Slashdot Mirror
Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash
Daki writes "Achaea, the flagship text-based MUD of Iron Realms Entertainment, suffered 'a massive hardware failure', and all of the current player and world data was damaged early last Friday morning PST. After sending the damaged harddrive to a data recovery firm in Toronto, it seems as if the world of Achaea will once again be up and running by Tuesday morning at the earliest. In the interim, they decided to roll back to a week-old copy, but the info gained on this backup version will be wiped when the recovered data is loaded. This has caused the birth of a world dubbed 'Anarchaea', where rules have no meaning, the gods fry the players at request, and players are killed by homicidal butterflies and socks. During Anarchaea, the text-based MUD even reclaimed the number one spot on Top Muds, which is quite a feat."
www.mudconnector.com
There's a lot more out there than Achaea. Use the search feature.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I'm the CEO if Iron Realms, which owns and operates Achaea and a couple other text muds. First, I realize this is a low-value news article to most of you, but we didn't submit it (one of our players did). Second, I am fairly embarassed about this whole thing. The backup problems were a result of a minor but very crucial screwup on our ISP's fault that left us without backups since February 12th.
Anyway, believe me when I say this is hardly the kind of publicity we need or want. (We've only got about 5000 users but that's plenty when you're a text mud.)
--matt
MUDs are the precursor to MMORPGs.... seriously, a little googling would have turned up the answer and a more comprehensive history.
The text MUD (Everquest is a graphical MUD) scene is actually more alive than it ever has been and there's a LOT more innovation in design going on in it than in the graphical MUD market. Now, it's nowhere near the size of the graphical MUD market, and the fact that the graphical products get all the attention these days is why it may seem to you like it's died off. It's also misleading to say there are 1000 text muds. Yes, technically there are, but is it worth counting those that are downloaded and run more or less 'as is', and who have like 5 or 10 players simultaneously online, ever?
There are maybe 50 text muds that get any decent traffic and are of decent quality, ranging from the biggest (Simutronics' Gemstone IV with ) down to quality roleplay intensive MUDs like Armaggedon with maybe 50 or 60 simultaneous players. We (Iron Realms Entertainment) have, for instance, way more players than Meridian 59 has, and yet it gets quite a bit more media attention than even Simutronics' games (which have more players than we do) do.
--matt