Moria

Moria
Major Roguelike
Developer	Robert Alan Koeneke
Theme	fantasy
Influences	Rogue
Released	1983
Updated	1987
Licensing	copyleft source, freeware
P. Language	Pascal
Platforms	?
Interface	ASCII, Keyboard
Game Length	?
[{{{site}}} Official site of Moria]

Moria, first released in 1983, is one of the earliest clones of Rogue.

Description

Moria was based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and the player had to go down the mines of Moria and ultimately kill the Balrog to win the game.

Moria is one of the older roguelikes, writen in 1983 by Robert Alan Koeneke. It was the first Open Source roguelike, allowing it to run into different platforms in a time when that was hard to achieve.

Although the game is not as popular as it once was, it is still considered a major Roguelike.

This game was the first roguelike to have a "Town" level, where you may buy your weapons and armor, amongst many other things

The game world are "The Dungeons (or Mines) of Moria", and altough the name comes from the world of Tolkien, there is little that the game shares with the books.

In the deepest level, you must find and destroy the Balrog. This is a hard quest for which you must prepare with the proper equipment and character enhancement items.

Versions and platforms

Moria was written by Robert Alan Koeneke in 1983, in VMS Pascal. According to the author, he started development when, after being hooked on Rogue, he moved to another department where the game wasn't available. He released the source code in 1985. The last official Moria (4.7) was released in 1987, except that some archive sites carry a 4.8 from 1989.

Koeneke was working in Moria 5.0, which was an almost complete remake with interesting features like streams, lakes and new weapons. It was, however, never released. A different version called UB Moria 5.0 appeared at the University at Buffalo; this is the last VMS version ever, and is often called VMS Moria 5.0.

The availability of source code allowed Moria to survive. After the creation of a Unix version, Umoria, in 1988 (which moved the language to C), the game became available on many platforms (DOS, Amiga, and others) and also spawned many variants, of which Angband and the later Bands are the most popular.

Legacy

Due to releasing its source code, Moria was used by several variants, the most succesful being Angband.

Related topics

• Major roguelikes

Related links

• David Grabiner's Moria Page
• The Dungeons of Moria
• Usenet article, where the author himself describes the origins of Moria
• Moria got its own dedicated newsgroup. It can be accessed through Google groups.
  • Latest rec.games.roguelike.moria FAQ