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nethack/dat/history
nhmall 40e7eb7e2a sync recent wording change in history
2019-05-05 14:16:49 -04:00

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NetHack History file for release 3.6
Behold, mortal, the origins of NetHack...
Jay Fenlason wrote the original Hack with help from Kenny Woodland,
Mike Thome, and Jon Payne.
Andries Brouwer did a major re-write, transforming Hack into a very different
game, and published (at least) three versions (1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.0.3) for
UNIX(tm) machines to the Usenet.
Don G. Kneller ported Hack 1.0.3 to Microsoft(tm) C and MS-DOS(tm), producing
PC HACK 1.01e, added support for DEC Rainbow graphics in version 1.03g, and
went on to produce at least four more versions (3.0, 3.2, 3.51, and 3.6;
note that these are old Hack version numbers, not contemporary NetHack ones).
R. Black ported PC HACK 3.51 to Lattice(tm) C and the Atari 520/1040ST,
producing ST Hack 1.03.
Mike Stephenson merged these various versions back together, incorporating
many of the added features, and produced NetHack version 1.4 in 1987. He
then coordinated a cast of thousands in enhancing and debugging NetHack 1.4
and released NetHack versions 2.2 and 2.3.
Later, Mike coordinated a major rewrite of the game, heading a team which
included Ken Arromdee, Jean-Christophe Collet, Steve Creps, Eric Hendrickson,
Izchak Miller, Eric S. Raymond, John Rupley, Mike Threepoint, and Janet Walz,
to produce NetHack 3.0c. The same group subsequently released ten patch-
level revisions and updates of 3.0.
NetHack 3.0 was ported to the Atari by Eric R. Smith, to OS/2 by Timo
Hakulinen, and to VMS by David Gentzel. The three of them and Kevin Darcy
later joined the main NetHack Development Team to produce subsequent
revisions of 3.0.
Olaf Seibert ported NetHack 2.3 and 3.0 to the Amiga. Norm Meluch, Stephen
Spackman and Pierre Martineau designed overlay code for PC NetHack 3.0.
Johnny Lee ported NetHack 3.0 to the Macintosh. Along with various other
Dungeoneers, they continued to enhance the PC, Macintosh, and Amiga ports
through the later revisions of 3.0.
Headed by Mike Stephenson and coordinated by Izchak Miller and Janet Walz,
the NetHack Development Team which now included Ken Arromdee, David Cohrs,
Jean-Christophe Collet, Kevin Darcy, Matt Day, Timo Hakulinen, Steve Linhart,
Dean Luick, Pat Rankin, Eric Raymond, and Eric Smith undertook a radical
revision of 3.0. They re-structured the game's design, and re-wrote major
parts of the code. They added multiple dungeons, a new display, special
individual character quests, a new endgame and many other new features, and
produced NetHack 3.1.
Ken Lorber, Gregg Wonderly and Greg Olson, with help from Richard Addison,
Mike Passaretti, and Olaf Seibert, developed NetHack 3.1 for the Amiga.
Norm Meluch and Kevin Smolkowski, with help from Carl Schelin, Stephen
Spackman, Steve VanDevender, and Paul Winner, ported NetHack 3.1 to the PC.
Jon W{tte and Hao-yang Wang, with help from Ross Brown, Mike Engber, David
Hairston, Michael Hamel, Jonathan Handler, Johnny Lee, Tim Lennan, Rob Menke,
and Andy Swanson developed NetHack 3.1 for the Macintosh, porting it for
MPW. Building on their development, Barton House added a Think C port.
Timo Hakulinen ported NetHack 3.1 to OS/2. Eric Smith ported NetHack 3.1
to the Atari. Pat Rankin, with help from Joshua Delahunty, is responsible
for the VMS version of NetHack 3.1. Michael Allison ported NetHack 3.1 to
Windows NT.
Dean Luick, with help from David Cohrs, developed NetHack 3.1 for X11.
Warwick Allison wrote a tiled version of NetHack for the Atari;
he later contributed the tiles to the NetHack Development Team and tile
support was then added to other platforms.
The 3.2 NetHack Development Team, comprised of Michael Allison, Ken Arromdee,
David Cohrs, Jessie Collet, Steve Creps, Kevin Darcy, Timo Hakulinen, Steve
Linhart, Dean Luick, Pat Rankin, Eric Smith, Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz,
and Paul Winner, released version 3.2 in April of 1996.
Version 3.2 marked the tenth anniversary of the formation of the development
team. In a testament to their dedication to the game, all thirteen members
of the original NetHack Development Team remained on the team at the start of
work on that release. During the interval between the release of 3.1.3 and
3.2, one of the founding members of the NetHack Development Team,
Dr. Izchak Miller, passed away. That release of the game was dedicated to
him by the development and porting teams.
Version 3.2 proved to be more stable than previous versions. Many bugs
were fixed, abuses eliminated, and game features tuned for better game
play.
