Izchak
- This article is about the in-game shopkeeper. For the DevTeam member, see Izchak Miller.
In NetHack, Izchak is a special shopkeeper who runs the lighting shop in Minetown. He has a fixed gender (like tool shop owners, but unlike other shopkeepers) and a slightly different conversational repertoire from other shopkeepers, but is otherwise identical for game purposes.
Contents
History
Izchak Miller was one of the founding members of the NetHack DevTeam. Professor Miller passed away on the 1st of April, 1994, at the age of 58, from complications due to cancer. The DevTeam added Izchak the shopkeeper into the game in NetHack 3.2.0 as a tribute, inspired partly by his work on the shopkeeper code. The character on the navigation imagemap on the NetHack site is also named after him.
Etiquette
Although there are no special in-game penalties for doing so, many players consider it extremely poor form to kill this particular shopkeeper. The NetHack community itself is somewhat divided on this issue—in #nethack, it's rare to see someone reprimand another player for killing him (although most people still try to avoid it); in RGRN, at least several vocal regulars will usually reprimand any transgressions; and the wiki itself sees a broad mix of editors' opinions.
For extinctionist games, it is considered acceptable to leave Izchak alive -- there is no "official" definition of extinctionism, and most automated definitions, e.g. the ones used at the /dev/null/nethack tournament, care only about the monster kill and born counters and extinction flag and thus do not require Izchak's death in particular anyway. Getting these up to their maximum values for shopkeepers can be done via repeatedly killing, resurrecting, and rekilling any shopkeeper; an extinctionist game would likely want to do this anyway to gain 120 or 255 shopkeeper kills.
Variants
xNetHack
In xNetHack, Izchak is guaranteed to remain alive if Orcish Town is generated.
EvilHack
In EvilHack, Izchak is the only shopkeeper to have a special response if killed.
TNNT (the game)
In TNNT (the game), the reward for completing the dev team's quest, the Really Cool Shirt, is not given if you personally killed Izchak previously.
Encyclopaedia entry
The shopkeeper of the lighting shop in the town level of the gnomish mines is a tribute to Izchak Miller, a founding member of the NetHack development team and a personal friend of a large number of us. Izchak contributed greatly to the game, coding a large amount of the shopkeep logic (hence the nature of the tribute) as well as a good part of the alignment system, the prayer code and the rewrite of "hell" in the 3.1 release. Izchak was a professor of Philosophy, who taught at many respected institutions, including MIT and Stanford, and who also worked, for a period of time, at Xerox PARC. Izchak was the first "librarian" of the NetHack project, and was a founding member of the DevTeam, joining in 1986 while he was working at the University of Pennsylvania (hence our former mailing list address). Until the 3.1.3 release, Izchak carefully kept all of the code synchronized and arbitrated disputes between members of the development teams. Izchak Miller passed away at the age of 58, in the early morning hours of April 1, 1994 from complications due to cancer. We then dedicated NetHack 3.2 in his memory.
