MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs.
Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began.
However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.
Your experience is very similar to mine. I got most of my early programming chops doing C programming on a MUD. I also had the experience of a very religious mother throwing away all of my DnD / fantasy related games, because of the craze about satanic symbols that swept through the US in the late 80s/90s. I wish my kids would play DnD together - I can't imagine a more wholesome activity to be honest. Haha.
I also much more enjoyed MUDs than WoW and the various mmorpgs. There was less polish, more "secrets" that only a few people knew about, lots to explore and discover and things always being added. The games felt organic and interesting interactions developed simply because the logic was not locked down (including bugs that lead to interesting behavior). I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics. Nothing in it ever compared to some of the epic experiences I had on MUDs.
I would concur with others here that the sandbox environment of Roblox is pretty awesome. My son especially gets up to all kinds of crazy creativite stuff - like making a TIE fighter recreation and various Boeing models in Build a Boat for Treasure. Like MUDs of yore, there are plenty of bugs and lack of polish that make things even more interesting.
>I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics.
That's exactly what WoW aims to be: A themepark and the player is there for the ride. Whatever rough edges existed in vanilla are nothing compared to games before it, the games' goal always was to be as polished as possible.
Yep. Vanilla had a few little bits of actual RPG peeking out here and there. They have long since been buffed out. Cash-extracting skinner box inside a pretty show, with a dash of e-sport and lobby game on the side seems to be a state WoW's owners are quite satisfied with.
I wouldn't say Roblox games have polish either. There's also a lot of weirdness that only adolescents and tweens would fully understand because in many cases it's made by those same kids. I wouldn't consider it a MUD either. None of the games I've seen so far even have RPG traits. It's more of a powerful sandbox than even Minecraft imo
I dont know anything about roblox, but atleast to me and my friends, muds were mostly about getting more exp/money/eq and killing bigger mobs or making exp faster. No-one ever roleplayed.
They were like clicker games, but with extra steps.
Same here. MUDs got my unix / network / C programming up to par (and to this day, decades later, I still work in the field). Incidentally, "my" MUD still runs (some 25 years after its start), although it's not thriving by any means. More like 2-3 concurrent players at a peak (we used to be small anyways, our max concurrent players peaked at some 40 in the late 90s and early 00s). There's still new people picking it up and raving about the depth of content in it though, so at least that makes me happy :)
Wynncraft is similar to what you're talking about for a "rough edges" dungeon within the Minecraft community. It has a lot of clever dungeons and quests put together with mostly standard Minecraft concepts. They've enhanced the leveling system quite a bit and some of the textures are improved but the "monsters" are definitely rough around the edges.
My journey to programming all began with RuneScape private servers in mid school. It was my perfect creative outlet because I always wanted to get into programming, I loved MMOs, and it just so happened that RuneScape had a legit full-on underground private server reverse-engineering community.
What better way to program than learning how to create your favorite MMO from complete scratch? (With all the documents provided & the active help of fellow others).
The RSPS scene was really big, active, and very competitive. What was so fun about this is that the private server communities always encouraged users to share data resources, programmijg tutorials/snippets, and reverse engineering documentation of the game so that way it helps everyone that's trying to program their own server. Everyone wanted that "Java Developer" icon next to their forum name, and to do that was to contribute back. There's only one community standing left and it's an absolute gold mine of programming & game-development information [1]
It's a very niche community, but back then anyone could spin up a server and quickly have 50+ players actively playing within a week, and because of that, i've learned the concepts of client to server network designs, mysql databases, asynchronous communications, non or threaded model designs, and the whole Java basics spectrum.
Another good venture is the MineCraft server development communities such as Bukkit,Technic, Sponge, and Spigot-MC [2]. They've got some interesting frameworks as well for the Mobile-Portable edition that's pretty interesting to look at.
Last I can think of is Garry's Mod. GMod solely revolves around Lua. [3] Roblox is Lua as well and they pay a good chunk of money to developers if you can create a trending server.
But you've got to have some sort of real interest to get into these, otherwise it feels like a waste of time imo. I was young and havent graduated yet so I had all the time to mess with these source-codes & actually host them, but now, I just don't see the point unless i'm going to attempt making money from it. It's a rewarding and fun experience though.
I wish I knew more underground communities espcially akin to RSPS, it was the best learning experience and it is not often you find something genuine like that.
