embrace the addition of scripting, with many expressing confusion over its usage, and it was therefore later removed. The original Moria/Angband software license allowed distribution of the game, but only does so if "not for profit", which precludes packaging with many Linux distributions or inclusion within a magazine cover disc. The license also does not explicitly allow code modification, something which is in practice ignored by the Angband community. In light of these perceived issues, an initiative to re-license Angband was therefore started by maintainer Rühlmann in 2000. This "Angband Open Source Initiative" was designed to make Angband proper Open source under the GPL license. The process was completed on 9 January 2009. Rühlmann stepped down in October 2005, leading to a brief period of uncertainty. However, Julian Lighton was soon announced as the new maintainer in March 2006, but did not release a new version of the game. Due to the absence of Lighton, Andi Sidwell assumed maintainership, with the support of the community, in December 2007. Under their watch, other developers have come on board and the game has seen significant gameplay and internal code changes. Maintainership passed over to the current maintainer Nick McConnell, starting from version 4.0.0 (2015). Community Some loci of Angband discussion are the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.angband, the Angband Forum website, and the IRC channels #angband (on WorldIRC) and #angband-dev (on Freenode). Some players continue to play Angband for several years. Derivative works Among Angband's many derivatives are MAngband (1997), a multiplayer variant; Zangband ("Zelazny"+"Angband") (1994), which incorporates elements of Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber novels; and Tales of Middle Earth (1998), a Tolkien-themed game developed from the ZAngband code base. Tales of Middle Earth'''s source code and story were later rewritten, and the game became Tales of Maj'Eyal (2012). Legacy David Brevik cited Angband's randomized levels and items as a "huge influence" on Diablo and "the model of what we wanted". Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player Two features the dungeon from Angband and "Morgoth's crown" as the location of one of the Seven Shards that the protagonists must collect. See also List of roguelikes List of open-source video games Notes References External links Angband.live where one can play Angband, and several variants, online Zangband.org (Zelazny + Angband'') Angband variants table - list of 140+ Angband variants 1990 video games Acorn Archimedes games Amiga games BeOS games DOS games Linux games Classic Mac