During the lifespan of NetHack 3.1 and 3.2, several enthusiasts of the game
added their own modifications to the game and made these "variants" publicly
available:
Tom Proudfoot and Yuval Oren created NetHack++, which was quickly renamed
NetHack--. Working independently, Stephen White wrote NetHack Plus.
Tom Proudfoot later merged NetHack Plus and his own NetHack-- to produce
SLASH. Larry Stewart-Zerba and Warwick Allison improved the spellcasting
system with the Wizard Patch. Warwick Allison also ported NetHack to use
the Qt interface.
Warren Cheung combined SLASH with the Wizard Patch to produce Slash'em, and
with the help of Kevin Hugo, added more features. Kevin later joined the
NetHack Development Team and incorporated the best of these ideas in
NetHack 3.3.
The final update to 3.2 was the bug fix release 3.2.3, which was released
simultaneously with 3.3.0 in December 1999 just in time for the Year 2000.
The 3.3 NetHack Development Team, consisting of Michael Allison, Ken Arromdee,
David Cohrs, Jessie Collet, Steve Creps, Kevin Darcy, Timo Hakulinen,
Kevin Hugo, Steve Linhart, Ken Lorber, Dean Luick, Pat Rankin, Eric Smith,
Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz, and Paul Winner, released 3.3.0 in
December 1999 and 3.3.1 in August of 2000.
Version 3.3 offered many firsts. It was the first version to separate race
and profession. The Elf class was removed in preference to an elf race,
and the races of dwarves, gnomes, and orcs made their first appearance in
the game alongside the familiar human race. Monk and Ranger roles joined
Archeologists, Barbarians, Cavemen, Healers, Knights, Priests, Rogues,
Samurai, Tourists, Valkyries and of course, Wizards. It was also the first
version to allow you to ride a steed, and was the first version to have a
publicly available web-site listing all the bugs that had been discovered.
Despite that constantly growing bug list, 3.3 proved stable enough to last
for more than a year and a half.
The 3.4 NetHack Development Team initially consisted of Michael Allison,
Ken Arromdee, David Cohrs, Jessie Collet, Kevin Hugo, Ken Lorber, Dean Luick,
Pat Rankin, Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz, and Paul Winner, with Warwick Allison
joining just before the release of NetHack 3.4.0 in March 2002.
As with version 3.3, various people contributed to the game as a whole as
well as supporting ports on the different platforms that NetHack runs on:
Pat Rankin maintained 3.4 for VMS.
Michael Allison maintained NetHack 3.4 for the MS-DOS platform.
Paul Winner and Yitzhak Sapir provided encouragement.
Dean Luick, Mark Modrall, and Kevin Hugo maintained and enhanced the
Macintosh port of 3.4.
Michael Allison, David Cohrs, Alex Kompel, Dion Nicolaas, and Yitzhak Sapir
maintained and enhanced 3.4 for the Microsoft Windows platform. Alex Kompel
contributed a new graphical interface for the Windows port. Alex Kompel also
contributed a Windows CE port for 3.4.1.
Ron Van Iwaarden maintained 3.4 for OS/2.
Janne Salmijarvi and Teemu Suikki maintained and enhanced the
Amiga port of 3.4 after Janne Salmijarvi resurrected it for 3.3.1.
Christian `Marvin' Bressler maintained 3.4 for the Atari after he
resurrected it for 3.3.1.
The release of NetHack 3.4.3 in December 2003 marked the beginning of a
long release hiatus. 3.4.3 proved to be a remarkably stable version that
provided continued enjoyment by the community for more than a decade. The
NetHack Development Team slowly and quietly continued to work on the game behind the scenes
during the tenure of 3.4.3. It was during that same period that several
new variants emerged within the NetHack community. Notably sporkhack by
Derek S. Ray, unnethack by Patric Mueller, nitrohack and its successors
originally by Daniel Thaler and then by Alex Smith, and
Dynahack by Tung Nguyen. Some of those variants continue to be developed,
maintained, and enjoyed by the community to this day.
In September 2014, an interim snapshot of the code under development was
released publicly by other parties. Since that code was a work-in-progress
and had not gone through a period of debugging, it was decided that the
version numbers present on that code snapshot would be retired and never
used in an official NetHack release. An announcement was posted on the
NetHack Development Team's official nethack.org website to that effect,
stating that there would never be a 3.4.4, 3.5, or 3.5.0 official release
version.
In January 2015, preparation began for the release of NetHack 3.6.
At the beginning of development for what would eventually get released
as 3.6.0, the NetHack Development Team consisted of Warwick Allison,
Michael Allison, Ken Arromdee, David Cohrs, Jessie Collet, Ken Lorber,
Dean Luick, Pat Rankin, Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz, and Paul Winner.
Leading up to the release of 3.6.0 in early 2015, new members Sean Hunt,
Pasi Kallinen, and Derek S. Ray joined the NetHack Development Team.
