In 1990 Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand with the help of other students at the University of Warwick, created Angband 1.0, based on the existing code for Umoria 5.2.1. Angband is an extended version of Moria, with much more influence from the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien than its predecessor. Angband is a reference to Morgoth's "prison of iron" (see Tolkien's "Silmarillion"). The goal of the game is to kill Morgoth and get the iron crown which has the Silmarillion jewel encrusted in it.
Sean Marsh, Geoff Hill, Charles Teague and others worked on the Angband source, releasing a copy known as "Angband 2.4.frog_knows" at some point, which ran only on Unix systems, but which was ported by various people to various other systems. Then Charles Swiger attempted to clean up the source code, coming up finally with Angband 2.6.2 in late 1994. Then Ben Harrison took over, where Swiger left. He is still the current maintainer of Angband. He did a a major rewrite, resulting Angband 2.7.0, released around January first, 1995.
The additions of Angband to Moria include:
Ben Harrison has also written a Borg to play Angband. It is an automatic player for the game of Angband. It "sees" the game the same way as a human player would see it, as a screen full of ASCII characters. Ben Borg has several smaller and large goals and it can learn from its mistakes. So it is a sort of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ben Borg has been able to win the game, which is pretty amazing considering that most human players are never able to do it. The game of Angband has highly random nature, so the borg cannot know most things for certain. The Ben borg uses a cautious ("wimpy") strategy and advances much more slowly than most human players. A computer program has infinite patience compared to us humans.
The core of Angband is written in C programming language, but the the monsters, magic and normal items, artifacts and vaults are described in separate text files, so even people who don't know how to program can modify these and add new creatures, objects and such to Angband.
Maybe because of this and the fact that Angband has very clean source code compared to most other roguelike games, Angband has spawned more variants than any other roguelike game. The number of variants at the moment is about 20 and it keeps growing.
The most popular of all Angband variants is Zangband, short for Zelazny Angband. It is nowadays more popular than Angband, much because it has more features than any popular roguelike game and new versions of Zangband appear frequently.
Zangband was originally created by Topi Ylinen, in 1994. Zangband features creatures, objects and powers from Roger Zelazny's Amber-series of fantasy novels. But it doesn't end here. There are hundreds of new, often funny, monsters which don't have anything to do with Zelazny or Tolkien, e.g. Martti Ihrasaari (making irony of the fat former president of Finland), Barney, the dinosaur, and even Santa Claus! Zangband introduces about 20 new character races and some of the old ones are changed as well, new character classes such as the monk, chaos warrior, high mage, mindcrafter and warrior-mage. The character classes often have special abilities and limitation/disadvantages. E.g. a vampire can drain life from monster, but will take damage from sunlight. The spectre is able to fly through walls. Zangband has completely new magic system with 7 realms of magic (life, sorcery, nature, chaos, death, arcane and trump). Zangband features random artifacts, pets (charmed monsters which are friendly towards you and attack your enemies). chaos patrons for chaos warrios (sort of gods). Zangband has better artificial intelligence (AI) for monsters. Unique monsters can even to talk at the player and there are friendly monsters as well, such as Gandalf the Grey and Fangorn the Treebeard.
The original Angband had only two quests; first kill Sauron at 99th dungeon level and then a trap door appears and then kill Morgoth. The new versions of Zangband have dozens of additional quests and you can easily add your own. Zangband also has a wilderness area surrounding the town and new terrain features such as lava and water (and water monsters). The latest development versions of Zangband allow Python-programming language used to customize the game. In my honest opinion Zangband is the most advanced and best roguelike game at the moment, but some NetHack players might disagree.
Many of the Angband variants are graphical. Utomno was Matt Craighead's attempt to write a real-time version of Angband with isometric 3D graphics. The development has been frozen for some time.
Some other Angband variants:
For more information check The Angband Variant FAQ.
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