The History of Cthangband

Once upon a time, there was a game called Rogue that was frequently available on Unix machines. It was a dungeon crawl, something like Dungeons and Dragons. There were nine rooms per level, which were displayed on the screen of a terminal using ASCII graphics. There were twenty-six sorts of monsters, shown on the screen as letters. The player (represented by an "@") tried to survive the descent to the bottom, where he or she would find the Amulet of Yendor, and then make his or her way up again. All without being killed by a monster, starving to death, or using the wrong magical item at the wrong time.

Roguelike games have evolved from Rogue. They are games in which a character goes around fighting monsters and gaining treasure until the character achieves a certain goal. They have certain distinctive features:

• They use an overhead view of what is going on, and typically don't deal with which way the player character is facing. The display often is letters, numbers, and punctuation, since these are easier to tell apart than graphics (which are often an option).
• They are very long games, not designed to be finished in a single session. They are hard to win.
• They generally do not have save and restore features for when a character dies or does something stupid. The savefile is used only to allow play in multiple sessions, and automatically update at the end of a session to show the current status of the character (which may be dead).
• They generally are available for no cost. (This has no effect on play, but is characteristic of a roguelike in at least some people's opinions.)

The length of the game, and the risk of losing a character that one has played for days, seems to lend intensity to the games that gets positively addictive.

Rogue sparked imitators, and the best way to look through them is at the Roguelike News Page. One of these follow-ons was Moria, in which players travelled down through the mines to slay the Balrog. It was nominally set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and included many new features. Robert Koenecke, the author, kept making the game harder and harder to win.

Eventually, Angband split off from Moria. The venue of play was moved from the mines of Moria in the Second or Third Age to the land of Angband, where Morgoth established the fortress of Thangorodrim, in the First Age. The dungeon was doubled in size, and many new features added. The main Angband page is Thangorodrim, and Angband is currently maintained by Robert Ruehlmann.

Of all the maintainers of Angband, the one with the most impact may well be Ben Harrison, who unified the various platform-dependent versions and created a clean code-base that made it surprisingly easy for anybody with a C compiler, a talent for programming, and an idea to create his or her own variant. Eventually, Topi Ylinen wrote a variant called Zangband, nominally based on the fiction of Roger Zelazny, primarily the Amber series. Dean Anderson looked at that, and wrote a variant of that called Cthangband. At first, Cthangband was pretty much Zangband with changed monsters, but Dean made some major changes.