Isn't this sort of like Grand Theft GNU, that game that some people on /g/ made? Also, while I do support the use of C where it makes sense (OS, performance-intensive tasks), it would save a lot of time to make this game using Lua, Python, Ruby, really anything higher level. Personally, I'd write it in Haskell and use ncurses, but somehow I don't think that'd be a popular idea.

It could be done in C, if everything is planned out, as venam says, and if we are careful with memory and portability - it's entirely possible that code that works on one OS and architecture (like the most common - GNU/Linux on amd64) could fail on another (e.g. OpenBSD on SPARC) because of some platform difference you didn't take into account (in this example, because something might have happened with big-endian vs little-endian).

Too many headaches with C, in my opinion. I'd contribute, and it'd be fun, but I'm not looking forward to the long nights hunting down null pointers in stack frames.