Moria (1978 video game)

PLATO Moria's splash screen

Moria is a dungeon crawl style role-playing video game first developed for the PLATO system around 1975, with copyright dates listed as 1978 and 1984. It was a pioneering game, allowing parties of up to ten players to travel as a group and message each other, dynamically generating dungeons (instead of pre-computing them), and featuring a wireframe first-person perspective display. One of its developers, Kevet Duncombe, had not read the works of J. R. R. Tolkien or heard of Dungeons & Dragons at the time. But he was familiar with the PLATO game dnd and its developers, who were fans of both, and one of whom, Dirk Pellett, suggested the name Moria for Kevet's game.[1][2]

Moria, like all other PLATO lessons, was originally monochrome. In an effort to "modernize" the lessons, color was added by an intern in 1994 at University Online after the CYBIS system and its content was sold to them. CYBIS (short for CYber-Based Instruction System) was the new name for PLATO after CDC sold the trademark to The Roach Organization in 1989.

## See also

* Avatar (PLATO system video game)

## Sources

1. ↑ Schuller, Dan. "Moria". https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/moria.html.
2. ↑ Mark J. P. Wolf Before the Crash: Early Video Game History 2012 p212 "After Spacewar!, several more games appeared on the PLATO system, including DECWAR (1974, based on “Star Trek”), Empire (1974), a Dungeons & Dragons–inspired game named "dnd" released in 1979, Moria (1975), the original Freecell (1978), and a flight simulator named Airfight..."

* Moria at cyber1.org, where one may play the game
* Fun with PLATO at Armchair Arcade

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