Nethack is a famous roleplaying game developed by dozens of voluntary developers all around the world, some of whom have never met eachother. The game has survived, and is still actively played, for over 23 to 28 years (depending on how you count) and the collaborative nature of it's development may indeed have something to do with it's longevity.
The basic premise of the game throughout different versions is, that the hero controlled by the player descends through series of caverns to finally reach Hell (politically corrected to Gehenna in later versions), plunder an artifact called Amulet of Yendor and escape back up with the rightful owner on your heels, in oder to be rewarded with immortality by your god. Of course, the true attraction of the game is just to survive in an extremely hostile environment where death of a characters means deletion of the saved games as well.
NetHack has a very peculiar development history. While originally a humble game called Hack, developed in 1982 mainly by Jay Fenlason, assisted by Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jon Payne, it would gain its collaborative nature when more developers would join in and start updating and modifying the game. Thus Hack became NetHack; the word Net does not refer to any multiplayer aspects of the game, but to USENET, a worldwide internet discussion system used by the developers as their primary means to coordinate their joint efforts already in the year 1987 - years before World Wide Web even existed.
Source:
NetHack 3.4.3 Guidebook Credits
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