New moon tonight! Be careful....
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Happy new year and welcome to 2022! I'm trying not to use so-called "social media" because negative forces are using it to manipulate and disempower me it makes me more mentally ill. Instead, I'd like to make cute little webpages like this for sharing! Anyway, I was scrolling tumblr in a moment of weakness and came across a post by user @galactica-phantom showing off these photos of a Japanese PC-98 release of greatest-of-all-time video game NetHack.
This box art alone is cool as hell to me, but apparently that's not all there is to it! I did a bit of searching based on the name 蓮川龍司郎 visible on the front cover, and turned up some interesting results. Unfortunately, the book seems to be very rare, as I couldn't find anyone selling it or even more images.
Eventually, however, I did find some information about it on a little Japanese NetHack spoilers wiki called hackaholic.
And for my friends' convenience, I've whipped up a translation!
Apparently the book was like this (link broken)
NetHack binaries (for PC98)
An original startup shell
Short stories for various situations you might find yourself in while playing
And I skipped the link at the bottom but it's just a search for the book so yeah. Oh! And Tikeh's name there is a link to a stub about her. The only new information it has is that there are comics of her trying to carry a giant's body and also getting ヤラレちゃった by an incubus (fucked? killed? fucked and killed? i donno!!).
I dug a little more to find where the broken link at that top of the page used to go. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine I was able to go to the site it was from and use a little information from the URL to find the post on the cute tiny 2ch-style message board that the link was referencing!
I saw this come up on a certain other message board, so I kinda wanted to share (since I have it on me).
It includes NetHack for PC9801, version 3.0j (PL10) (in English of course). It didn't come with the source code, but apparently the publisher would send it to you if you asked. It also came with original modding tools, and it let you play background music or have the game display a computer animation on startup.
As for the contents of the book, there'sIt's the kind of thing that would get the player's imagination in gear. The story segments worked great as spoilers too rofl. Its retail price was 2800 yen though, which seems kind of expensive.
By the way, I'm pretty sure some of the guys behind this book were involved with the game Matchmaker, which was big back in the pre-Web days of the internet. I know Shin Araki is the author of Stardust Hero Legend (Hoshi-kuzu Eiyuuden, Dengeki Books).
Thanks.
Oh yeah, and what does NetaHack mean? It's just a cute little joke title for the book by the author of the above post. For those who don't know, neta is a Japanese word that's kind of similar in meaning and usage to the English word meme. It comes from reversing the word tane, which means seed (like the ones plants grow from). It's like the "seed" of a joke I guess?
Well! I hope you had as much fun learning about NetaHack as I did! It's cool to explore these little cave systems of obscure old pages. I found other fun stuff in the process like Animeband! Cool!
If you have more information about the NetaHack book (scans? pleading emoji) or can help me obtain a copy, please email me about it or something!
January 4, 2022 05:43