The first version of Moria was written by Robert Alan Koeneke at the University of Oklahoma in 1983. Around 1980 or 1981 Robert was exposed to Colossal Cave Adventure (later just 'Adventure') and Rogue. Like many other students and computer freaks he was soon hooked to playing Rogue. When he received a job at university in working a student assistant for computers, he began to work one of the early VAX 11/780's running VMS. There were no games available for VAX 11/780 at that time. Robert thought something had to be done about it. The VMS system was equipped with Fortran IV, PASCAL V1.?, and BASIC programming languages. Since most of the game was string manipulation, he first attempted to write a roguelike game in BASIC.
Around 1983 Robert took an operating systems class in PASCAL. That summer he finished Moria 1.0 in VMS PASCAL. He found that VMS Pascal had variable length strings (wow!). In Summer 1983 he finished Moria 1.0 in VMS PASCAL.
VMS Moria was the first freeware and opensource roguelike. Its source code was free to spread and modify by other users, as long as they retained the original copyright history. Moria became very popular and spawned an incredible amount of variants and derivatives.
Robert's friend Jimmy Todd wrote a better character generator for the game and helped him with many other features also. Robert received a lot feedback from the players of Moria and kept improving the game based on these comments.
The goal of Moria is to descend down into the dungeons of Moria and defeat Balrog, a very powerful, evil being. The name of the game (Moria) and Balrog are from Middle Earth stories by J.R.R.Tolkien, but other than that the game doesn't have much common with the writings of Tolkien. The game starts on a town level with shops to buy and sell weapons, armor, food, magic items and equipment other. Moria was the first roguelike to feature a town level. Moria featured "infinite dungeons". In other words, every time you went up or down to another level, a new level map was generated randomly. The previously visited dungeon levels were not saved, only the current one was saved if you saved the game while being in dungeon.
Moria features:
In the beginning of a new game the player is able to choose the race, character class and sex of the character which have an impact on character's skills, character statistics and abilities.
In 1987 Moria v. 4.7 was released. It was the last official release by Robert Alan Koeneke. He was working on Moria 5.0, but never finished it and the source code was lost. According to him Moria 5.0 was a complete rewrite featuring many enhancements such as water, streams, lakes, water monsters, mysterious orbs, new weapons and such.
However other people ported Moria to C language. James E. Wilson made UMoria (UNIX Moria) in 1988 which became very popular and spawned many variants, the most famous of these was Angband, and it was ported to many other operating system such as MSDOS (PC-Moria), Amiga (Amiga Moria) and Atari ST.
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