It was one of the first Rogue clones, and as such, all the characters and monsters are represented by ASCII characters. Later ports for other platforms made use of graphical tiles in place of plain letters and symbols. In 1984 a greatly extended version was posted on Usenet, and by 1987 many available versions of Hack were merged together to form the beginnings of NetHack, one of the most prominent Roguelikes. Hack, and in turn NetHack, inspired many other Roguelikes including ADOM and Linley's Dungeon Crawl.
