NetHack/Trivia


 * Anticlimax Boss: Vlad the Impaler prior to 3.6.1, to the point that use of "Vladsbanes" - items that would normally be weak and ineffective as weapons - were a common Self-Imposed Challenge.
 * Ascended Fanon/Official Fan-Submitted Content: Ideas from patches and variants frequently find their way into the vanilla game.
 * Author Existence Failure: Founding DevTeam member Izchak Miller passed away in 1994; the 3.2 series was dedicated to his memory, and he was memorialized by a special game-end tombstone, which is still available as a compile-time option. 3.2 also added added a shopkeeper named Izchak, who has unique dialogue compared to the others and always runs a lighting shop in Minetown. Players consider it very poor form to mistreat this particular shopkeeper, despite the extent to which his co-workers are maligned by everyone; often, he is even spared by extinctionists.
 * Development Hell: Version 3.4.3 was released in December 2003. The next version, 3.6.0? Finally released... in December 2015. Before that, the largest such gap was the three years the release of 3.2.2 and 3.2.3/3.3.0; for a time, the community at large believed any future releases after 3.4.3 to be Vaporware, which has spawned NetHack 4 and a few other variants. Thankfully, newer versions have come far quicker in comparison since then.
 * Fan Nickname: And they're about as creative as you can get.
 * "Foo" is a loanword from hacker jargon used in referring to a group of similar monsters (e.g. "foocubus" can be a succubus or incubus, while "footrice" can mean either a cockatrice or a chickatrice).
 * On the note of footrices, their corpses are often referred to as "rubber chickens".
 * The Wizard of Yendor is called "Rodney".
 * Vladsbane was a Weapon of X-Slaying parody name given to whatever item(s) the player used to Cherry Tap Anticlimax Boss Vlad the Impaler with.
 * Port Overdosed: See for yourself.
 * The Wiki Rule: NetHackWiki and Wikihack.
 * Word of God: Often found in comments within the code, e.g..