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MUDs Turn 30 Years Old
Massively points out that today marks the 30th anniversary of the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) going live at Essex University in the UK. The game, referred to as MUD1, was created by Roy Trubshaw. Richard Bartle, a man who also worked on the game as a student at Essex, has a post discussing the milestone and talking about how MUDs relate to modern MMOs. What MUDs did you play?
www.bat.org
So much wasted time. Best MUDs I found were the highly modified diku/circles, like ThunderdomeII and MUME.
Aardwolf - where the men are MEN, and most of the women are too... http://www.aardmud.org/
I played Kobra (a Star Wars MUD) in the mid-late 1990's. It was as addictive as crack to me. I was way more addicted to that game than anything else I've ever played before or since (including WoW). And, unlike mordern MMO's, it was all FREE!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
30 years old ... and they still haven't got laid.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'm still playing Terris, over 10 years and still going strong.
Absolutely love MUDs.
Woot go batmud! I wish WoW hadn't sucked me away.
Yes, that's right, AnimeMUD. And this was back before Dragonball Z was all the rage. We're talking Akira and MD Geist level anime here. I was bored with most of the standard Tolkein-esque MUDs, so this one was a nice change of pace.
http://www.igormud.org:1703/ So many years there... go Mauve!
Muds, they taught me to code and shot my reading and typing skills through the roof. (As long as 'a r' is a valid sentence for attack rat...)
http://www.theforestsedge.com/
still good enough to play, i just find that with kids, school and a full time job, i don't have as much time to modify my bots...err play.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
NannyMUD Woo!!! My poor first semester of college put at least I killed Laggg!
I always liked the LP-style MUDs. I hated playing the diku/circle style. One of the primary reasons for that may have been that the LP style was a lot more fun for me to develop on. I had great fun developing for various MUDs, but eventually they all sort of petered out and I stopped. It's no fun coding something if you know that no more than one or two people will ever see it.
The one I developed the most on was Styx, which was a local MUD run from New Mexico State University. It was fairly small, but the fact that many of the players were people I saw almost every day IRL made it more fun. Back then, we would have 20 or more people in the same lab in the computer center playing most of the night, to say nothing of the various players from elsewhere around the country and the world.
The one I spent the most time playing was LustyMUD (nothing sexual, that was just the character name of the person who ran it). I played that one for years, but never actually got to Wizard status because right before I got there they completely tore out the old quest system, put in a bunch of near-impossible quests, and reset everyone's completed quest count back down to 0. After that, I just didn't have the motivation to climb back up that hill.
Another MUD I played a great deal on was Genocide, which was a great PvP MUD. I sucked at it, but it was a lot of fun in its heyday. I credit it with my fast typing speed, as the only way to survive was to be able to buffer multiple commands in quick succession. It's still up, but now it's mostly just people idling all day and occasionally chatting. There are almost never any wars anymore.
I started playing MUDs in 1989, and didn't really stop logging on until maybe 2006. I still occasionally log in to one or two of the old MUDs, but almost never play anymore.
Tinyworld was popular by alot of people at Carnegie Mellon and the Univ of Northern Iowa and we had a bit of an exchange program. We even talked an english teacher into teacher class online. We started a school organization to police ourselves so we didnt hog all the universities resources for students who needed them but the university still considered it a game and when they found out that we had found a loophole in the student organization charter to get around them kicking people out for using computers for MUDDING, they called me (the president of the org) before the school board). I took the opportunity to give a presentation on how MUDDing was an example of the internet and how the internet would allow people from across the world to connect. I showed them how we were able to exchange files and ideas and how one teacher had taught a class online. Afterward, they were so impressed that I didn't get kicked out of school and instead they put a million dollars more funding into the information/computer sciences programs (which at that time was what they considered it to fall under).
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I'm gonna go hop on IRC. If you find some, message me and I'll put them in my .plan. You can finger me to see what others have sent.
Ah yes, the good old days. I remember the days of using the Sun stations in our lab to telnet to a DikuMUD. This game had some positive effects on me in the early 90's. First, I learned how to speed type, especially after a server crash when you'd try to be the first to log on and kill the troll for the black dagger (+2!).
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
So what you are trying to say, is that MUD is now older than dirt?
I played on a mud called Star Wars: New Galactic Order... On sensenet.legions.org 5555.
It used to be pretty popular, although the admin was sort of insane... for example, the codebase had "mudsex" capability (ala godwars) and the owner/admin thought too many people were spending too much time with it, so he wrote in sexually transmitted diseases. Seemed like within a week, half the mud was scratching and oozing everytime they entered a room.
Kids and diseases could be avoided by using a condom however.
