I just discovered that it's almost certain that a copy of the game NetHack got automatically installed with your copy of Mac OS X. Here's how to play it:

1) Open Terminal.

2) Type 'nethack' at the command line (minus the quotes, of course), then press Enter.

3) There's no step 3!



(800 posts! Wow, already!
...1000, here I come!!!)

tcsh: nethack: Command not found.

??!! Why are you running tcsh? Switch to bash.

Oh, wait... I guess it's only on OS X 10.3 or later, then.

bash: nethack: command not found

MacOS 10.4.10

-bash: nethack: command not found

10.5.1

I think this game must be in a directory of some sort, or there's a command needed to open it.

Using my 1337 Unix skillz, I have determined that either your theory is somewhat flawed, or Captain Bob and I have some messed up computers.

Looking up "nethack" in Spotlight gives me two Unix "man" files: screen.1.html and zshparam.1.html, and these are in my "Developers" folders, which are only installed after installing Xcode etc. I suggest you look them up or try to figure out what you're doing, because as far as I can tell, there's no "nethack" on my computer.

There was some trick a while back where you could also get a really crappy copy of tetris and stuff. But you had to type some command before that. It was like a pack of games (think TI-84 style PuzzlePack) that you got to somehow.

EDIT: Here it is. The command is "emacs": http://www.eeggs.com/items/43501.html

Yeah, emacs was one of the commands referenced when trying to get to nethack. I got something when I typed "emacs nethack", but I can't figure it out at the moment.

Hmm... I can't seem to get this to work on my Mac IIci... Are you sure it's built into every mac?

emacs is a text editor with far too much feature bloat, including tetris and a text adventure game called Dunnet. It does not, however, include Nethack, at least not by default. And Nethack is not installed on Macs by default. I'm guessing that you ran the installer and expected it to just give you a double-clickable executable, when it also installed the commandline version as well. Run

% which nethack

to find out where your version of the game is installed.

OK, FALSE ALARM.

It turns out that I had installed NetHack a loooong time ago, with Fink, and then forgotten about it. Sorry.

P.S: That emacs command is 'emacs -batch -l whatever', but NetHack isn't among the included games. Try 'emacs -batch -l dunnet'.

Well that's disappointing.

Posting in thread of epic fail.

That was mean, DataSpot.

Now hold on a second. It was an honest mistake!

Well yeah, no one fails on purpose.

Well, it's not often that one fails on such an epic scale on purpose.
hrm...
This is not the fail you were looking for.
Red Fail, standing by.
Use the Fail, Luke!
Our cruisers can't repel fail of this magnitude!

...sorry, don't take it personally, SoItBegins. It's just that... I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you fail.

Alright, even if I didn't like you before, you'd be forgiven just for this.

That was like ten magnificent modified quotes in that, that post is for teh win.

EDIT: So how can we get Nethack?

Sometimes I wish DataSpot posted way more often.

1) Get Fink. Fink lets you download many different Unix programs, all tweaked to run on your Mac. The best part is, it handles all the download/compile/install for you!

2) Get FinkCommander. This is a GUI for Fink. (This step is optional, but helps immensely.)

3) Tell Fink to download and install NetHack.

4) Type in 'nethack' at the Terminal, once the dust settles.

5) Have fun!

Or you could just download the binary here: http://www.nethack.org/common/index.html

Uhhhh... yeah, that!