This is an old unix / terminal game from the early 1980's. I used to play it back then on my Amiga. I spent a few hours and dug up a somewhat recent copy of the source and got it to build under linux. Just grab the tarball from the link below, unpack, go inside and do 'make'. The executable is called "hack" and you can just run it.

Download here.

I had been looking at Wikipedia's listing of deaths in 2007 here and on April 20, 2007 found the entry for Fred Fish who died at age 54. Back in the 1980's when I was into the Amiga computer Fred Fish collected many hundreds of disks of free software and distributed them. I followed some links and found listings of the Fred Fish collection online, and found disk 8 has the source to the Amiga port of the hack game.

I grabbed a copy of the lha archive of the files of the disk, then for fun went about getting the source code to compile back on linux / unix. I got it working, then realized the version wasn't the latest. So I did some more internet searching and found the newer 1.0.3 version and did pretty much the same tweaks to get that source tree to compile on linux. Actually it was easier since it already had the curses terminal output functionality working.

The source evolved into nethack but I never played that, and it seemed the memorable things from the original game (the friendly dog for example) were no longer there, nor the clever text messages. And I couldn't find any other port of the "original" to linux, so I did it myself.

This page has been accessed (e^i) times since 20111021.