People of secondary interest to NetHack

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This article is a list of various notable people of secondary interest to the game of NetHack, explaining each person's works and the contributions to the game that they inspired.

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams(11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a work of science fiction comedy which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy and developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated several adaptations. These stories chronicle the adventures of one Arthur Dent, though to be the last survivor of the Earth's destruction by a Vogon constructor that was making way for a hyperspace bypass - he is rescued from Earth's destruction by Ford Prefect, a humanoid alien writer for the in-universe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the pair travel around the galaxy.

In NetHack, there are a few references to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the most primary one being the towel, a multipurpose tool. While not as ridiculously useful as in The Hitchhiker's Guide, it still has various relevant applications: among them are blinding yourself, wiping glop or grease off your person, removing engravings on the floor, and wetting the towel to whip at monsters.

The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal and the microscopic space fleet are two hallucinatory monsters that were adapted from The Hitchhiker's Guide.

NetHack: The Next Generation

In 1994, Sebastian Klein released NetHack: The Next Generation, a variant of NetHack 3.1.3 that draws much more heavily from the works of Douglas Adams and adapts them to the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash that is the variant's geek culture influence.

Michael Moorcock

Arioch and Stormbringer are original creations of author Michael Moorcock.