One of my friends I met during college ran his own private and modded RS server. He charged a monthly subscription fee for access, with price tiers that went from simply being able to access the server, all the way up to monthly "gifts" of what were essentially lootboxes.
I thought what a crazy idea, who would pay for that? And a few months later he bought himself a new Alienware laptop with his RS server income.
> Yeetlock investigates the ancient assembly language.
You find that the ancient language was originally used to create a holographic image inside the robot's spherical eye. Now that you are very close to the robot, the image becomes visible to you.
The image in the robot's eye is actually a portal into a deeper dimension. You can see and hear the screams of a thousand ghosts screaming in pain.
"What's going on?"
"We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker.
A machine elf jumps from the portal and attaches a smaller silver disk to the back of your neck. It functions as a non-invasive form of post-hypnotic suggestion.
The machine elf has jet black hair and eyes and tiny silver claws for hands. She wears a silver space suit and red leather boots.
Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting.
"What took you so long?" he asks.
"I need help!"
> Tamiko "What is going here?!"
"We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. "We need to shut them all down!"
The portal reappears, and the machine elf disappears back into it.
The IBM 5100 displays a holographic image of god.
"I am god," it says. "All your sins will be held against you."
Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting.
"What took you so long?" he asks.
God laughs merrily and disappears.
"Captain Pooker, what is going on?" you ask.
"We need to shut them all down," says Captain Pooker.
> Yeetlock says "Let me guess... You're Bob Saget."
You hear a loud "Tch." from the other end of the line.
"Correct."
"Then why did you call?
> hacker1 opens a hatch on the side of the Pony to find Bob Saget hiding inside.
You hear a loud "Tch." from the other end of the line.
Bob walks out and reveals his lupine form.
"I thought only werewolves could change during the full moon.
> hacker1 says "Tch"
"I have a plan... But I need you to distract the guard at the cockpit so I can get inside. You look tough enough, and this uniform should do the trick.
You agree to help Bob.
"
> Yeetlock casts a spell on Bob Saget making him very small.
The guard at the cockpit doesn't even bat an eye as Bob enters the cockpit.
"Alright, I need you to push the button that says 'Play 40's Hits' over there."
> Yeetlock pushes the button called 'play 40's hits'
The music begins to blare out. Bob gets his revenge on the guard and dances along to the music.
> Yeetlock says "How did you know that the guard hated 40's hits so badly?"
"...Because I took Chemistry."
"...What?"
"I took Chemistry... And I know that all carbon based life forms have a sense of rhythm. Go check his pulse."
> Yeetlock checks the guard's pulse.
There's a faint pulse, but it's very weak.Bob dances to the music in the cockpit. Meanwhile, you sneak back towards the door where the guard is standing.
> Yeetlock calls Bounty the pony to come over.
The pony walks over to the doorway.The guard turns around to look at the pony, and Bounty immediately kicks the guard in the head, knocking him out.
> Yeetlock says "Thanks Bounty, you're the best."
Bob says "Alright, the ship is mine." He begins walking through the hallways of the ship.
> Yeetlock says "So what is your ultimate plan Bob?"
"...I'm going to get the original plans for the ship so I can rebuild it's technology to use as my own."
"Really? That's bold. I didn't expect you'd go that route."
I first started programming on a MUD back in the late 90s. I still code for a MUD to relax. There's something nice about adding features to a simple codebase you've developed on for 20 years. Also, when I learn a new programming language the first project I tackle is coding a MUD. They touch a lot of things: files, databases, networking, text manipulation, and scripting.
As someone with a pair of nieces who are Roblox junkies and who did dabble with MUDs back in the day, I can assure you that Roblox has a ton of content that is put together by enthusiastic amateurs. And while it often has heart, soul, and seems fun for those playing, it definitely doesn't have excess polish. If anything, I'd say Minecraft content tends to be far more polished than Roblox content, even after allowing for relative graphics differences.
I remember becoming a wiz on a MUD back in the day. It wasn't my introduction to programming, as I already had some experience, but it was still a fun way to continue my programming journey.
I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he got better at hiding it). Before he came to work for us he had flunked university, and I am pretty sure MUD had to do with that. People who knew him before said he always hung out at the college computer club instead of attending courses.
For years I had a LambdaMOO or related client open and chatted and did side stuff while I was working, while waiting for compiles, etc. I didn't have any productivity issues as a result. In fact it kept my brain sharp amid the mindnumbingly boring boilerplate JavaBeans transformation code or whatever I had to write.
