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One of my classmates flunked out of Harvey Mudd freshman year thanks to obsessively playing Moria. First semester he failed 4 out of 5 classes and the administration normally would tell him not to come back in the spring, but they decided to give him a chance to do better. Second semester he failed all 5 classes.

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I'm reminded of Bright's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game), a turn-based PvP strategy game. My friend's 1989-ish instance was sadistic enough to batch execute four turns per day. Every player had to rush to a TTY every six hours to give new marching orders. If you study or sleep too late, your forces and factories could be wiped out.

The obsessives, living on campus newly free of supervision, were line printing maps and writing logistic planning tools that foreshadowed EVE Online's "spreadsheets in space."

I still play it. Also, XConq it's a modern rendition of Empire, written in TCL/Tk.

Heh. My first rogue-like was Moria on the 4-College VAX-780, at CMC, which is a short walk from Harvey Mudd. We had both Moria and Walker Bright's Empire, and I tried both of them. I didn't really get deeply into Moria until later, when the first MSDOS version came out; but after that I was obsessed with Moria and its follow-on, Angband, plus many different variants of Angband, for many, many years.

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