The kiwi bird hits you -more-

I've previously mentioned a Finnish roguelike connection and wondered on the origins of it. But there is also a strong connection between roguelikes and New Zealand, which predates the obvious Lord of the Rings link. There's this discussion of a surf beach in the North Island, and how it relates to a randomly generated Angband artifact. There's the dreaded kiwi bird in POWDER. The maintainers of two separate variants are from NZ (Myself and Antoine).

Then there's Caverns of Underkeep (warning: link crashes Firefox 3 Beta 2), which is a Java-based roguelike I discovered via the Indie Games weblog. Joshua Smyth runs his own development blog but is also in Auckland Game Works, which is how I figured out the New Zealand connection.