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“I listened a lot to my playersand kept making enhancementsto the game to fix problems, tochallenge them, and to keep themgoing. If anyone managed to win,I immediately found out how, and‘enhanced’ the game to make itharder. I once vowed it was ‘unbeatable’,and a week later a friendof mine beat it! His character,‘Iggy’, was placed into the gameas ‘The Evil Iggy’, and immortalized...And of course, I went in andplugged up the trick he used towin...”- Robert Alan Koeneke,Moria’s creatorSurrounded bygiant white louse,our desperatedwarf resortsto one of theunidentifiedpotions in hisinventory. Sadly,It was a potion ofslowness.After being abandoned in 1987 by its originalcreator Robert Alan Koeneke, the game lived on asUnix Moria – or uMoria – a port that thanks to beingwritten in C provided new players with the possibilityof playing Moria on different hardware (contraryto what the name suggests, uMoria can be played onsystems other than Unix, e.g. MS-DOS). This is by farthe most popular version of Moria and the one thatinspired the creation of games such as Castle of theWinds, Angband and even Diablo.Nowadays, the popularity of Moria and uMoriahas been far surpassed by the derivative titles, especiallyAngband (in fact, the subgenre of roguelikesthat has been codified by this game is often describedAngband-like). While it’s sad that such an importantgame in the history of CRPGs is being overlooked,it’s easy to see why: Angband is extremely faithful tothe gameplay and setting (although this time playersare tasked with defeating Morgoth) of original Moriawhile greatly improving it and expanding upon it.It’s simply a better game that, while still challenging,won’t scare off less experienced players.While everyone with an interest in roguelikegames should play a few sessions of Moria to experiencean important part of the genre’s history, chancesare that more fun will be had with games that descendedfrom it. MMAngbandAngband was first released in 1990 but is still inactive development. Its gameplay and visual styleare similar to that of Moria but it has more enemies(including boss monsters), spells and items as well asa longer dungeon while at the same time being morebalanced and streamlined. In contrast to Moria’smonochrome look, Angband gives colors to differentenemies, items and HUD elements. It is also notablefor the ease of modding as all its data is stored in textfiles – this has resulted in the creation of numerousvariants, such as ZAngband and MAngband, andhelped to popularize the Moria/Angband subgenreof roguelikes.The Amiga version had mouse support and very simplegraphics, but both were more confusing than helpful.Angband allows for tilesets, as well as ASCII graphics.21