"Moria, along with Hack (1984) and Larn (1986), is considered to be the first roguelike game, and the first to include a town level," according to Wikipedia.
At the dawn of the computer era, there were some games that were based on Lord of the Rings and D&D. It brought you into the world and gave you the ability to be a character and fight monsters. If you wanted to kill the Balrog at the end, you had to go to the mines of Moria. One of the creators of the game, Robert Alan Koeneke, passed away this week because he wanted a game to play at school. Since then, it has inspired a lot of games. I played the game for long periods of time. He will always be remembered for his contributions to the computer game industry.
"Koeneke was working on version 5.0 of Moria when he left the university for a job," remembers NME, "though he made Moria open source so others could work on the project."
In an email posted by Koeneke to a mailing list for Angband (a subsequent popular roguelike derived from Moria) in 1996, the developer reflected on his legacy. "I have since received thousands of letters from all over the world from players telling about their exploits, and from administrators cursing the day I was born... I received mail from behind the iron curtain (while it was still standing) talking about the game on VAX's [an early range of computers] (which supposedly couldn't be there due to export laws). I used to have a map with pins for every letter I received, but I gave up on that...!" While Koeneke never developed another video game, his influence on the gaming industry cannot be understated as his work directly inspired games like the Diablo series. The original Moria can be played here.
