How were You Introduced to Angband?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Van]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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~

[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?