Nethack is now in the Museum of Modern Art

pcgamer.com:

Nethack(opens in new tab) is one of the great (and ongoing) gaming projects. It first appeared in 1987 as a fork of a 1982 title, Hack, created by Mike Stephenson, Izchak Miller and Janet Walz. The game operated on an open source principle, where anyone was free to create their own version, but only the members of the DevTeam could change the main source code.

Over time the DevTeam grew with skilled coders from the community and, after more than three decades, has had an unknown number of members. They seem to like the mystery. Over its lifetime NetHack has grown and grown in complexity, somehow juggling its hundreds of emergent elements together, with the DevTeam held up as collective coding gods by the game's devoted community. Browse the NetHack forums and even now you may well come across the initialism TDTTOE: The DevTeam Thinks of Everything.

NetHack's emergent roleplaying isn't like anything else out there,(opens in new tab) nor has its development been. It's a singular project from all angles, and has now received the recognition it deserves. The Museum of Modern Arts began its videogame collection in 2012(opens in new tab), and at the time mentioned NetHack would eventually be included (though it wasn't in the initial 14 titles chosen). Its time has finally come: NetHack has been added to the Architecture and Design department's collection, and will be displayed as part of the Never Alone exhibition(opens in new tab) from September 10.

The news was shared by coder Jean-Christophe Collet in a blogpost discussing his own early involvement as a member of the DevTeam (thanks, Slashdot(opens in new tab)).

«A long time ago I got involved with the development of NetHack, a very early computer role playing game, and