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Richard Bartle Awarded the GDC First Penguin Award

Posted by Zonk on from the i-often-envision-mmog-designers-as-little-men-in-tuxedos dept.

TerraNova has the story that MUD1 co-designer Richard Bartle has been awarded the annual First Penguin Award. The award is given for exhibiting "the courage and bravery of a developer who is the first to test the proverbial waters, in the face of uncertainty of success or failure. Receiving a 'penguin' serves as an inspiration and lesson to the community."

1 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Muds by petsounds · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs *are* MMO games. The only real difference between them and modern MMO is the interface -- graphical vs. text. In fact, I would venture to say that some of the MUSHes and MOOs were more sophisticated and engaging than the more mainstream MMOGs of today. MOOs especially offered more ability for users to create complex objects through its own scripting language to enhance role-playing. The MMOGs of today are based on the MUD concept of gameplay, which always focused more on hack-n-slash and item collection than role-playing, with social interaction limited to parties banded together to make treasure hunting easier. Of course, MUDs in turn were heavily influenced by such early single-player games as the Nethack/Rogue/Moria variants on Unix systems.

    There are still quite a few text-based MMO games out there, just google for them.