Near the end of the development of 3.6.0, one of the significant inspirations
for many of the humorous and fun features found in the game, author
Terry Pratchett, passed away. NetHack 3.6.0 introduced a tribute to him.
3.6.0 was released in December 2015, and merged work done by the development
team since the release of 3.4.3 with some of the beloved community patches.
Many bugs were fixed and some code was restructured.
In late April 2018, several hundred bug fixes for 3.6.0 and some new
features were assembled and released as NetHack 3.6.1.
The NetHack Development Team at the time of release of 3.6.1 consisted of
Warwick Allison, Michael Allison, Ken Arromdee, David Cohrs, Jessie Collet,
Pasi Kallinen, Ken Lorber, Dean Luick, Patric Mueller, Pat Rankin,
Derek S. Ray, Alex Smith, Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz and Paul Winner.
The NetHack Development Team, as well as Steve VanDevender and
Kevin Smolkowski ensured that NetHack 3.6.1 continued to operate on various
Unix flavors as well as maintaining the X11 interface.
Ken Lorber, Haoyang Wang, Pat Rankin, and Dean Luick maintained the port
of NetHack 3.6.1 for Mac OSX.
Michael Allison, David Cohrs, Barton House, Pasi Kallinen, Alex Kompel,
Dion Nicolaas, Derek S. Ray and Yitzhak Sapir maintained the port of
NetHack 3.6.1 for Microsoft Windows.
Pat Rankin attempted to keep the VMS port running for NetHack 3.6.1,
hindered by limited access. Kevin Smolkowski has updated and tested it
for the most recent version of OpenVMS (V8.4 as of this writing) on Alpha
and Integrity (aka Itanium aka IA64) but not VAX.
Ray Chason resurrected the msdos port for 3.6.1 and contributed the
necessary updates to the community at large.
The official NetHack web site is maintained by Ken Lorber at
http://www.nethack.org/.
On behalf of the NetHack community, thank you very much once again to
M. Drew Streib and Pasi Kallinen for providing a public NetHack server
at nethack.alt.org. Thanks to Keith Simpson and Andy Thomson for
hardfought.org. Thanks to all those unnamed dungeoneers who invest their
time and effort into annual NetHack tournaments such as Junethack
and in days past, devnull.net (gone for now, but not forgotten).
- - - - - - - - - -
From time to time, some depraved individual out there in netland sends a
particularly intriguing modification to help out with the game. The
NetHack Development Team sometimes makes note of the names of the worst
of these miscreants in this, the list of Dungeoneers:
Adam Aronow Janet Walz Nathan Eady
Alex Kompel Janne Salmijarvi Norm Meluch
Alex Smith Jean-Christophe Collet Olaf Seibert
Andreas Dorn Jeff Bailey Pasi Kallinen
Andy Church Jochen Erwied Pat Rankin
Andy Swanson John Kallen Patric Mueller
Ari Huttunen John Rupley Paul Winner
Barton House John S. Bien Pierre Martineau
Benson I. Margulies Johnny Lee Ralf Brown
Bill Dyer Jon W{tte Ray Chason
Boudewijn Waijers Jonathan Handler Richard Addison
Bruce Cox Joshua Delahunty Richard Beigel
Bruce Holloway Karl Garrison Richard P. Hughey
Bruce Mewborne Keizo Yamamoto Rob Menke
Carl Schelin Ken Arnold Robin Bandy
Chris Russo Ken Arromdee Robin Johnson
David Cohrs Ken Lorber Roderick Schertler
David Damerell Ken Washikita Roland McGrath
David Gentzel Kevin Darcy Ron Van Iwaarden
David Hairston Kevin Hugo Ronnen Miller
Dean Luick Kevin Sitze Ross Brown
Del Lamb Kevin Smolkowski Sascha Wostmann
Derek S. Ray Kevin Sweet Scott Bigham
Deron Meranda Lars Huttar Scott R. Turner
Dion Nicolaas Leon Arnott Sean Hunt
Dylan O'Donnell M. Drew Streib Stephen Spackman
Eric Backus Malcolm Ryan Stefan Thielscher
Eric Hendrickson Mark Gooderum Stephen White
Eric R. Smith Mark Modrall Steve Creps
Eric S. Raymond Marvin Bressler Steve Linhart
Erik Andersen Matthew Day Steve VanDevender
Frederick Roeber Merlyn LeRoy Teemu Suikki
Gil Neiger Michael Allison Tim Lennan
Greg Laskin Michael Feir Timo Hakulinen
Greg Olson Michael Hamel Tom Almy
Gregg Wonderly Michael Sokolov Tom West
Hao-yang Wang Mike Engber Warren Cheung
Helge Hafting Mike Gallop Warwick Allison
Irina Rempt-Drijfhout Mike Passaretti Yitzhak Sapir
Izchak Miller Mike Stephenson
J. Ali Harlow Mikko Juola
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