Moria (video game)

Moria

Screenshot from Moria-like game
Developer(s)	Robert Alan Koeneke & Jimmey Wayne Todd
Stable release	5.6 / November 2010
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Roguelike
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://remarque.org/~grabiner/moria.html

Moria is a roguelike computer game based heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings. The game's objective is to kill a Balrog, presumably Durin's Bane, deep within the Mines of Moria. A later port of Moria called Umoria (UNIX Moria) inspired the Angband roguelike game. This game influenced the preliminary design of Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo.

The original version was written at the University of Oklahoma by Robert Alan Koeneke and Jimmey Wayne Todd Jr., after they became hooked on Rogue but could not run it on the VAX-11/780 minicomputer to which they 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 license that permitted sharing and modification but not commercial use. Koeneke's last release was Moria 4.7 in 1986 or 1987, although more recent versions have been compiled by a variety of authors. Moria inspired a number of derivative versions. Jim E. Wilson created Umoria, a modified version in C for UNIX and MS-DOS; Umoria later became Free Software under the GNU General Public License, through the work of the free moria project. At the University of Washington a modified Pascal version named Imoria was developed, which has been ported to C by Steve Kertes.