Ich habe in den letzten Wochen mehrfach versucht, Leuten zu erklären, warum Nethack so toll ist. Anläßlich des zehnten dev/null/nethack-Tourniers ein paar Liebeserklärungen:

evanbd: At first glance, nethack seems not just hard but outright sadistic (well, ok, it is, but bear with me). But, as you get to know it, you realize that it's not like many other RPGs. Rather than trying to acquire the single best collection of stuff you can, in nethack you're rewarded for having backup plans -- and backups to your backups. When you find yourself surrounded my monsters and low on HP and out of healing potions you might consider praying. If you've done that too recently, you might try a wand of teleport or digging to escape. And when you discover that those wands just ran out of charges, you'll be glad you didn't leave that cursed potion of gain level behind. (The cursed ones, rather than gaining a character level, make you gain a dungeon level.)

Combine the attention to detail with the huge variety of options for character class, general strategies, and the high game-to-game variability thanks to random dungeons levels with random items, and you get serious replay value.

slaker: I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.

mathimus1863: You can actually find a wand of wishing on the first level and get any three items in the game. The inexperienced player still won't make it very far. No matter how strong or amazing you are, you could still die from a falling drawbridge, cockatrice corpse, being digested by strange creatures, being drowned by an electric eel, or kicking a wall while you are near death. Even after all the years I've spent on this game, I still learn something new every time I play. It's that deep.

Passend dazu geht auch einer von vielen Awards an denjenigen Spieler, der auf die meisten verschiedenen Arten stirbt. Letztes Jahr schaffte es jemand, auf 141 verschiedene Arten zu sterben.