When did you begin playing roguelikes ?

Message

wolfis · #1 Post by **wolfis** » Wed Feb 05, 2003 10:26 am

i hope roguelikes were around 15+ years ago ... i assume they were .

FlamingMuffins · #2 Post by **FlamingMuffins** » Wed Feb 05, 2003 8:36 pm

I started playing roguelike games about 2 years ago with the game called net hack...i got it off a demo cd for some pc magazine...it had like a million free old games for comp...how bout other ppl

gonad · #3 Post by **gonad** » Wed Feb 05, 2003 9:09 pm

back when it was just rogue, I think I've managed to play just about every rogue like thats been made for the pc including some for the apple and the adom

PigInZen · #4 Post by **PigInZen** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 3:18 am

1986, at UC Davis. We had timeshare accounts with $100 each quarter - they came with Registration fees. I had a very good friend who was a CS major had we went around to each of our non-geek friends asking for use of their timeshare accounts. I figure we blew threw 6 or 7 accounts each quarter playing NetHack on the UNIX mainframes and Empire on the VMS mainframes.

He had a old terminal that we used from his apartment. Otherwise I headed for the morgue - four labs full of Tektronix terminals in the basement of one of the science buildings.

Almost failed out my sophomore year.

(edit: left out the Empire info... would love a build of that for OS X. Impossible to find)

Sharkopath · #5 Post by **Sharkopath** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 6:38 am

My first introduction to Roguelikes was in 1993 or 94 or so... I was in high school and I had found a catalog from a shareware distributor, who sold shareware games for $4 each on 3 1/2" floppies... since the internet as we know it had yet to appear in my little town, I thought this was a good deal. Along with cheesy games like Commander Keen, Jason Storm in Space Chase, Avoid the Noid, and the original shareware RPG Dungeons of the Unforgiven, I found an ad for a game I'd never heard of... The Dungeons of Moria. Awed by the advertising copy billing it as an "immersive RPG adventure where you build a character and train them for weeks, months, years to defeat the Balrog who lies beneath the murky depths" or some such nonsense, I was willing to take a chance, since it only cost $4 and it didn't require VGA or anything fancy that would have confused my poor old 286. When I first got it I was kind of confused by the ASCII-character graphics and stymied by the intricate command scheme, as well as perennially ticked off by my characters' continual deaths. But then my mom figured it out and started getting high scores (or at least reaching high levels--for some reason the scoreboard was broken in the version we bought.) I just couldn't let this stand, so I printed out Moria's 50-page-plus online manual and pored over it constantly in order to find new strategies to beat her. And once I went to college and discovered the Internet I found Angband, which drew me to it because it was described as "Moria's heir" or "Moria on steroids." I also found that I could compile it on my school Unix account and play it via telnet anywhere I wanted to, which was a big plus. I tried other roguelikes such as Nethack, Omega, and ADOM for a while, but none of them recaptured the same "essence" of dungeon-crawling fun that Moria, Angband, and their variants have for me. And then I found ToME... and I've had no social life ever since...

</nostalgic babble>

wolfis · #6 Post by **wolfis** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 7:16 am

i am pretty much like the above post ... a friend introduced me to moria on the a500 must have been 1993 ... then it was on to angband ... then zang ... and now tome !

Lord Dimwit · #7 Post by **Lord Dimwit** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 8:43 am

I've got to add myself to the Grizzled Veterans Club as well...

My first experience was on a Mac Classic that was so slow online that I couldn't download anything larger than a megabyte in a day or so, and Moria, with its ability to fit on a floppy disk, fit the bill perfectly.

I switched pretty quickly to Angband once it came out. Since then, I've conducted a sort of dysfunctional relationship with roguelike games... Play it for a while, die, get frustrated, then come back after some time. For a while during my high school days I tried some other more "traditional" RPGs, but they didn't compare.

I guess I don't find it surprising that there are so many old players out there... The roguelike game doesn't appeal to those with short attention spans or a taste for the trendy. For this type, we have Final Fantasy.

