How were You Introduced to Angband?

[bio_hazard]

First played in 1993 or 1994, sophomore year in college. I was in campus housing and sharing a house with a guy who's brother was an engineering major at MIT. He gave my friend and I 3.5" floppies so we could play. It was dos though and I had a Mac so I still had to borrow a computer

This same brother at MIT got us into Magic the Gathering.

[grumbleguts]

1988/9 was playing nethack on a unix system. Played that until I discovered angband in 1991 at uni, in a computer science class, where most of us were playing angband instead of the actual course content.

[maboleth]

I don't remember actually, but I think it was late 90's or so.

I was one of the guys that supplemented Gervais titles back in the day, when they were the greatest and hi-res (I still love them most of all - I can only play @ in Gervais titles :-) ).
The tile set was missing many new monsters and items and was using ugly substitutes. I contacted Gervais, got his approval and refilled the map with all the missing items, drawing in his style.

Still warms my heart when I see my work & name in the tiles. Small personal stuff, but was proud then.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

On a cross-country plane flight in the early '90s, the passenger next to me was playing angband on his laptop and talked with me about the game. He kindly gave me a copy on a 3.5" floppy disk, and I have played off and on ever since. Didn't ever legitimately win until I watched Fizzix's "Let's Play Angband" series on YouTube. Since then, my game has improved, but still lacks the real professional status of some of the greats.

[AceRimmer]

My university had it tucked away on one of it's large Unix machines back in the late 80's, early 90's.

@sffp introduced me to it back in the early 90's.

[sffp]

My university had it tucked away on one of it's large Unix machines back in the late 80's, early 90's.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I'm 44, found Moria around 1992 while rummaging through my brother's collection of 3.5 diskettes he brought home with him on holiday. I couldn't play Angband until 1999 when I upgraded my computer where I started playing 'in earnest' but lusted for it back in 1995 when my friend could run it on his 386. It had color, and artifacts, and rooms full of enemies, uniques, and color. I remember being freaked out when I first saw a unique orc with a horde of other orcs -- Moria is very sparse.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.