Angband is 1990, Nethack is 1987

If you dig into the version history of Angband[0] you will find that it was derived from the Moria[1] code, which was released in 1983. So depending on what your concept of "origin" is it might or might not be older.

[0] http://www.thangorodrim.net/history/version.txt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(video_game)

Nethack, in turn, descends from Hack, released in 1982, but first published to Usenet in 1984. Hack and Moria are likely simultaneous.

I mean, if we're going to play this game, they're all roguelikes and thus they're all descended from Rogue. Which, in turn, descends from Colossal Cave Adventure and Dungeons & Dragons, which is descended from traditional war-gaming, and if we continue down far enough we're back at the Royal Game of Ur.

It's more than that. Both Angband and NetHack are forks of their ancestors.

There is an unbroken line of continous development of the same code base coming from the 80s. Hack and Moria OTOH were clones of Rogue and didn't share any source code with it.

There is still non trivial code from 1984 in NetHack: https://i.imgur.com/H4HpjYf.png

With Angband, the case is a bit more complicated as the original Moria was written in Pascal but it was already converted to C in 1987 and Angband decends from that code.

I seriously love this whole discussion. It's "well, actually"ism at its best—and actually useful.

It's of course a similar game but they're so different.

Angband is one of those games that are about endless grind, trying to get those rare item drops that allow you to descend a bit further by offering some form of elemental resistance you lacked. And then you can continue grinding. Also, later on, many fights with unique monsters with extremely powerful attacks.

Nethack is much more about getting a collection of items and then trying to figure out how to identify them until you have enough of the important ones,and not running into random deaths. And a lot of fun because all the obscure interactions that can happen.

This is the old way to play Angband, and consensus on the forums is that it's incorrect (not to mention extremely boring).

Rather, you want to dive as deep as possible, pick your battles very carefully, and get loot off the ground or from occasional fightable monsters. Hilariously, people have found that Ironman play (never leaving the dungeon, and always descending) is easier because it forces you to play like this.

When grinding, you will still run into out-of-depth monsters that will wreck you, so there is no way to play the game safe.

That's probably true, but I don't like that cautious way of playing where you avoid the monsters. I want to kill them all,or most of them anyway. Of course that doesn't have to be too cautious all the time as that does become boring, there's something in between of course.

It pretty much ruined my life in college and I haven't touched it since. After I stopped playing I still loved reading all those YACD posts on Usenet.

Don't forget multi-player mAngband. :) https://mangband.org/