There were other things. The staff at the time went out of their way to create new areas, but it lost steam. It's still up, but I never see an admin there to authorize a character... which is for the best.
Muds were/are fun... and highly addicting.
I'd go so far as to say that MajorMUD was the most influential on modern MMORPGs. I lost an entire decade to MajorMUD and would be playing still if metrobbs hadn't shut down.
I was lucky enough to play the "original" Essex MUD back in 1984-86. At that time I was employed working nights as a Network Operator in one of the main NOCs on the UK university network, JANET. With my blistering 9.6k connection to Essex Univ I used to spent FAR too much time as "Quadgop" rather than doing what I should have been doing (i.e. looking after the X.25 switches).
Matt
Thirty years, and the graphics still suck.
Netbooks, they come with Linux or a $3 copy of Windows. Either way, Microsoft loses.
MajorMUD ran on WorldGroup BBS systems. It was great until MetroBBS bought it and started screwing it up. I've played a lot of MUDs and I found it was by far the best and was quite polished compared to many others.
Creeping Death was a very fast paced MUD. I remember getting up at 4am to play, just so I could avoid the higher-level player killers. Not even the 'safe room' was safe (through a means of dragging someone out of the room once they're asleep). Aarilax was his name. Finally one of my friends beat him at his own game. That was like a gazelle ramming its hoof down a lion's throat while simultaneously kicking him in the groin. *Ahhh* Those were the days...
But, more on topic: Thanks to playing MUDS, my typing skills were greatly improved while I was just a kid. I remember beating the entire typing program our school had when I was in the 5th grade, in only 1 month. The rest of the year I was allowed to surf the "internet" (a novel concept at the time) and animate stuff.
Now I'm an independent contractor and am earning my keep while paying for my wife and I to go through school. Proves to show that, at least in my case, games helped pave the way to education and employment.
If all else fails, add another if.
in Melchior, and lost many a night's sleep in Duris, Land of Bloodlust, which is still up I think. I'll never forget how I killed some player popping his mouth off to me, was seen by a security mob, then got banished to a prison city next time I ran into guards. Every mob was way badder ass than my now stuffless char and having to sneak my way out of there and back to civilization at a run was awesome. Still haven't seen prison as punishment implemented in any graphical mmorpg.
Wasted far too much time on these two during the early nineties.
Tried a few other Diku/CircleMUD's but always came back to Fusker then StrangeMUD
Endian.
-- "I know that this is vitriol, no solution, spleen-venting, but I feel better having screamed, don't you ?"
MUDs are alive and kicking today just the same as yesterday. Some of us even innovate and incorporate new tech as we go. XML and web services are great gateways for text-based games to do stuff they can only dream of in graphics.
I live life on the edge
Dark and Shattered Lands until WoW...
frog blast the vent core
Igor Mud as my main one.. I played and coded on a few others, but Igor was the one that really stole my Uni years away... And quite a few since..
Yea, I tried playing again recently ... it's better as a memory.
Feudal Realms. Unfortunately it died for reasons common to most MUDs. How many of you were the ubergeeks of the MUD world? Cry out ye coders and world builders and imms/imps on high!
-=Bang Bang=-
I'm surprised no one mentioned "Nightmare" or "Dreamverse".. .popular in the 90's for sure. I recall seeing around 100 players at once on each of the games.
Then "evercrack" came out, killed muds forever.
I started playing an adult themed mud called Edge of Midnight in 2000 and I still play there today. MUDs have an advantage over MMO's in that they can be accessed from any computer on the internet and has telnet, no need to pay subscriptions or download gigabyte game patches and can even be done over pokey ol dialup.
Back in 1990 I had absolutely no idea what "multitasking" and "multi-user" meant when it came to a single machine; I was raised on C64s, Apple ][s, etc., which were basically single-tasking. A friend at college showed me MUDs (specifically AberMUD) and all of a sudden it was like playing Zork and Adventure all over again, but in real time! With real people! All over the world!
As if my mind weren't already completely blown by the idea of a real-time Zork-like game, I realized that all of this was happening on a single machine, somewhere in Sweden. I asked how this was possible, and therein lies the beginning of my discovery of how computers worked in general, culminating in being a developer today.
It seemed absolutely magic to me then, and in reality, is still magic now. Man...I can still see it all now, sitting in front of that VT102 on the tiled, raised floor, thinking I had been let in on the hidden secret of the world, which was the early 1990s-era Internet.
Good times, good times.
Thematic mix/mess of HHG, B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, and general insanity.
Back in the hey day of the late 90's there were hundreds and hundreds of active players on Mortal Realms at any given time.
