ToME WikiMoria is a RogueLike game available at David Grabiner's Moria page or Beej's Moria page
The first version of Moria was written by Robert Alan Koeneke at the University of Oklahoma in 1983.
The goal of Moria is to descend down into the dungeons of Moria and defeat a very powerful evil being. The name of the game and the evil being are from Middle Earth stories by J.R.R. Tolkien, but other than that the game does not 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 rogue-like 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. Previously visited dungeon levels were not saved, and the current dungeon level was saved only if you exited (and therefore saved) the game while in dungeon.
Features of Moria:
- Eight different player character races: human, half-elf, elf, halfling, gnome, dwarf, half-orc, half-troll
- Six different character classes: warrior, mage, priest, rogue, ranger, paladin
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 he 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.
See also ToME's version information for more historical rogue-like information.