Oh, man.
I remember coming across Toady's site waaaay back when he was still working on Armok 1, looking over its huge list of intended features, and thinking that it was all insane (in a good way.)
Later on I came back when I got into LCS a lot, and posted on the forums a lot when Toady was working on that.
One day he posted a thread about he was getting
back to the dwarf game -- it was something like two years, I think, between posting that thread and actually releasing Dwarf Fortress, but we'd constantly discuss it there.
Oh, and he'd release videos occasionally, so I guess those are my first in-game images of Dwarf Fortress. I wonder if anyone still has those videos? I couldn't find them when I searched my computer or the internet, and the DF map archive doesn't seem to have them, either (I'm not sure they'd be compatible with it, but they were the first DF videos ever made.) Toady drowned one of his miners and a bear starved to death... also, there was a dragon attack. And some humans set up camps when attacking, I recall that.
Once it was released, my first few actual forts didn't do well at all -- this was back before anyone knew how to play, before there was a useful wiki or anything, so it was pretty normal for everyone to die in your first winter (also, the 2D versions were harder in general -- no moats, unless you managed to pump magma all the way outside, which was a huge undertaking. So sieges tended to be rather lethal. Not to mention unlimited hordes of monsters crawling out of the river, the chasm, your
well...)
EDIT: Haa, going over the old Back To The Dwarf Mode thread turned up some posts that are funny in retrospect...
"this could very well be the game that Toady is remembered best for."Discussion of
improved hauling ideas, before the game was even released. Some things never change.
Adamantine was originally going to be mithril, but was changed for copyright reasons. I'd forgotten that.