A Gaming Night at the Museum

A long time ago I got involved with the development of NetHack, a very early computer role playing game, and soon joined the DevTeam, as we’ve been known since the early days. I was very active for the first 10 years then progressively faded out even though I am still officially (or semi-officially as there is nothing much really "official" about NetHack, but more on that later) part of the team.

This is how, as we were closing on the 35th anniversary of the project, I learned that NetHack was being added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of New York. It had been selected by the Architecture and Design department for its small collection of video games, and was going to be displayed as part of the Never Alone exhibition this fall.

Upon hearing that I went through the traditional 5 stages of amazement:

• Disbelief: “That has to be a joke!” Was my first thought. Even more understandable when you consider that this was just a mere day or two from April 1st, so our collective disbelief and initial caution were somewhat warranted.
• Shock: Once we confirmed that this was legit, it hit me like a ton of brick. Those who best know me will know the full extent of the irony of me becoming an “Artist in the collection” of a museum of modern art.
• Ego boost: I won’t lie, at that stage my Ego, which I always try to keep in check, got the better of me, so I had to let it have its victory lap. My wife was very patient and understanding at that point.
• Back to reality: Thankfully I soon got a hold of myself and sent that damn Ego back to sleep in the backroom of my mind. That’s when you put things back into perspective.
• Reflection: Once my brain was functioning normally again, if you can call that normal, I started looking back at these 35 years and what they meant to me, the team, the gaming community and, finally the open source community. That is where I realised how much I learned from that experience and that I wanted to share it.
Which brings us to this article, and I apologize for the longish preamble.

NetHack, a pioneer

NetHack was, and still is, one hell of an anomaly and is remarkable for a number of reasons. As a game it is one of the founders of the Roguelike genre and has been recognized as a huge influence by the creators of Diablo and the creator of Torchlight, among others. Countless articles have been written about the history and impact of NetHack and you can find a lot of links on the game web page (be warned though, that page is stuck, purposely, in a 1990s design). But that’s not what I want to reflect on here.

You see, NetHack was a pioneer in a surprising number of other areas:

It is one of the oldest open-source projects still in activity. It actually predates the term “open-source” (it was “free software” back then) and even the GPL by a few years.

It is also one of the first, if not the first software project to be developed entirely over the Internet by a team distributed across the globe (hence the “Net” in “NetHack”).

 In the same spirit, it is one of the first projects to take feedback, suggestions, bug reports and bug fixes from the online community (mostly over UseNet at the time) long, long before tools like GitHub (or Git for that matter), BugZilla or Discord were even a glimmer of an idea in the minds of their creators.

I was in my early 20s, at the very beginning of my career and I think I learned, working on NetHack, as much, or more than, on any of my actual jobs of that time. To be honest I realised that much later, when looking back.

Lessons from the DevTeam

So what did I learn working as part of the NetHack DevTeam?

First, I learned that you should always write clean code so that you won’t be embarrassed by, 35 years later, when it ends up in a museum.

Second, and more seriously, I learned how to work with a distributed team with nothing more than e-mail (there were no Skype, Zoom, Teams or Slack back then. Actually, e-mail was very often working over UseNet as well so it could take a few hours before it got delivered). I am convinced that teams today could benefit vastly from cutting down on these constant interruption generators. Developers, in particular, work best when they have significant blocks of time at their disposal so they can think, focus and code. Asynchronous communication is fantastic that way. It also encourages you to find solutions to problems by yourself first instead of asking someone because the answer will come 24h later at the earliest. Because of that delay you also learn to be precise in your communication to avoid unnecessary, time-wasting round-trips.

Third, and that happened rather quickly, I learned to put my ego aside when working in a team. To be fair I benefited greatly from some very patient coaching and etiquette lessons from one of our more experienced members of the team. When one of your ideas is shot down or some of the code you worked so hard on ends up the proverbial cutting room floor, you definitely should not take it personally and should be capable of taking a few steps back and seeing that this is the right decision. More importantly you should learn from it. To me this is fundamental, and I bring it up as often as necessary, I even went as far as writing an article about it a few years back. To have a functional team, every member has to learn that lesson one way or another. When Egos go unchecked you will end up with a toxic, and sterile work environment.

Finally, I learned that having fun is the best way to boost your creativity and productivity to the highest levels. There is no substitute. We didn’t have any lofty goals, we didn’t set out to change the world or disrupt anything, we just enjoyed a little game called Hack, came up with ideas that we thought would make it even more fun, worked on these ideas, met like-minded people, and decided to band together. Having a blast all along.

I am incredibly grateful to have been part of that adventure. It had a huge impact on my life and I am absolutely thrilled to see the game and the team recognised in such spectacular fashion.