@Play: Larn Turns 40

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre. Larn, created by Noah Morgan, may his name be sung by the bards forever, is a venerable classic roguelike game, from the same era as Moria and the first Hacks. It’s always been more obscure than the other games but was still popular, and it’s still played today. atsb, aka Gibbon, made a GitHub post commemorating its 40th anniversary, and noting the code has been ported to run on many systems, like Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, OS/2, 68000, Alpha and many others. There they have both its source code and many precompiled binaries. We covered Larn once back on GameSetWatch, but GSW’s now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, and my Larn article from there is in the book Exploring Roguelike Games, so it seems a good opportunity to write of it again here. You can download it from that page, but note that after unpacking it you should copy the files in the…