So I’ve just learned two startling facts. 1) GNU Screen was still in development, and 2) that we used to have a NETHACK option, but it was removed???

From the man page:

nethack [ on | off ]

Changes the kind of error messages used by screen. When you are familiar with the game nethack, you may enjoy the nethack-style messages which will often blur the facts a little, but are much funnier to read. Anyway, standard messages often tend to be unclear as well.

This option is only available if screen was compiled with the NETHACK flag defined. The default setting is then determined by the pres ence of the environment variable $NETHACKOPTIONS and the file ~/.nethackrc - if either one is present, the default is on.