Amulet of Yendor

From Wikinfo

In a few computer games, especially NetHack, the Amulet of Yendor is a highly coveted artifact hidden somewhere in the dangerous dungeon. To retrieve it, one must descend the stairs into the dungeon, fight or evade the many monsters, then somehow grab the Amulet and escape with it to the surface, thus winning the game. Several players have spent many hours of gameplay, often over many years, in repeated failed attempts to accomplish this. Indeed, when you die, you do not keep your save file and you must start the game from the beginning. Despite this, some skilled players have been able to win.

Yendor is Rodney backwards

The Amulet of Yendor first appeared in Rogue, the original roguelike game, but the origin of the name "Yendor" is unclear.

The name might allude to the Witch of Endor, a biblical character who owned a talisman with magical powers. One of Rogues authors has a vague memory of it simply being chosen because it sounded "fantasy-like" (compare names like Mordor, Gondor from J. R. R. Tolkien's books) and because of the amusement from "Yendor" being "Rodney" spelled backwards.

This derivation gives rise to the question, "Well then, who was Rodney?" (These days, "Who is Rodney?" is more often asked of the nickname of NetHacks Wizard of Yendor, but that is a re-reversal. The Amulet of Yendor predates the addition of the Wizard of Yendor to NetHack.) The answer is simply that "Michael [Toy, one of the authors of Rogue] thought it was a funny name and sounded sort of neat backwards", and so named the Amulet accordingly. Some microcomputer ports of Rogue (but possibly not the original UNIX version) also had "Rodney" as the default player name.

Origin of the Amulet

The Amulet of Yendor originally appeared in Rogue, the very first of the roguelike games. Upon a terminal to a VAX running BSD, players sat in front of a "graphical game", the best that a text-only "character cell" display could show. The at sign @ representing the player (a rogue attempting to steal the Amulet) and uppercase letters like A represented monsters while various punctuation stood for dungeon rooms, corridors, and fantasy objects such as weapons, armor, food, and magical scrolls and potions.

Retrieving the Amulet was a straightforward but extremely difficult affair; the rogue would explore the randomly generated dungeon looking for stairs downward. The dungeon starts out as rectangular rooms connected by corridors, but later takes the form of a maze. Somewhere below the 20th level is the Amulet; the rogue would take it and then follow stairs upward (into more randomly generated dungeon levels) until reaching the surface again. During most attempts, a monster would kill the rogue, but there were other dangers such as starvation.

Rogue clones such as UltraRogue and Advanced Rogue retained the Amulet of Yendor. However, many other roguelike games replaced that goal with something else; in Moria, one wins by killing the Balrog at the bottom of the dungeon; while in Larn one searches for a particular potion. For those who believe Milen of Everything2, the "outstanding features of a roguelike game" include random dungeon levels, powerful monsters, items that start unidentified, and a quest that is generally difficult, including permanent death. The Amulet of Yendor, being a specific item, is not on the list.

However, a Rogue clone called Hack retained the basic form of the dungeon and the goal of retrieving the Amulet of Yendor, even as it added new features to the game, such as multiple character classes. A variant of this game called NetHack continues to see development today, and most players seeking the Amulet of Yendor now do so in NetHack.

SPOILERS

Where is the Amulet of Yendor?

In early copies of Hack, the Amulet of Yendor was somewhere underneath a boulder in a maze. It was Hack 1.0.2 that added the "wizard of Yendor" to guard the Amulet. Hack also introduced the cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor; the dungeon will sometimes contain one or more of these (not at the bottom in the usual location) and some adventurers would sometimes waste a game retrieving a fake Amulet.

NetHack 3.0.0 introduced a new ending to the game, the Astral Plane. Even now, the goal of the game is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. Players carry the Amulet out of the dungeon to the Astral Plane and offer it to their god.

Since NetHack 3.1.0, the Wizard of Yendor no longer posesses the Amulet of Yendor. To gain the Amulet, you must force it from a priest or priestess in a new sanctum below the maze. You must find three "invocation artifacts" (killing the Book of the Dead, taken from the Wizard of Yendor) and use them in an "invocation ritual" to open the way to the sanctum.

However, because Hack and NetHack are such difficult games, it is easy to wonder whether the Amulet is really down there at all, or if players always died before reaching it, or if every Amulet was a "cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor". In an incident linked from NetHack's home page, someone emailed the Internet Oracle to ask:

O oracle most wise and benevolent please hear me.

Where is the real amulet of yendor?

The Oracle responded that at some point a hero would reach the bottom of the dungeon and battle the guardians for the Amulet, but the Amulet would not be there. Rather the Amulet was actually in the basement of a restaurant near the dungeon entrance.

But listen, NetHack players! Any such Amulet, at best, is yet another cheap plastic imitation. Several have successfully lifted the Amulet from Moloch's Sanctum, sacrificed it in the correct place on the Astral Plane, and ascended to demigodhood or demigoddesshood; just use Google Groups to search rec.games.roguelike.nethack for YAAP (yet another ascension post).

So what happens when you wear it?

Since NetHack 3.0.0, the game permits the player to wear the Amulet of Yendor. Those hoping for an impressive work of magic that grants super strength or invincibility or something great, should stop hoping as they read this paragraph. The effects of wearing the Amulet of Yendor are almost uniformly negative. Simply carrying the Amulet can cause bad effects to happen, but wearing it is worse. For more information, read the Everything2 writeup linked below.