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[thvaz]

I am well into my thirties, but my first contact with ASCII was with nethack around 2003, and later with ADOM. I never played DF with a tileset. (Although I use Stonesense often).

[Aquillion]

Well, I was a fan of Liberal Crime Squad and posted on the forums a lot.  Then Toady posted this thread saying he was working on a dwarf game...

[46852]

I think I stumbled upon DF some time around 2008 (0.28.181.40a I think it was). I don't know who or what tipped me off, could have been that I happened to read the 2008 Gamasutra article and got interested? I recall it was just a lucky internet accident with wonderful repercussions (hmm, a negative term according to dictionary, but I think that suits DF quite well)!

I have a history with ASCII games, I've been playing around with NetHack since 3.1.x (I think? wow that's 20 years ago...) and played Adom quite a bit too. In general, I appreciate the simple informativeness of ASCII.

I remember having tried a DF tileset once, didn't quite like it because it was... ugly   For me the tilesets look ugly because they try to look "better", but really aren't that fancy to look at after all. ASCII, on the other hand, doesn't try to look good, it just tries to convey you the info on the screen in the most convenient and efficient way and that's enough for me

I think all those dots, quotes and letters have burned into my retinas for too long now that anything else in DF would look just plain weird.

Think of it like this:

"What the hell is that purplish white and red blob with small legs... is it six legs... is it some kind of a slime or an insect, what the heck??!? OUCH, it bites!"
 
vs.

"A small purple "x"... it's a grid bug! Smack!"


PS. Also my kids seem to enjoy looking me play ASCII DF. I consider that quite a miracle, seeing as they've grown into all this High Definition Ultra High Detail World with fancy graphics and lens flare... "Dad, where's that cat now, wasn't it a small gray c? Oooh, there it goes! Ow, it's there with the small green g's, why is it all red?"

[dnamein]

I saw a topic on one of the biggest "western" websites about Starcraft - teamliquid.net. People were talkng in designated topic (created in 2007) about their crazy stuff they did in DF. I was shocked, how much "fun" it can bring.

[Knick]

Boatmurdered for the win, plus TV Tropes mentions.

[The Bastard of France]

I first encountered DF with One f Jef's let plays but decided to not play it because of the lack of graphics and high learning curve (I blame the modern FPS world i grew up in). It was after i watched Blankdoor play the adventure mode that i decided to install DF with the LNP but i found the adventure mode too difficult without using cheats, then i tried the fortress mode.
So here i am, massacring goblins and elves indiscriminately and hoping my dwarves build that gate before the clowns come in.

[papent]

as with quite a few people; tvtropes got me hooked line and sinker

[FrankMcFuzz]

I wanted Minecraft. I did not want to pay for Minecraft. I researched Minecraft. I read "inspired by Dwarf Fortress". I researched Dwarf Fortress. I realized Dwarf Fortress is the best thing ever. I no longer wanted Minecraft.

Someone gifted me Minecraft. I played it for 2 days and then realized Dwarf Fortress is the game I've always wanted and that Minecraft is nothing close.

[Armok]

((Just because there seems to be a lot of people dissatisfied with minecraft: Have you tried some of the huger, more recent modpacks out there? Vanilla minecraft is shit, Sollitarycraft on good settings more tollerable. There's even rumored to be a modpack that's not baby-easy on FTB somewhere, might have been Magic Farm.))

[Andal]

Lord of the Rings Online, actually. I had joined an all-Dwarf Kinship on one of the RP servers, and they were using these weird symbols when describing gifts and items, such as =flasks= and +rings+. Intrigued, I inquired as to the symbols' provenance, and was told of the game of Dwarf Fortress and of a little tale of a fortress called Boatmurdered. I did my research, and was hooked.

[0rion]

A friend told me about 4X games a while ago (~2-3 years) and DF (mixing up DF and 4Xs... what a mess). Few months later, I was searching for procedural world generation and found a topic explaining how the DF worlg gen actually works. I was "Oh, this game again... seems interesting".

Later, another friend told me "You should really try DF. I give you the game and a tool to manage the jobs (and maybe you should use a graphic pack too), try it !". I thought : "two additionnal programs in order to be able to play ? No thanks".

And finally, one month and one day ago (07/03), I was watching a conference about video games and narrative design. The guy used the term "procedural narration". I googled that and once again I found a topic dealing with DF. This time I began to seek information about DF. And a few minutes later I was enjoying my first fortress 

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

If I remember right, it was some time after I had started getting into minecraft, after finally buying it (I had been playing only in the 'classic' beforehand.)  At the time, I was wanting to get the game from him, since I didn't think my internet would be able to download the game.  I really thought that it was a few hundred megabytes to a gigabyte in size when I heard of the complexity.  So, we wound up starting up a succession fort between the two of us, after I had gone through a full year without being aware that you could activate professions.  Eventually managed to wind up with a four year fortress running, logs written by the overseers dwarfs we had (I think with screenshots as well...).  If I remember correctly, I was going crazy building stuff up, a pyramid built up on the surface and an underground pyramid hollow, with a connection to magma, as well as building a maze and constructing a five z-level underground city with a throne room that had water raining down from above, and he dealt with all the stuff I was neglecting.

Eventually life got in the way and the fort died unceremoniously.  Granted, around this time the first edition of .34 was going up, which is when I (finally) did a google search and found the Bay 12 Games site and managed to download the game for myself.  Later joined Bay 12 after reading through the existing "If Bay Forum were a Mountain hall thread and here I am.

[Vattic]

I' heard mention a fair few times before a more detailed article convinced me to download. Can't remember what site the article was on. I didn't get anywhere past embark and I gave up. The text was confusing as I'd not played anything visually like it before. A while later I was reading the Mines of Moria chapters of The Lord of the Rings and it reminded me of DF and inspired me to try again.

[Snaake]

I used to play Nethack in the early 2000s (I definitely remember playing it a lot in the summer of 2002, but also before and after that), both with ascii and tilesets.

DF I heard about through friends/tvtropes, in 31.x I think (before minecarts, but not much before). Can't remember if I read Boatmurdered before I started playing or after.

[than402]

so,i played minecraft and i read in its wiki that dwarf fortress was one of its inspirations.so i read the tvtropes page of the game,and i read all the wacky stories:chaining up mermaids and forcing them to breed?killing grizzly bears with vomit?dwarven day care?MUST!!!PLAY!!!