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ZAngband is a freeware 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 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 then J.R.R. Tolkien's works. (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.
ZAngband was and is continually adding new features; many Angband players say that the last "fun" version was either 2.2.8 or 2.4.0, depending on their dislike of OAngband combat 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. The current development version is 2.7.4c, although development has slowed recently.
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] (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=36F3C8B9.35B06EDD%40spark.ul.edu&output=gplain)).
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