ABSTRACT
Mathematisch Centrum was founded in the 1940s as Amsterdam’s premiere destination for research in the fields of mathematics and computer science. Brouwer eyed Usenet as the perfect distributor for his revised Hack game. Brouwer moved on to other interests after releasing Hack 1.0.3. In April 1988, the DevTeam patched NetHack to version 2.3e. While autonomy was the norm among the DevTeam, introducing a new character class required consensus. NetHack has grown far beyond its origins as a cult game enjoyed only by hackers and college kids with Usenet access. Today, users are accustomed to downloading games measured in gigabytes. When Andries Brouwer released his Hack 1.0 update in December 1984, the game was packaged in 15 separate files totaling 400 kilobytes in size—small enough to fit on a floppy disk three times over.
