Flaghack
Flaghack was a roguelike computer game released in the 1980s.
Gameplay
Conflicting reports exist as to the actual gameplay of Flaghack. It is thought that the game contained many "false win" conditions, leading to many players believing that they had beat the game. The "true win" condition (if it indeed exists) is currently unverified, although there are many implausible claims of win conditions of increasing absurdity.
Possible main stages of the game include (likely not in order and with missing/misremembered stages):
- surface quest/radical preparation
- initial descent
- shallow quest
- flagartha/time crystal
- lateral navigation/time nullification/deep quest (potentially optional)
- re-surfacing
- real surface quest/ekstasis
- celestial spheres
- Empyreal/the veil
- escape
- hypercarnation
- refolding
- kindling
- transmutation
- extasis
- persistence
Initial Development
Originally implemented as TECO macros that generate TECO macros that generate Lisp macros that generate a domain specific language called FURL, completed over the course of 5 sleepless days by an anonymous group of PhD students at Mega Harvard, famously large portions of the code consisted of only the word FLAGS in various states of capitalization.
Destruction of Source Code
As the game was originally considered public domain, there were several attempts at extending the game or mining the source code for information. Famously this lead to several high profile cases of total Flag Psychosis at the Mega Harvard AI lab. Eventually this culminated in one student overwriting the entire mainframe storage with the word FLAGS, believing that they were extending the game, destroying the source code for the game.
Reimplementation
Despite relative lack of information on the actual mechanics of the game, thousands of people claim to remember playing the game or to have gained special supernatural knowledge on how the game works. It should be noted that each of the original developers have vowed silence on the game, and the maximum number of people with access to the computer lab while the game was active was 5.
All known attempts to rewrite the game have failed, most attempts ending catastrophically.
There is no known available implementation of Flaghack. Under no conditions should you attempt to play a game that claims to be Flaghack.