Ville Saalo, moi! 👋

NetHack is a notoriously difficult game that some people play for decades and never win, even if they have all the spoilers available. I used to play it a lot some twenty years ago.

The game may not look like much; in fact by default it consists only different characters and symbols of different colors: you are the @ symbol, a grey d is your dog, a purple capital letter is some highly dangerous monster, a brown % is food, and so on. It takes a bit of imagination, but once you’re fully immersed into the game, even looking at your own email address may send shivers down your spine because it looks like you’re in a narrow corridor surrounded by monsters.

The goal is to descend down a perilous dungeon, retrieve a powerful magical item called the Amulet of Yendor, come back up, get to the Elemental Planes and the Astral Plane, and finally offer said amulet to your deity, who will grant you the gift of immortality in return. This called ascending the game, i.e. ascending to demigod(dess)hood.

So, how did NetHack get me playing the Battlefield series, then? Battlefield is a series of first-person shooter games that has always been bragging with some cutting-edge graphics, so it couldn’t be much farther away from NetHack.

Well, in 2010 I was still using the Opera browser. Opera had a strong community, and they hosted a community event where you could win a copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by sharing your best gaming experience. Others shared experiences about games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, or Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and I, well, shared my first NetHack ascension – and was selected as one of the winners. One of the high points in my career as a gamer for sure!

I looked up the relevant pages from The Internet Archive: the contest pitch and my story is here and the winners were announced here. But just for the sake of completeness I’ve copy-pasted my award-winning Yet Another First Ascension Post (YAFAP) here. Enjoy!

My best gaming experience took place on 22. March 2004. That’s the day I won a game of NetHack for the first time ever.

I had been playing the same character, lawful dwarven female valkyrie, on and off for a month already. My previous valkyrie had also broken my previous record score but suffered the horrible fate of getting poisoned by the demon lord called Juiblex.

This time I was more careful and even though I had met several new monsters and obstacles I had finally managed to get to the final level: the Astral Plane. The journey through the Planes of Earth, Air, Fire and Water had already been very difficult and exciting, but I remember well the adrenaline rush I got for finally stepping into the Astral Plane. The Astral Plane contains three altars, only one of which matches your alignment. You must then find the correct one by trial and error and sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to beat the game and to ascend to the demigodhood.

So, typical for my luck, I had to visit the two wrong altars first. The Astral Plane is filled with incredibly powerful enemies, worst of whom are Famine, Pestilence and Death – three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – and they had already managed to kill me once or twice. I had had amulets of life saving but I was out of them now, so the next death would be, well, fatal.

I remember my heart beating like crazy even though the game is turn based and all that actually was on the screen was letters and symbols of various colors. In that state of mind I wasn’t thinking clearly. When trying to make it to the final altar my characted got burnened by all the stuff in her inventory because of taking too much hit and because of the curses from all the monsters that were able to use magic. In NetHack it is really important not to get burdened because it directly affects your speed, so I got into even more trouble because all the monsters were moving twice as fast as I was.

When my hitpoints were falling too quickly and the final altar was too far away I made my final decision: I dropped my bag of holding after salvaging a few of the most important items from inside it. This meant that I gave up on many weapons, scrolls, wands, potions and such that would normally help me stay alive but had now become just weight.

After abandoning most of my gear I got my dexterity back and started fighting my final fight. The way to the altar was filled with monsters. The Horsemen were all right behind me, so I had to either lose them or endure their hits – I couldn’t lose any time fighting with anything behind me anymore.

After quaffing all my remaining potions of healing and slaughtering lots of capital A’s, @’s, D’s and whatnots I finally made it to the altar. Just to be safe I looked at it, even though I knew the result beforehand: a lawful altar. There were still several monsters around me but I now knew that at this point they could not hurt me anymore: I was one turn away from ascending to the demigodhood. I checked my next commands twice or thrice: which keys to press and which item to sacrifice. After all, it would be pretty embarassing if not instantly fatal to try to sacrifice some junk item to Tyr when he was expecting the Amulet; not to mention the monsters around me waiting to land in more blows. But then, for the first time in my life:

You offer the Amulet of Yendor to Tyr…
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance…
The voice of Tyr booms out: “Congratulations, mortal!"
“In return to thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess…

Even if an invisible choir had actually been singing I couldn’t have heard it for all the adrenaline filled blood that was rushing in my head, making my ears hum.

PS. A couple of years ago I created a site where I’ve visualized NetHack monsters with AI image generators. Check it out at NetHackMonsters.art. It’s kind of like my AI sandbox, offering me some context to try new services. There’s also a couple of AI-generated audio files and some texts about NetHack. I used to have a site like this back when I played NetHack, but that was just a collection of links to representative monster images around the web. Both that site and probably those images too have been lost in the sands of time, so the rise of AI image generators gave me the idea to resurrect the site.