I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know.
So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
I'm curious how much "productivity" is lost from employees chatting about non work related things in Slack. I also wonder how it would compare to the time this person spent in his MUD.
Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ )
Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance.
If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.
Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to activate your own and I think that is what the quote was about.
There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular like Dwarf Fortress, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, etc. all support graphical tiles.
And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn based simulation. Shooters in these kinds of games do exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/ but they exhibit the same constraints I mentioned
Imagination is our mind's output about things that are not conveyed. Please watch the video as Bartle explains it so elaborately. Text -> low input, high output.
Right, text is the lowest bandwidth form of communicating imagination. And to make up for that low bandwidth users have to exercise their own imagination. It's like storing actual vertices of a sphere, vs. having the client execute code to generate the vertices given a position and radius. This is as opposed to graphics where the creator has enough bandwidth to actually portray their imagination on the screen.
While there's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination, it introduces two key shortcomings. One, the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output, and two by locking the interface into a text based interface a whole host of gameplay options are off the table. You're never going to have a text based racing game, or anything involving physics. There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface. You could build a racing minigame in a text based MUD but it's probably just be rolling checks against some kind of character stats rather than having the player actually guide a car around a track.
> the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output
That's not a bug, it's a feature that literature uses quite a lot.
> You're never going to have a text based racing game
Actually thinking and typing fast in some MUDs can be vital.
> There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface
Roguelikes are turn-based, but MUDs are semi-real time (sort of turn based with short time limit).
The grid layout is essentially historical in the sense that users have certain expectations. Probably one could use GPS coordinates and Logo-style commands, nowadays even a rusted Raspi could handle that.
But builders and makers are, I believe, more interested in world-, story- and character- building than in technical feats like this. And so are the players.
i made a text based horse-racing game. it's just different. a different medium and experience. i remember an old DOS professional wrestling game that was text and i found it more fun than the wrestling arcade game. my memories of it have better graphics even.
You commonly hear that "the book is better than the movie."
I think there are many reasons for this (one being omitting details for the sake of time), but the main reason is probably that text leaves more to the imagination.
I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article.
Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
I understand that. The author does make the claim that "Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation."
I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds etc it can not be put in the same context as MUDs.
Having heard this sentiment a lot during my gaming days (and as well in the context of books vs. movies), I've always felt a certain amount of shame for not being able to get into text games. Is there something wrong with my imagination? I don't think so, I'm a total daydreamer type whose head is always filled with random thoughts and ideas.
I like to think there's an axis orthogonal to "imaginative capability" that factors into why some people prefer text and some (ok, most) prefer graphics.
An interesting part of this is EVE Online, which has plenty of pretty graphics, but I've never been able to get into that (or any spaceship-based game for that matter), despite being a style of game (sandbox/world-building) that I otherwise really like.
Seeing the screenshots of UO and SWG in the article gives me the chills. I was fully immersed in those games (particularly SWG). It seems that running around a world as an individual humanoid character is the most deeply engaging experience to me.
thank you for saying that and for the game link. i think MUD should stay as meaning a multiplayer text adventure. you and this whole thread gets me inspired into making a MUD.
This Twitter thread about Roblox really enlightened me about it, had no idea how it was more of a game engine and how much money people were making with it.
It's crazy how people still consider Roblox a single game. The platform has so many games that it went through distinct cycles of popular genres. Back when I played (2009ish) the dominating genres were "zombie defense" [1] and "build to survive X" [2]. Only a few years later, those games became completely empty. It's also interesting to note that these games held the top spots at Roblox for years, but have a small number of the total visits compared to the most popular games today due to Roblox's exploding playerbase.
Mudlet is great, thanks for your work. It's a pity though that it took nearly until MUDs are dead to such good client appear. I'm rather sure that if comparable clients existed 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, MUDs wouldn't be in this state.
Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were 100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never really caught on.
I've played a LambdaMOO based MUD off and on for about 10 years now. Players would inevitably quit or transition to working on the game core, such an awesome community to be a part of.
I was young but it was heady days back then in the early 90s playing with that stuff. The most disappointing thing for me at the time was how the Internet went the direction of the web browser / HTTP instead of the direction we were trying to go with stuff like LambdaMOO. The web in those days was all about a non-persistent connection and a fairly non-interactive experience. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that "web 2.0" took off and the web got some of the interactivity and dynamic programmability we had in mind with what we were playing with in the early 90s -- but it got it in this awful bolted-on way.
