How were You Introduced to Angband?

[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...

[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?

[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. : )

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.