Pinback’s Top Ten Games of All-Time: #9

#9: NETHACK (1987)

Most of the entries in this list are of the “best of genre” variety. For instance, if all you like are text adventures, your top ten are gonna be primarily text adventures. But I’m exercising a lot of self-control by trying to sprinkle in a number of game genres in here, to give the widest (and most accessible) variety of games for you to enjoy in the order in which I present them.

So which genre is NetHack? The obvious choice is the AD&D RPG hack-n-slash genre. It excels in that genre. But here are some other genres which NetHack is at or near the top of:

1. Death Means Death games. There’s something just so much more satisfying about surviving another second, another minute, another level, when you know that if you slip up once and get your ass handed to you, your game is over. Of course, if I had applied this concept to my own life, I might not have ended up taking Zoloft and writing ten webpages about how miserable I always was.

2. Games You Can Play On Old Computers. When NetHack came out in 1987, it was already about 15 years outdated, technologically. It blazes on an 8088.

3. Old Games You Can Play On New Computers. 20 years later and it’s still humming along nicely.

4. Desert Island Games. NetHack is the obvious choice for ANYONE who has a gun put to their head and is forced to only play one game again for the rest of his/her life. Most games you either win (Half-Life), or get as good as you’re ever gonna get, so it gets boring (Galaga). NetHack is neither of these. First of all, it’s very HARD, and you will never win it. But it’s different every time you try, and there’s so much depth built in over the years that you will find yourself discovering new things years after you first start playing. And on the off- off- off-chance that you DO win it, you can just fire it up again as a different character, and it will be a completely different game, different story, different everything. The ultimate replayable game. And when you’re still playing it 50 years from now, it will still work on your computer. There is so much to admire here, about a game that has, and will always fit on one floppy disk, that you begin to look with scorn at the modern, 5-gig-requiring, video-card-that-hasn’t-been-invented-yet-using monstrosities. NetHack shows us that all you need is love. And ASCII.

5. Games You Can Play At Work Without Getting Caught And Fired. It’s ASCII. You know what else is in ASCII? SHELL COMMANDS! Also: BATCH FILES! You wouldn’t fire an employee over employing shell commands or batch files, would you? Of course not.

It ain’t flashy, it ain’t new, it ain’t the next big thing. It’s just what it’s always been, and what it’s always been is: incredibly entertaining, and the ninth best game of all time.