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.
The current maintainer of Moria is David Grabiner.
This project is my attempt at porting UMoria from C to Java. Because Java does not have native control over a commandline console, it has been turned into an applet with a console look-alike. This project has been in the works since the summer of 2011, but because of school and work it has not gotten the attention it deserves, and therefore is still rather buggy. Fixes will come with time.
The free-moria project is complete and the source code is now on GitHub.