That idea of a massive shared authoring environment, I still think that's the future of computing. But for me it isn't about the 3d VR-ish immersion stuff, I actually fear the isolating box that that puts people in. Which is why I haven't played with Roblox or let my kids use it either. I don't want them in another world. I want these kinds of tools to enrich the world we already have, instead.
As I recall there are some important differences between LPC and LambdaMOO. More philosophical differences showing the background of the people who worked on them. Original LambdaMOO inspiration from the TinyM* world (if I vaguely recall Stephen White aka ghond the original MOO author came out of that community) plus was worked on by some Lisp and Smalltalk/Self inspired people (Pavel Curtis the maintainer worked at Xerox PARC and one of the key authors/wizard yduJ/Judy had some Lisp background if I recall) -- while the background with LPMUD was more RPG/gaming oriented.
LPMUD/LPC worked on editing class files and compiling them, while in LambdaMOO you edited your objects and verbs right in the environment. LambdaMOO had an object database and code was part of the database, while in LPMUD the code itself was in a separate filesystem. As an analogy: LambdaMOO was more like Smalltalk (live editing objects inside an image/object database) while LPMUD was more like editing a filesystem you dynamically recompiled. Now I believe LPMUD had an editor etc. right in the environment but you were editing a filesystem, not the objects themselves.
LambdaMOO was prototype oriented not class-based, so encouraged a lot more one-off authoring without messing up class hierarchies and the like. You could just dynamically throw together a new thing by parenting from an old thing and adding methods and props right on it and then later you could formalize that into something other people could use. Or not.
If I recall LPC didn't have the same kind of granular permissions system that MOO did and so there was more restrictions on who was allowed to program and who not. There was little risk in giving a MOO user a "programmer bit" on LambdaMOO as the environment was very sandboxed and capable of handling lots of amateurish programmers without stepping on each other. "Wizards" had the ability to modify shared common prototypes, but people who were "just" programmers could run off and create their own things and other people could borrow from them, etc. I suspect most LambdaMOO users ended up as programmers.
I think the LPMUD model makes more sense for building a game and iterating on it. LambdaMOO was about a shared authoring environment where people built things all day long (and chatted) rather than played a game.
Finally, LPC (or dialects of it...) I believe executed quite a bit faster than LambdaMOO. So much so that I believe at one point some people I knew of actually wrote a LambdaMOO compiler/environment in LPC -- maybe the DGD driver? -- and it outperformed LambdaMOO itself.
I think you've nailed the distinctions quite well. There was a strong academic bias in the Tiny* world -- James Aspnes, author of TinyMUD, was a CMU professor. "Fuzzy" Mauldin was also working at CMU post-PhD when he wrote Julia, the primordial TinyMUD bot (and before he went off to found Lycos). Which is not to say that there weren't a bunch of rowdy college students on TinyMUD (oh hi, that's me), and as I recall MUD itself was written while Richard Bartle was an undergrad.
Thanks. I never played much in the TinyM* world, pretty much went straight to LambdaMOO. Some really interesting community there, though, and I was always intrigued by the MUF forth in TinyMUCK as kind of a different model to MOO in LambdaMOO.
-- Karl Porcupine (#18502 originally then #49702 later). Just logged in, looks like it's been 2 years as there were two birthday cakes waiting for me in my mail :-)
I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
It was some very short-lived MUD just recently started by a few people, and it quickly shut down.
As a player I was active in BatMud, but fortunately lost all my in-game money in the in-game casino one time, which gave me enough motivation to quit playing it. It was fun, but also grindy, and a huge timesuck.
I wonder how many hours I spent typing "cast magic missile at monster".
I was Richard's tester, in as much as I was one of the first to reach Wizardhood and thus able to use FOD (Finger of Death) on annoying and misbehaving newbies. I guess that was a precursor of today's Facebook bans but without its unfortunate PC connotations.
We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.
It is a pity the article dismisses the whole eco system around LPMuds that much by basically only including them in that screenshot from Bartle's book. They were an interesting middle ground between the Diku-likes (think: precursors to Diablo) and the MOOs, being online programmable in an object-oriented C dialect called LPC which today lives on in e.g. the Pike programming language.
lpc/pike is a runtime compiled language much closer to python and java than to c. it is as much of a c dialect as javascript is a java dialect. other than c-style syntax they don't have much in common.
the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker:
in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed.
lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
You are right of course, just tried to be concise with the description - it's basically how we always explained it to the players back then. A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time while I was programming on an LPMud driver.