I think that this genre (and ToME is certainly one of the finest specimens) is really the most strategic and variable that I've ever encountered, and that's why I still love it after my interest in other games has long since faded. They're the only computer games that really stimulate the imagination.

There's a windy old reminiscence for you...

V4X3N · #8 Post by **V4X3N** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 11:21 am

Depending on your definition of roguelikes, either 1988 or 1997. 1988 is when I at last got a PC AT and saw all this weird shareware. Bits of which that qualify as roguelikes - kind of - include the Kingdom of Kroz and ZZT. I call for a judgement check since they didn't actually descend from Moria and the like, and they were mere pale PC imitations at best.
1997 is when I was at last shown the true light of the roguelike in a version of Ben Harrison's cleaned up and highly portable Angbands. As pretty much my first action, I instinctively reached for the min/max: Took my beefy Dunadan fighter, equipped him with a dagger, and read scrolls of to hit and to dam at it until it was +10/+10.
*sniff* We'll always have our victory over Gollum, even though those baby dragons blasted our ass from wall to wall, didn't they?

Teber · #9 Post by **Teber** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 12:38 pm

wolfis wrote:i am pretty much like the above post ... a friend introduced me to moria on the a500 must have been 1993 ... then it was on to angband ... then zang ... and now tome !

my introduction to moria was in 1989 or something. i had an a500 at the time. after which i followed the same sequence. a few year ago i got internet at home and played pern and tome on a mac. now i've got a window$ machine.

i'm completely out of touch with all angband variants. i play tome exclusively now.

Zombie Yeek · #10 Post by **Zombie Yeek** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 2:52 pm

I started with moria some time around 1990, went on to angband, zangband, then tome. My brother introduced me to each version, but tends to grow bored with each version much faster than I do.

Ravenred · #11 Post by **Ravenred** » Fri Feb 07, 2003 2:52 am

Late 80s, early 90s... Umoria on an Amiga 500 gotten off some far off dial-up BBS. First me, then my brother... my brother always got higher scores than me, but what can I say... he plays like a munchkin!

Then, only three odd years ago I was on the net at work and thought "I wonder whatever happened to..." got onto phial.com, from there straight onto Thangorodrim. Spent a few minutes being bamboozled by the choice in variant and the HUGE culture which seems to have grown up around the ol' Umoria.

Gravitated to Pern, as I was an Anne McCaffrey fan (a stance I've since re-examined since she started throwing lawsuits around). and haven't looked back since. It's just as addictive and far more interesting than the blue and white screen of distant and fond memory!

</gush>

manchu · #12 Post by **manchu** » Thu Feb 13, 2003 10:48 pm

Also a veteran of the dungeons. I started in the fall of 1987 with Nethack when I visited my little brother at boarding school. He and I spent the better part of a Saturday in the school's computer lab getting up to about level 7 or 8 and then dying over and over again. It was years before I figured out successful tactics on my own without ever having access to any type of forum to discuss any such thing. I eventually won Nethack and began to explore variants. Spent some time at Ang, Zang, Sang ( a favorite of mine). Played Adom, won Omega a few times, won Ragnarok a few times also,and poked my nose in a few others. I've been playing Tome now for about half a year and like it quite a bit.

Manchu
warrior of the ages.

Grimwind · #13 Post by **Grimwind** » Sun Feb 16, 2003 10:09 am

Hack on a Sun, Cal, 1987. Didn't play much. It was pretty buggy. The high score list was made up of people who dropped the most negative gold

Caswallawn · #14 Post by **Caswallawn** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 7:47 am

Eye of the beholder 2, the first one I played and completed. I barely remember the others as I was just learning to walk as my older brother played I think it was "Castle" on the pc junior. That one had the letter symbols for monsters and items, and us kids crowded around thinking it was the coolest. I could only manage to be any good at "Snipes."

Ludvig · #15 Post by **Ludvig** » Tue Feb 18, 2003 12:43 pm

In 1998 when I was in desperate need of a shareware rpg for timekilling. Found ADOM which I played untill v1.00. Then I thought: I bet this isn't the only rouge-like (I was right). Found TOME. Never plays ADOM...

ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal