[2] Moria was the basis of the better known Angband roguelike game, and influenced the preliminary design of Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo.

The player first chooses a "race" from the following: Human, Half-Elf, Elf, Halfling, Gnome, Dwarf, Half-Orc, or Half-Troll.

Each time the player ascends or descends a staircase, a new level is created and the old one discarded; only the town persists throughout the game.

Around 1981,[5] while enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, Robert Alan Koeneke became hooked on playing the video game Rogue.

Soon after, Koeneke moved departments to work on an early VAX-11/780 minicomputer running VMS operating system, which at that time had no games.

[6] In 1983/84 Jimmey Wayne Todd Jr. joined Koeneke on the development of Moria, bringing with him his character generator, and working on various aspects of the game, including the death routines.

[8] As C was a much more portable programming language than VMS Pascal, there was an explosion of Moria ports for a variety of different computer systems such as MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIGS.

UMoria 5.0, released in 1989,[7] unified these separate ports into a single code base, fixing many bugs and gameplay balance issues, as well as adding lots of new features; many of which were taken from BRUCE Moria (1988).

[7] During the early 2000s David Grabiner maintained the code base, releasing only minor compiler related fixes.