Moria (computer game) - Definition and Overview

Moria is an old roguelike computer game, based on a story from The Lord of the Rings. The goal in the game is to reach the bottom of the maze of mines of Moria and kill the Balrog. The original version was written by Robert Alan Koeneke at the University of Oklahoma after he became hooked on Rogue but could not run it on the VAX 11/780 computer running VMS to which he had access.

Version 1.0 was written in VMS Pascal and completed in the summer of 1983. From around 1985 the source code was widely distributed under a licence that permitted sharing and modification but not commercial use. Koeneke's last release was Moria 4.7 in 1986 or 1987.

Moria inspired a number of derivative versions. Jim E. Wilson created Umoria, a modified version in C for UNIX. At the University of Washington a modified Pascal version named Imoria was developed, which has been ported to C by Steve Kertes. Angband was derived from Umoria at the University of Warwick. Furthermore, it is known to have been an inspiration for Diablo.

External links

• Usenet article (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=4ge77v%24clt%40ionews.ionet.net) from February 21, 1996 in which Robert Alan Koeneke discusses the origins of the game.
• Steve Kertes' C port of IMoria  (http://www.angelfire.com/games3/imoria/imoria.html)
• KMoria - port of Unix Moria 5.5.2 for the Palm OS (http://roguelike-palm.sourceforge.net/kMoria/)