What is BOSS: Beyond Moria (aka MacBOSS)?

BOSS is what you get when you take Moria, modernize it (magic becomes science, monsters become more realistic beasts, items get updated, etc.), add a lot of new features (different dungeon types, monsters, lots of new items, multiple towns, etc.) and give it a twisted sense of humor.

BOSS is also easier than Moria. You're all familiar with people posting to rec.games.moria things like "I *finally* won!!!" and "five years and only one winner so far." The idea behind BOSS is to make it the sort of game you can win in a weekend, instead of in a few weeks.

Like Moria, the object is to become a powerful character who defeats the mega-monster at the end of the game. In BOSS, that monster is the Boss, a mean, rotten, disgusting and vile mafia figure who's out to control the world. To do this you must travel far in search of his hide-out deep under the sewers of New York City, battle terrible alien creatures, and survive against almost impossible odds along the way.

Rather than having one extremely deep dungeon as in Moria, BOSS has several shallower dungeons, one per town. Each town's dungeon is 500 meters deep, except for the last one, which is 2500 meters deep. Each town's dungeon takes up where the last town left off, with a couple of levels of overlap. The net result is about the same start-to-finish difficulty as in Moria. You cannot find the BOSS until you get to the bottom of the last dungeon. The game follows a cross-country trek, from Seattle to the Big Apple.

To catch a bus you must have 1) completed the current town's dungeon, 2) have paid off your loan, if any, and 3) kill the town's local Mob Boss. Then you may go to the hotel and climb aboard. And of course there isn't any way to get back to previous towns. This isn't like Moria, where if you get in over your head you can retreat a few levels. You're dealing with the mafia here, and they aren't terribly forgiving when it comes to cocky low level adventurers.

This game was originally developed for DEC's VAX/VMS platform. Version 0.1, which forked from VMS Moria 5.0, dates to November 1990.

A Macintosh port of VMS BOSS 2.4 was released online by Mark Vesterbacka in December 1993. This was the only home computer build of BOSS released in the 1990s.

 

Download BOSS: Beyond Moria (aka MacBOSS) for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac