How were You Introduced to Angband?

[Kooltone]

How were you introduced to Angband, and if you are comfortable sharing, how old are you?

I'm assuming I'm one of the young whippersnappers playing this game. I'm 28. I grew up playing Pokémon Gold/Silver and Ruby/Sapphire on a GBA SP.

I was introduced to Angband about a year or two ago, but I have been playing old-school roguelikes since around 2014.

If I recall, I took a round about route to these old games. My friend's dad happened to have an old copy of Commander Keen and introduced us to some of the DOS games on his Windows XP computer. I think after that, I started looking around for other abandonware DOS games. At some point, I found The Hobbit DOS game and discovered Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Eventually, I ran across ADOM which was my very first roguelike. I didn't make it very far into the ADOM, but it left a lasting impression on me. I tried Nethack at some point, but it always felt obtuse to me. I'd play Nethack off and on for years and even found a port on my Android phone. But for some reason, the port no longer works on my device. I looked for alternatives and ran across an Angband port on Google Play. Since then, Angband has been my exclusive classic roguelike, and yes, I mostly play it on my phone.

[Sky]

2007.
I was building my PC with a C2D and i had very little money, so i built it one piece at the time, i used a Celeron while i saved for the CPU, and had no GPU at all. I needed something to play that would run on a veritable potato, and Angband was it.
I have no idea if i already knew about it, i may have just googled it.
I was always into D&D and RPGs so this would have been something i was looking for.

I think i played 3.0.6 or something like that.

I could hardly play the game. Had no idea what keybinds were, i would only play Dunadan Warriors, and could not aim at anything that wasnt in a straight line from me.

Somehow, i even managed to get to Morgoth once, and got crushed.

[Egavactip]

Back around 1990 or 1991, I bought an Amiga and went to a users group meeting and bought a bunch of shareware on floppies. One of the games on one of the disks was Moria. I messed around with Moria, which reminded me of the old Avalon Hill computer game Telengard, only better, but I never got very far with it. I still remember that annoying leprechaun.

Decades later, I remembered Moria and decided to google it. In the search results was something that said Angband was a successor and better game than Moria, so I downloaded it and tried it. The random treasure aspect of it hooked me. Plus, I was getting tired of the game I had been playing for years (I tend to focus on one game for many years until very tired/burnt out on it), which was Civ 4. So Angband basically replaced that for me and it's sort of a nightly stress reliever for me.

[Sphara]

I found a concept of roguelikes from a Finnish computer magazine by the late 80´s. Got Nethack, Moria and Omega around my preteens. Never came even close of finishing Moria (my deepest character was killed by an Iridescent Beetle, I'll never forget that). Don't remember how I got any of these games. Probably a copy from a friend or a shareware purchase.

By the mid-90's I found Angband. I was able to win it around I was 18. By that time I knew Tolkien only by name, so my first introduction to LoTR/Silmarillion characters was made by Angband the game. Played some ZAngband in my 20´s and then took at least 15-year hiatus from Angband variants. Returned in 2016 and have played occasionally ever since. I'm pretty sure I would not have returned without the existence of this website.

[smbhax]

14 months ago YouTube's algorithm put a thumbnail for a video called something like "Top 5 Roguelikes for New Players" in front of my eyeballs. Maybe that clicked in my brain from the term "roguelite" from when I'd played some Nuclear Throne four years earlier? I don't know. Anyway I checked out the video and it mentioned a game called Infra Arcana that looked kind of neat. I tried that, then Rogue, then DCSS, and then Sil-Q, which brought me to this forum, and eventually to Angband. : )

[tom]

Who doesn't like talking about themselves

I got into Angband some time perhaps ~1996 when a friend at school gave me Angband for DOS on a 3.5" floppy disk. I'm not sure the exact version, but it had player ghosts so must have been 2.7.6 or earlier. I was blown away by the depth of the game compared to commercial stuff I was addicted to at the time. I viewed it as an 'open-endeded' game, and spent a lot of time mining gold at shallow depths, and savefile scumming.

I didn't get much good at the game until returning to it in 2.8.3 era, and won with a Mage (and globe of invulnerability...). Around that time (~1999) I briefly maintained Dragon Angband, before maintainership passed to Andrew White

Angband was the first 'real' C codebase I was exposed to, and reading 2.8.3 code made some parts of the C language click for me. It really made a mature C programmer of me.

Well, being young and foolish I dropped angband for half a lifetime (perhaps the tactics of the day, stat potion scumming <dlvl 40, turned me off), only returning in winter 2020/2021, when life was unusually isolated and home-based. I've found the changes since 2.8.x really awesome.

In an unexpected rerun of things half a lifetime ago, again I find myself working on a variant. (https://github.com/tomm/tactical-angband). Is it a cycle? Perhaps I'll disappear, and return in another 20 years, grizzled and grave-ready, to make one last variant?

[Ed_47569]

How were you introduced to Angband, and if you are comfortable sharing, how old are you?

I'm 39 and have been playing since about 1997 - Version 2.7.9 I think.

At school we still had Acorn Archimedes computers in the main IT suite - anyone remember them? They were quite popular in UK schools during the late 1980s and early-mid 1990s. Anyway I stumbled across a rare colour version of Umoria (ported by Eduard Poor) and got hooked pretty quickly. One day an older student came over and asked why I was playing it - a much better version called Angband was released a few years prior! So I downloaded Angband on the family PC at home and have never looked back...

[Bill Peterson]

How were you introduced to Angband, and if you are comfortable sharing, how old are you?

Although there are arguments about the one or two machines that predate me, I'm essentially older than computers, 79 this year. I skipped over arcade videogames, sticking with pinball until the mid-80's when I got an Amiga and a DOS machine. As I was gainfully employed I could afford all the fancy graphics games, and still do.

