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. The roguelikes are usually superficially two-dimensional dungeon crawling computer games, most with simple text or ASCII graphics and many with tiles which replace the rather limited character set with a wider array. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Wikicities has a wiki about The Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings Wiki The Encyclopedia of Arda - Mark Fishers tribute site to the works of Tolkien Tolkien Gateway Tolkien Collectors Gateway The Tolkien Wiki Community TheOneRing. ... A small maze. ... In J. R. R. Tolkiens fictional world, Middle-earth, Moria (also known as Khazad-dûm, The Black Chasm, The Black Pit, Dwarrowdelf, Hadhodrond, and Phurunargian) is the name given to the underground city, mines, and connected tunnels that run through the central Misty Mountains. ... This article deals with J.R.R. Tolkiens Balrogs. ... The University of Oklahoma (OU) is an institution of higher learning located in Oklahoma. ... Rogue is a dungeon-crawling computer game dating from 1980. ... VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ... OpenVMS V7. ...

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. Pascal is one of the landmark computer programming languages on which generations of students cut their teeth and variants of which are still widely used today. ... 1983 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1985 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... 1986 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1987 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

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. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the UNIX operating... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... The University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a major public research university in the Seattle metropolitan area. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the UNIX operating... Angband is a roguelike game derived from Moria and enhanced successively by Alex Cutler, Andy Astrand, Charles Swiger, Ben Harrison and Robert Ruehlmann. ... The University of Warwick is a campus university which, despite its name, is located mainly inside the southern boundary of Coventry, England, some 11 km ( 7 miles) from the town of Warwick. ... Diablo Diablo is a point and click action computer role-playing game released by Blizzard Entertainment and developed by Blizzard North, released in late 1996. ...

External links

• Usenet article from February 21, 1996 in which Robert Alan Koeneke discusses the origins of the game.
• Steve Kertes' C port of IMoria
• KMoria - port of Unix Moria 5.5.2 for the Palm OS