''The Dungeons of Moria'', usually referred to as simply ''Moria'',Also called ''UMoria'' since its rework in C in 1987. is a

computer game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual feedback from a display device, mo ...

inspired by

J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson ...

's novel ''

The Lord of the Rings ''The Lord of the Rings'' is an Epic (genre), epic high fantasy novel written by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book ''The Hobbit'' but eventually d ...

''. The objective of the game is to dive deep into the

Mines of Moria Mine, mines, miners or mining may refer to: Extraction or digging *Miner, a person engaged in mining or digging *Mining, extraction of mineral resources from the ground through a mine Grammar *Mine, a first-person English possessive pronoun Mi ...

and kill the

Balrog Balrogs () are a species of powerful demonic monsters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. One first appeared in print in his high-fantasy novel ''The Lord of the Rings'', where the Company of the Ring encounter a Balrog known as Durin's Bane in ...

. Moria, along with ''

Hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * Hack (Unix video game), ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * .hack (video game series), ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia fran ...

'' (1984) and '' Larn'' (1986), is considered to be one of the first

roguelike Roguelike (or rogue-like) is a style of role-playing game traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character. Most ro ...

games, and the first to include a town level. ''Moria'' was the basis of the better known ''

Angband Angband may refer to: * Angband (Middle-earth), the fortress of Morgoth in Tolkien's fiction * ''Angband'' (video game), a roguelike game named after the fortress *Angband (band) Angband is a Persian-American power metal group, formed in 2004 i ...

'' roguelike game, and influenced the preliminary design of

Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and Video game publisher, publisher based in Irvine, California, and a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. Originally founded in 1991, the company is best known for producing the h ...

's '' Diablo''." he idea for ''Diablo''was modified over and over until it solidified when ave Brevikwas in college and got hooked on ... ''Moria/Angband''".

Gameplay

The player's goal is to descend to the depths of Moria to defeat the Balrog, akin to a

boss battle In video games, a boss is a significantly powerful non-player character and computer-controlled enemy created as an opponent to players. A fight with a boss character is referred to as a boss battle or boss fight. Bosses are generally far stro ...

. As with ''

Rogue A rogue is a person or entity that flouts accepted norms of behavior or strikes out on an independent and possibly destructive path. Rogue, rogues, or going rogue may also refer to: Companies * Rogue Ales, a microbrewery in Newport, Oregon * ...

'', levels are not persistent: when the player leaves the level and then tries to return, a new level is

procedurally generated In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated content and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. I ...

. Among other improvements to ''Rogue'', there is a persistent town at the highest level where players can buy and sell equipment. ''Moria'' begins with creation of a character. The player first chooses a "race" from the following: Human, Half-Elf, Elf, Halfling, Gnome, Dwarf, Half-Orc, or Half-Troll. Racial selection determines base

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

and

class Class, Classes, or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used d ...

availability. One then selects the character's "class" from the following: Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, Ranger, or Paladin. Class further determines statistics, as well as the abilities acquired during gameplay. Mages, Rangers, and Rogues can learn magic, while Priests and Paladins can learn prayers. Warriors possess no additional abilities. The player begins the game with a limited number of items on a town level consisting of six shops: (1) a General Store, (2) an Armory, (3) a Weaponsmith, (4) a Temple, (5) an Alchemy shop, and (6) a Magic-Users store. A staircase on this level descends into a series of randomly generated underground mazes. Deeper levels contain more powerful monsters and better treasures. Each time the player ascends or descends a staircase, a new level is created and the old one discarded; only the town persists throughout the game. As in most

s, it is impossible to reload from a save if the player's character dies, as the game saves the state only upon exit, preventing save-scumming that is a key strategy in most computer games that allow saving, although it is possible to save the file that is generated by the game (MORIA.SAV in the Windows version) to a backup location, then restore/replace that file after the character had been killed. The balrog (represented by the upper-case letter B) is encountered at the deepest depths of the dungeon. Once the balrog has been killed, the game has been won, and no further saving of the game is possible.

Player characteristics

The player has many characteristics in the game. Some characteristics, like sex, weight, and height, cannot be changed once the player has been created, while other characteristics like strength, intelligence, and

armor class Health is a video game or tabletop game quality that determines the maximum amount of damage or fatigue something takes before leaving the main game. In role-playing games, this typically takes the form of hit points (HP), a numerical attribute ...

can be modified by using certain items in a particular way.

Mana Mana may refer to: Religion and mythology * Mana (Oceanian cultures), the spiritual life force energy or healing power that permeates the universe in Melanesian and Polynesian mythology * Mana (food), archaic name for manna, an edible substance m ...

and

hit points Health is a video game or tabletop game quality that determines the maximum amount of damage or fatigue something takes before leaving the main game. In role-playing games, this typically takes the form of hit points (HP), a numerical attribute ...

are replenished by rest or by some other magical means. Gold accrues as the player steps on gems or currency. Experience accrues as the player performs various actions in the dungeon, mostly by killing creatures. The "miscellaneous abilities" are modified as each skill is performed and as the player increases in experience.

History

Around 1981, while enrolled at the

University of Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma, United States. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two territories became the ...

, Robert Alan Koeneke became hooked on playing the video game ''

''. Soon after, Koeneke moved departments to work on an early

VAX-11 The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In ...

/780 minicomputer running VMS operating system, which at that time had no games. Since no longer having access to ''Rogue'' was "intolerable" for Koeneke, he started developing his own ''Rogue'' game using VMS BASIC and gave it the name, Moria Beta 1.0."... I worked on one of the early VAX 11/780s ono more games, and no more rogue! This was intolerable! So I decided to write my own rogue game, Moria Beta 1.0". During the summer of 1983, Koeneke rewrote his game in VMS Pascal, releasing Moria 1.0. In 1983/84 Jimmey Wayne Todd Jr. joined Koeneke on the development of ''Moria'', bringing with him his character generator, and working on various aspects of the game, including the death routines. Koeneke started distributing the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

in 1985 under a license that permitted sharing and modification, but not commercial use. The last VMS version was ''Moria'' 4.8, released in November 1986. In February 1987, James E. Wilson started converting the VMS Pascal source code to the C programming language for use on

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

systems, which had started to become popular by this date. To distinguish his release from the original VMS Moria, Wilson named it UNIX Moria, shortened to UMoria. UMoria 4.85 was released on November 5, 1987."Here it is! A Unix version of the popular VMS game Moria". As C was a much more portable programming language than VMS Pascal, there was an explosion of ''Moria'' ports for a variety of different computer systems such as

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

and Apple IIGS. UMoria 5.0, released in 1989, unified these separate ports into a single code base, fixing many bugs and gameplay balance issues, as well as adding lots of new features; many of which were taken from ''BRUCE Moria'' (1988). In 1990 the ''

'' project was started, which is based on the UMoria 5.2.1 source code. UMoria was in continuous development for several more years, with UMoria 5.5.2 released on July 21, 1994. During the early 2000s David Grabiner maintained the code base, releasing only minor compiler related fixes. In 2008, through the work of the free-moria project, UMoria was relicensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. Work has since continued on the game, with regular releases.

Notes

References

External links

Umoria.org
v5.7 Windows / macOS executables, much historical information, and links to source code. * *
Freeing an old game
in the ''

Free Software Magazine ''Free Software Magazine'' (also known as ''FSM'' and originally titled ''The Open Voice'') is a Web site that produces a (generally bi-monthly) mostly free-content online magazine about free software. It was started in November 2004 by Austral ...