Around the turn of the century I stumbled across AngbandTk, which I recall was 2.8.3 version. While I played that, I found that I could run the Borg in the background at work, learning from that means that I dive very slowly and end up with a large turncount. I believe that's why, of my 4 winners to date, 2 have found a plain gold ring.

Anyone who recognizes me knows that I'm a big advocate of Angband graphics, I really wouldn't play Vanilla very much until tiles were added to the 3.x.x version.

[fph]

I got a SuSE Linux distro around 1999-2000 and found Nethack on the installation CDs; this was my first exposure to roguelikes. After that at university (around 2003) I saw people playing Angband (ZAngband IIRC) on the desktop machines in the computer room of my dorm, and got my first fix of Angband there.

[bughunter]

1982: Went to an Engineering summer camp for wannabe engineers and spent all my evenings playing Rogue in the computer lab on VT100 terminals -- along with about 80% of the other campers. Took every > I found. Died quickly and often. Loved every minute and was hooked for life. That six week period imprinted a sense of awe and mystery upon me, associated strongly with the ASCII roguelike interface. I still play without tilesets today.

[Buncha self-indulgent typing deleted. Be grateful.]

2019: Got the roguelike bug once again. That's when I tried Angband again and found it much improved, much more to my liking. Streamlined dungeon crawl without puzzle and sidequest distractions. Kinda like Icewind Dale compared to Nethack's Baldur's Gate. I even got a gnome wizard as far as facing Morgoth, but he kicked my butt. (Also got partway up the learning curve for ADOM, but it's just too masochistic...)

2020: Computer crash. GPU failure. Fell back to an old 2004 Macbook Pro would only run roguelikes and DOSbox games. Angband was a lifesaver. Also found these forums.

2021: Bought a new laptop with a 64-bit CPU and top of the line graphics chipset. Splurged on Steam sales, played a lot of CivV, all the best fantasy RPGs, and even a few RTS titles. Took me about a year to get thru the best ones; I still have a Steam library full of unplayed, top-rated titles.

2022: Angband drew me back to the @. I seek a turn-based game that challenges me with risk and rewards me with good drops, that makes me think, and is casual enough that I can drop it for a few days and still pick it back up where I left off. All the roguelikes are like that, but Angband is all about the hack and slash - that's what I play for. I don't need 250fps gore and jiggly flesh models, I need the tactical puzzles, the "oh sh*t" moments, and the rewards of victory (and the agony of defeat).

Eventually I'll get the urge to play something like Civ or XCOM2, but I will also come back to Angband eventually.

[Nick]

One of my workmates had the borg running as his screensaver. Eventually I got interested enough to try the game; that was about 2003.

[Siemelink]

Around 1990 I had Moria on a floppy (cloning Emperor Liches for loot). I also found rogue on the uni mainframe (usually ran out of food)

[Estie]

I honestly dont remember. A friend showed me Nethack in the times when we connected to the internet via acoustic line (300 baud). We played together with another friend through the nights, alternating player/commenter.

One of my oldest Angband memories is my friend finding Aglarang with his HT warrior. But whether he was the first to play, or I introduced him, I cannot recall.

[Grotug]

Hi, I've been playing Angband for 10 years now and I'm 43. In 2013 I don't recall how I stumbled upon Angband but I think I somehow learned about Rogue and I guess that eventually got me to Angband. I think I did try Colossal Cave Adventure but did not make any progress in it the first time I played it (I replayed it a year or two ago and did manage to find some things in the cave).

I think I tried Nethack and maybe one or two other roguelikes after trying Rogue but I naturally gravitated toward Angband since it was Tolkien related. I was blown away by the writing in the game: the descriptions of the monsters and, more so, of the artifacts. Every artifact seemed so {special}. I really enjoyed the lore of the legendary heroes who had wielded whatever weapon I had found (I remember the weapon artifacts having the best descriptions).

I was also really impressed by the depth of the game, especially as it related to all the different kinds of treasures and equipment.

Speaking of Commander Keen, I loved that game as a kid. Here is a little video of me climbing the impossible tower:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx_iZcV2VA

[malcontent]

Sorry, I'm sure this is longer than it needs to be...

My first exposure was Moria at the University of Washington in Seattle on VAX terminals in one of the dormitories around 1987. My brother alerted me to a game that people were playing so I tried it. I was absolutely horrible at it, but I loved it. Looking back I shudder to think how far away I was from ever winning the game. I was only in the dorms for 2 quarters before moving out and didn't play again for about 10 years.

Around 1997 I built a computer (meaning I bought all the parts separately and assembled them) with the intent of running Linux like the uber geek I liked to think I was. I don't recall if Debian Linux had a Moria package or if I just built from source. I don't even recall what made me revisit the game. Then, with unlimited access and much more time, I got fairly consumed with figuring out how to win. Lots of visits to Beej's moria page, which you can still find (https://beej.us/moria/) and others that no longer exist. Eventually won, maybe twice, got burned out and accepted that there were other things to do in life.

20 years later, leading a team of developers at work that included some recent college grads that were into gaming, the inevitable discussion about "ascii games I played in my day" came up and I found some web-based version of Moria to show them to get a laugh. This sparked my interest a bit, which led me to Angband, which I now play way too much.

I think the staying power of Angband for me is the ability to vary the game parameters and the community around the game. Angband.live was a great resource but now I build on Linux (chromebook) and play on a big screen with 4 subwindows. It's very nice to not need an internet connection to play. I always, always play in ascii. I have always found other people's rendering of the characters and monsters a huge let down and prefer to let my imagination have fun. Due to my time away, and only recent re-discovery, I have only played 4.x versions.