How did you find Angband?

[Nomad]

I've always loved roguelikes, since before I knew what they were called. (Anyone remember a Sega Megadrive game called Fatal Labyrinth?) Somebody at university linked me to the User Friendly webcomic where the characters were always playing Nethack, so I downloaded that and spent six and a half years trying to beat it.

After playing through the hellish endgame multiple times before I finally got my first win, I really didn't want to touch Nethack again for a long time, so I went Googling for other roguelikes. Found Angband from an index page of some sort, and initially downloaded 3.0.9b since I was kind of put off by the beta notice on 3.1.2 until I stumbled over these forums and figured out it was less buggy than I'd assumed. So far, still hooked even after getting one lucky warrior winner.

[Timo Pietilä]

Played Moria before Angband was born, then moved to Larn and Nethack for a while (ascended few times), then did go back to Moria to find out that there was a new variant of Moria called Angband with lots of new stuff. Gave it a try. Been playing ever since. Enjoyed few variants every now and then, but I always seem to go back to original vanilla angband. There just is something in this basic version that is not beaten by any variant.

Have played less lately. I general have played anything much less lately. Must be the age. Only games still getting me hooked are Angband, Master of Orion and Master of Orion II. In that order.

[fph]

Found Nethack first, around 2000, on some old SuSE cd set that was my first linux install. Then went to college in 2002 and found several people playing ZangbandTK regularly in the computer lab. That got me hooked quite fast (though I never used the TK variant myself --- ascii for the win!). After a while playing Zangband 2.7.x, I switched to ToME2 and then Vanilla recently, after development started flourishing again.

[Estie]

Nethack was first, a friend from university introduced me to it. Played with a friend (a different one, we would alternate). Eventually he stopped and I have memories of trying to make the highest possible Excalibur (I think I got +32 or so) which indicates that I had become bored. At this time I also tried other roguelikes, a little Moria and Angband. I had found them while reading rec.games.roguelike. I have been playing on and off, mostly vanilla and ToME.

[Magnate]

I've always loved roguelikes, since before I knew what they were called. (Anyone remember a Sega Megadrive game called Fatal Labyrinth?)

Ah well if we're going that far back I had the Apshai trilogy on the Commodore 64, which were definitely roguelikes. And there was a game called The Valley for the Commodore PET which I reckon fits the bill too (though there was no inventory back then). I remember adding a new spell to that game, which worked - not a bad achievement at the age of about eight.

[Starhawk]

I was introduced to ADOM by an Internet buddy on a message board, became addicted and finally beat the game a couple of times after several years of trying.

After that I started poking about to find other roguelikes, and Angband has been the one I've liked the best so far.

[Lord Fell]

My dad was in charge of maintaining the computer labs at our local university, and I first played Rogue on his portable 286 (?) back in '85. One of the students who he hired as proctors (these guys are security-lite for public labs, and had a stock of 5.25" disks of software that students could borrow) passed a copy of Moria on to me. I was still to young to go to university at the time, but I knew where I could go to play computer games...

[ekolis]

My first roguelike was Nethack... but because it wouldn't run off the floppy disk and required installation onto my dad's PC for me to play, I tried to keep it a secret, as my dad wouldn't let me install games on his PC (I was maybe 10 years old at the time)... well, that, plus the violence in the game (You slay the hobgoblin! You read the scroll labelled ELBIB YLOH; you have found a scroll of genocide! Genocide what monster?)

A while later I found this game called "Mangband"... it looked like some sort of Nethack-like game, but for some reason I always got weird errors when I started it, as if it were trying and failing to connect to the Internet or something! I didn't realize it was a multiplayer-only game at the time! And I didn't realize that it was a variant of another game for even longer, until I got an Internet connection and looked up the game online and found Angband, a zillion variants, and a zillion zillion other roguelikes!

Never actually PLAYED Mangband, even after I got an Internet connection... now my favorite roguelike is Crawl

[Nick]

Ah well if we're going that far back I had the Apshai trilogy on the Commodore 64, which were definitely roguelikes.

I played Gateway to Apshai, but I wouldn't quite call it a roguelike - it was definitely real time, because I remember being instakilled by vampires.

Castle of Winds would have been my first roguelike.

[molotov]

I played Rogue on an Amiga computer at my grandma's house as a kid. I felt nostalgia as an adult and searched the internet for rogue clones and then roguelikes in general.

I found Angband and thought the learning curve was too steep, played Nethack and hated it, and then settled on MAngband simply because it was real-time and online. After learning the keys and tricks for MAnband (after about 2 years), I decided to give Angband another shot, and found that I loved the changes made since 3.0.9b. I've been hooked ever since.

[cofresi]

First exposure to a somewhat roguelike game would have been 'Temple of Apshai' on the Commodore 64. First real roguelike would have been 'Moria' on my friends Amiga. Then when dialup came around, Angband was one of the first games I downloaded and it's been love ever since.

[retrobits]

Started playing rogue at college on a Vax mainframe. Continued with rogue off and on for years afterward. Much later after I was out of college (maybe 10 years) and was searching for rogue on the internet. Dabbled with Nethack and didn't ever like it -- seemed too silly and random (still does). Then discovered rog-o-matic (a belligerent expert system) and was facinated by the idea of an automated rogue player. During my attempts to get rog-o-matic working, I stumbled across something called "Angband Borg" this was around 1999 or 2000. Once I saw the borg running I was hooked. So yeah, I guess I'm another of Andrew's victims. I've been playing Angband, porting Angband for handheld platforms, and running a borg for 10 years or so now. Angband and Interactive Fiction are my all time favorite computer games -- still play both today and prefer them over any new technology (although I've owned and enjoyed both a PS3 & Wii system).

[Frood]

I had seen hack and nethack on the web before finding Angband. I thought they were computer hacking games and was quite disappointed.

Later I read about Angband(actually ZangbandTK) in an issue of Swedish PC Gamer(I think the article was translated from some English language version of the same magazine). Started playing Zangband after that. I played Sangband for a while and tried some other variants. Nowadays I mostly play vanilla, I really like all the new updates. Got my first win a couple of months ago aswell.

[will_asher]

I first played rogue off of a floppy 5 1/4 inch disk (which was borrowed from a friend) around 1990. Found Hack a couple years later. Played it for several years until (somewhere around 1997-98) I asked around on the internet for how to win (because I had gotten to what seemed like the last level several times and couldn't figure out what to do next). That's when I found out about Nethack which I won once after about seven years with a lot of help from the Nethack newsgroup and spoilers.

I heard about Angband around 2005 or 2006 from someone mentioning it on the Nethack newsgroup. At first I didn't like it as much as Nethack (for reasons I have detailed several times).
Eventually I think the deciding factor was that Angband's code was so clean, organized, and commented, that I could easily figure out how to customise a lot of stuff. I have always liked to customise games and my favorite games have always been the kind with some kind of level-builder. I remember taking a look at Nethack's code soon after starting DaJAngband, and it wasn't nearly as easy to read and figure out. So I ended up sticking with Angband because I could change it to suit my tastes.

[Therem Harth]

Had a CD with a bunch of games on it when I was a kid. One of the games was an old version of Angband. It quickly became my preferred method of wasting time, but it did convince me to get serious about learning to touch-type.