[Paul1980au]

Dogs the other rogue like game that is superior to nethack in my opinion is the angband and zangband and variants of that - they are open source and more variants and ideas and the games themselves are far more detailed then nethack - it actually branced off from nethack but has a much bigger development community in progress and has a higher player amount

In this genre Space 4X open source we have freeorion.org ? which is in early stages but seems to be the only viable alternative in terms of similarness - if i was MM i would consider opening up SE2 to open source and then SE3 once SE5 was out - yes with all the programmers it could be very viable and it probably wouldnt distract to many players from SE5 as it would be superior but it could be something to work with - id like to hear from MM (aaron) on this. Commercially i guess he would be a bit cautious but there is always a place for superior commercial products similar to the open source alternative - the only thing would be new ideas in a open source he would have to be careful to generate his own source code due to GPL conditions.