There’s an old computer game that I remember from back in the days of the Mac Plus, when an entire operating system could fit on a floppy disc and having more than a megabyte of RAM was a luxury. It was called Moria, and it was very loosely based on the ancient Dwarvish mines in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The object of the game was to work your way down through the mines and become powerful enough to finally eliminate the Balrog.
There weren’t any fancy graphics or sounds. A simple grid arrangement of letters, numbers and symbols provided a map of the world. All of the ‘action’ was controlled with the keyboard. But even without the fancy bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from a computer game it was incredibly addictive.
It was also free. And so was the source code. Which means that computer geeks from around the world could poke and prod at it and update it for newer computers, newer operating systems. And they could add more features.
The most recent incarnation is called Angband, and despite all of the advances in technology, it still uses the same keyboard and character interface of the original. Angband is avaliable for pretty much every computer out there, and it’s still free. Optional graphics and sounds are available, but in my opinion they just detract from the game.
If you’ve got a computer and a lot of time on your hands, go download a copy.
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