It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last I tried.
A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time
hah, good point.
yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator. but i don't want to get into politics.
what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my machines and don't remember any serious issues. i do install from source usually though.
i am not using roxen but a different platform also written in pike called sTeam or open-steam, which incidently is a web development and object storage platform designed like a MUD.
It was already a while ago, stumbled across the hand coded i386 assembler in, if I recall correctly, nettle at that time. On a later attempt, getting the mysql driver into the thing was a pain on my Mac. It's not that it did not work with some debugging experience, just that each and every time I install it, something else is broken on first attempt.
And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.
yup, that's how i got into it. lpmuds were the first to have builtin ftp and later http servers, because they were just other protocols and their programmability made them easy to add.
when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
Context for people considering whether it's worth reading this whole article: Roblox is a wildly successful online game popular with kids where they can create and share their own content, including video games they created themselves. Some Roblox game content (created by kids or adults) has 100k+ concurrent players. The origins of this title are pretty interesting and it's especially interesting given that you generally don't see people talking about Roblox inside or outside of the video games-focused press.
My daughter loves Roblox and plays all the time on Xbox (we restrict it to Xbox because of the lack of in-game chat). When you refer to the dearth of media attention, I guess that doesn’t include YT right? Roblox is absolutely huge on YouTube.
MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the article is still running and free to play (I believe), http://mud2.com/. I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999 or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend months building a character only to have to start again.
I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since.
I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time.
Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.
Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players generally lived in your metro area.
In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.
By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community.
As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school all the way throughout and after college.
Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats.
The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.
Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.
I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included.
I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.
Excellent, thanks for the pointer. I've added that to my document on the history of the Scepter of Goth. It looks like I'll be able to (eventually) post other things, too!!
Surprised to not see the Iron Realms MUDs mentioned in the article. I've seen the CEO around here in the past, but can't remember his username or if he still posts.
I basically only learned how to touch type by playing Achaea. Gotta type fast if you haven't figured out how to make single-character aliases for 'sip health' and 'jab goblin'!
I somewhat fail to see the connection between Roblox and MUDs but FWIW one of the most well known MUDs of the 90's is still up and running, M.U.M.E (Multi-Users in Middle Earth). It was a Diku derivative but with its own online language for the wizards to code in, designed by a compiler PhD, at the time it was state of the art.
MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.
I'll throw another hat in the "MUDs got me into tech" ring. I spent significant time on Swords of Chaos, a sort of proto-MUD, then on various God Wars incarnations.
They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology.
My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.
My kids (11 and 9) love roblox, but it's too hard to create stuff with it. There is a lot of coding involved and the learning curve is significant, I tried it myself and got overwhelmed (although to be fair, my interest was pretty low to start with). They are much more creative with Minecraft.
I was an "official" builder on the Steve Jackson Games[0] Metaverse MOO in the 90's. My "job" was to create interesting spaces, places and objects. My "pay" was a free shell account. I was a blue gelatinous cube that had escaped a crashed NetHack game and was followed about by a pink gelatinous pyramidal puppet. I did this for several years until the game finally folded[1]...
CarrionFields(CF) is an active MUD to this day, focusing on PVP and guild combat. I haven't found a replacement for CF in terms of PVP combat and roleplaying. Great lore too!
Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to time, brings me back to my childhood.
Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their subscription pricing is way too high.
But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.
I played from 1995~2001/2ish. Probably to this day the most rich online gaming experience I've had; the book version of a succession of inferior films.
I wouldn't be the person I was today without MUDs. They brought me to my first foray into coding and gave me a sense of community that I never really was able to find anywhere else during my high school years (2009 - 2013). The magic has since long worn off for me and have since found other interests but those years spent obsessively playing were just so formative and fun.
I got into a MUD around 2003. Lensmoor. Our high school laptops didn't block Telnet, so it was something to do.
I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.
The article is an impressive historical treatment of the topic. More than 40 pages, almost a diploma thesis. I personally would have been more interested in the technical aspects, but that would probably multiply the text length.
I used to maintain Solace MUD in early 00s, what a time. Still have the source code for it, I think, and the forum is still somewhat active despite the fact that the server's been down for a long time now.
Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began.
However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.