ZAngband
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZAngband is a freeware roguelike role-playing computer game. It is a variant of Angband available for many different systems including DOS, Windows, Linux, variants of Unix, Mac, Acorn RISC OS and Amiga.
Perhaps the most famous Angband variant, ZAngband was also at one time the most popular. Many of the newer Angband variants owe their origins directly (e.g. ToME, Hengband) or indirectly (both OAngband and EyAngband were partly inspired by ZAngband's success and excesses) to ZAngband.
The name "ZAngband" stands for Zelazny Angband, because ZAngband was mainly based on Roger Zelazny's "Amber" books, rather than the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. (Some have suggested that it should stand for "Zany Angband" instead.)
ZAngband was originally authored by Topi Ylinen, was then maintained for a time by Robert Rühlmann, and is currently maintained by a development team led by Steven Fuerst, though there has been no development for nearly two years now.
While it was active, ZAngband continually added new features; some Angband players say that the last "fun" version was either 2.2.8 or 2.4.0, depending on their dislike of the OAngband combat system that was introduced in 2.4.0. After 2.4.0, a new wilderness system was introduced that was widely considered to be much less interesting than the one found in 2.2.8/2.4.0. Both ToME and Hengband (the most popular ZAngband offshoots) use the earlier, 2.2.8/2.4.0 wilderness system. A few hold that 2.1.1c was the Last True Version, as that was the version before the wilderness and certain other features were added. As the above implies, ZAngband's development was somewhat chaotic (a famous sarcastic quip about an early version was that it "seems like every game-balance or structural problem in vanilla Angband has been lovingly nutured [sic] to full hideous perfection here" [1]).
Nevertheless, for a while, the game has inspired several other variants and had a large number of dedicated players. Things have slowed down now, the most recent development version being 2.7.4c. However, a preview of version 2.7.5 is now available for download from ZAngband's SourceForge page [2].
