How were You Introduced to Angband?

[Estie]

Thats an old memory. I'll post my current song in the music thread.

[Pete Mack]

They say the best things in life are free.
Speaking of "Spottgesang"

https://youtu.be/E-P2qL3qkzk

[Egavactip]

The guy said to me, "It's okay, kid, the first balrog is free."

[Talharim]

Back in 87 or 88, a friend of mine at the university discovered Angband. He talked earnestly about it. He was enthusiastic about everything and I still remember him talking about his Dwarf priest clearing an orc pit with dispel evil.

I played a lot of Angband but was lousy at it and used savefiles. Then I drifted into Adom, which I played a LOT! Then I played ToME, Zangband, DCSS, Tales of Maj’Eyal, Sil, then I played more Angband, the farthest char was a lvl 45 Warrior that is on the ladder (I lost the savefile after the computer it was on broke down.

Then I DCSS again (that I finally won with several combinations of races and classes). Now I came back to Angband. Nick has done a wonderful job with the new classes and it has rekindled my interest in the game.

Let’s see if I can finally defeat Morgoth!

The problem is that I have a lot of characters. I have savegames of all the classes! I can’t decide on which one to commit to!

[mrfy]

Dude, I think this was it! We were a Mac family, and I always saw Moria mentioned but I could never find a way to play it, and I'm pretty sure that searching is what eventually led me to discover Angband.

I got into Moria long ago, probably late 80s and played into the mid 90s. There were several mac ports available. I still have a few versions on my old imac running MacOS 9.2.2, called PXMoria and MacMoria. I also played it on unix, both on the mac and on other unix sytems.

Lost interest and then about in the mid 2000s discovered Angband.

[Whelk]

Two friends at high school had got into Moria on PC, telling me all the stories of their characters. I couldn't find a mac copy, but managed to find this even more amazing version.

Dude, I think this was it! We were a Mac family, and I always saw Moria mentioned but I could never find a way to play it, and I'm pretty sure that searching is what eventually led me to discover Angband.

[half]

The Dungeon of Doom was also my first roguelike (c. 1986). It had some nice innovations on the formula. Probably the best graphics for a roguelike at the time, and I especially liked the partial identification of a particular kind of item for each class (a forerunner to Angband's psuedo-id), the rumour screen (a cross between NetHack fortune cookies and a manual), and the way the levels very gradually became labyrinthine as you descended.

The increasing size of levels as you descend in Sil is directly inspired by this, and the deathblades are a reference to the rare magic swords of the same name in The Dungeon of Doom.

I next got into Hack (c. 1988), then Angband (c. 1995). Two friends at high school had got into Moria on PC, telling me all the stories of their characters. I couldn't find a mac copy, but managed to find this even more amazing version.

In 2001, I started modifying Angband in ways that would eventually be released 11 years later as Sil.

[Whelk]

I'm pretty sure I found Angband on AOL at some point while searching for Tolkien-related stuff. My only roguelike experience before that was Dungeon of Doom many years previous, on the Macintosh Plus my dad got our family for Christmas one year.

I was a goober and used the cheat death mode for quite a while but never actually beat the game that way. I just had fun looking for all the familiar artifacts and creatures. And recalling back to town constantly to sell things before I learned I enjoyed no-selling mode. Or maybe no-selling wasn't a thing yet? Was that always an option?

[Archenoth]

Gosh, there's a looot I'm skipping here, but the short version is that I really liked ADOM!
After a broken hand-me-down PPC iBook with no OS from my school became my only usable computer, I ended up installing Gentoo on it and couldn't find a binary for ADOM that worked on that

But TOME 2 was in the repos, which I ended up liking quite a bit!

I still bounced off Vanilla though--and it wasn't until much later that I ended up reading the Angband lparchive that I ended up "getting" it and giving it a more fair try.
The design of the most recent versions being surprisingly nice really sealed the deal that Angband was something I enjoyed playing~

[ewert]

Unsure exactly when was the first time I played Angband specifically, but it all started in the 80s with Rogue, Hack, Larn (first one I completed, multiple times), Nethack et cetera. I mostly drifted off to graphic games sometime after early Moria, but popped back in for roguelikes every now and then. I think after Adom sometime in the 00s I more heavily picked up Angband for those thematic periods. I reckon Tales of MajEyal and Angband are my two most played roguelikes now, before 2000s definitely Nethack.

[gglibertine]

I was introduced to nethack by one of my oldest friends when we were roommates (1987, I think). He set me up with a dialup account on the minicomputer in his office at work. We even made up our own character classes, which he then added to the game. Among them were the Valkyrie (starts with a +1 long sword and really good armour), the Guitarist (starts with picks, which you could throw for damage, and a Strat, which was a reskinned axe; if you played it at a nymph, she would giggle and throw her knickers at you, which you could wear as a helmet), and the Asshole (same as the Tourist, only had auto-identify on everything because know-it-all).

Some years later, right around the time Angband came along, a boyfriend introduced me to it. I liked the idea of the town up top that you could always return to if you needed something.

I eventually got rid of the boyfriend, but I'm still playing Angband.

[EpicMan]

I found Moria on a Shareware CD somewhere in the mid nineties. Lost it, then late nineties-early 2000s while looking at a LoTR MUD I stumbled across Angband.

[Van]

I found Angband on one of those old CDs with like a thousand shareware and freeware games on them.

[Hounded]

My older brother had a computer supply and service shop back in the 80s and pre-loaded Moria when we upgraded to the XT. Burned a lot of hours playing and eventually lost the program. Went searching for it in the 90's and discovered Angband. Wasn't until then that I figured out what WoR actually did.

[Limeade]

It was one of the ports available in FreeBSD when I started using it as a desktop OS around 2003. Been hooked ever since, never got very far.