Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time

Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time to learn any of the other roguelikes mentioned in the article, but wanted to mention that nethack itself is a class of games. Many people have written variants to scratch a particular itch (the article briefly mentions spork, which was one of the very first). Some of those are wildly different from the base game. There is even a separate tournament in June dedicated just to playing as many of the variants as you can (junehack)