In 1990 or so, my friend and fellow Future Shock Software guy Steve bought a floppy disk in a computer software store for something like $10. On it were 3 games: some space game, a pretty decent Ultima 2 clone called Ranadinn, and a little game called "Hack". 

Hack was an offshoot of Rogue, which you may know from the term "Roguelike" which is applied to basically any game released nowadays, accurate or not.

Steve and I initially scoffed at Hack and its primitive ASCII graphics. But after a few hours of gameplay, we were hooked.

Hack more or less eventually turned into Nethack, which is probably my favorite game of all time.

Back in 2009 a smart guy named Dirk Zimmermann ported Nethack to iOS, released as "iNethack", updating the interface to work with touchscreens, in a rather effective manner, considering that Nethack uses the ENTIRE keyboard for commands (upper and lowercase!).

iNethack was easily my most played game on the iPhone, despite the fact that its graphics were basically ASCII characters (or slightly nicer if you used a tileset).

Long story short, Dirk eventually moved onto other things, several iOS updates were released, and after iOS8, the game was no longer playable. Nor was it in the app store as of 2014.

Luckily, the source code was posted and freely available, so I decided to give it a shot and fix it. About a month or two of late nights later (with some help from other iNethack fans), I have it working again, with a few slight improvements. But my goal was really just to have it running like it did before iOS7 was released and it started showing issues.

I volunteered to re-release it on the App store, with Dirk's approval. So that's what we're going to do.

It's currently being beta tested, and if no major issues are found (I hope), we will be releasing it back into the App Store under the name "iNethack2". 

If you want to beta test, let me know your email address and I will send you an invite! Must have iOS8 to test as it uses the TestFlight app.

So stay tuned! iNethack will live again.