I spent far too much time skipping class to play the game and was definitely addicted to it. Eventually only a "cold-turkey" type break (deleted all my characters) got me to quit.
Sometimes, even though you have nothing to say, you have to answer, and it's not entirely void of meaning. There i said it, and it was more than nothing.
Bah. DikuMuds? LP? I have no truck with you and your fancy modern ways.
Naah - I started with MIST, telnetting in from Lancaster University to Essex University. In fact there was quite a Lancaster contingent on MIST, and I am not joking that I know people who failed their degrees due to their addiction.
MIST was only available at certain times, so we started hanging out at Cheeseplant's House. I had previously considered this to be the first talker in the world, though wikipedia states it's the second. I was known as Scorpion on both of these (and please Mr Slashdot Admins, can I have my original Slashdot account back that I've lost the password and email to?).
One thing is that MIST was player vs player, as well as player vs the game. Killing your fellow player was all part of the fun, though it was frowned on to kill a level one newbie at the time. Really enjoyed MIST and would love to see an emulator for it somewhere, though of course it wouldn't be the same without multiple players logged on. Does anyone know of one?
Cheers,
Ian
First started playing MajorMUD off of TDH - The Dragon's Hoard which I do believe still exists thanks to Mikey Lee.
Played some homebrewed stuff on TheLoft out of Australia for a bit in college.
Until recently played a LOT of Shattered Kingdoms until I had a bit of a falling out with the IMMS.
Ah the good old days when Beanos wibbled and did "something"
Ignorance is Bliss -- And the Opposite is True -- Genius is Madness
It even had a tram in it like in WOW...
They should have a mod: -1 WTF
It's like "looking busy" at your employment - it's actually easier to do real work than to fake it. - bmo
I used to play SMAUG based muds, the one I played the most was called The Seventh Circle at mud.oro.net. I miss it, it was very fun. Also played Legend of The Red Dragon a lot on the BBS age. Being addicted to muds was the main reason for me not touching WoW ever, if I was addicted to something that was text only, I wonder what would happen with something so cool as WoW. I'd probably loose my family, friends and job.
Holy Mission taught me to touch-type. (Go thieves guild!)
Genocide taught me to how to be PKed in less than 5 seconds.
Cause I'm still on a few of those and used to be on like four others over the years.
Yes, it's a Star Trek themed game, but it's been going since 95. Hell, I just hit my decade+1 mark on there last May.
"If Common Sense was so common, it wouldn't be such a valued trait."
www.carrionfields.com 9999
Unlike other popular members of the genre, Carrion Fields does not allow players to purchase in-game advantages with OOC currency. In other words, it's a level playing field.
I can still remember when my brother convinced me to create a character on AustinMUD where he and some friends of ours had been playing for months. Being Texans, we assumed that AustinMUD would be filled with players at least SOMEWHAT local. Imagine our surprise (and theirs) when we found out that Austin was the name of the computer hosting the MUD, and that it was located in Denmark! I played on that MUD for a couple of years until EQ dropped. http://www.austinmud.com/
I first started out on GatorMUD, which was a mush (I believe) at the University of Florida. I played and developed on that for a while (built all of 13th Ave!) then went on to KoBra mud for a while.
Eventually got sick of just playing and decided I wanted to develop, so I got with the math department and started up Muddog Mud. Worked on that mud for a number of years before it was eventually wiped out.
During that time I also did quite a bit of playtesting on Silly Mud, a Diku style mud at UF (anyone remember CircaOp?)
Are there any OS MUDs I can install on a Linux box?
I played Shades far too much, and when the 200 quid telephone bill arrived, I was promptly banned from using the modem (and paying back that much on a typical 15 year old's odd job money took a long long time). I evaded the ban by playing only once or twice a week, for just half an hour at a time such that the cost of the phone calls would be lost in the general noise of the telephone bill. That was probably in 1987 or so.
The worst bit was when the edge connector from the VTX5000 modem to the Spectrum wobbled a bit, crashing the Spectrum. It always happened in the middle of a fight, too.
Then there were the archwizards. Who can forget Lordant (the bastard).
When I got to university, I ran a MUD for a while (using LPMud), well, until someone wrote a dodgy piece of LPC which ended up filling the filesystem that I was on, and the uni admins came down on me like a ton of bricks. So we had to play on the internet. After being brought up on Shades, a true hack and slash mud where player killing wasn't just allowed, it was openly encouraged, I found the rather wimpy muds that forbade player killing rather tame! Of course, when I ran the LPmud, the rules were Shades-style - hack and slash.
Shades, incidentally, is still running. Telnet games.world.co.uk 23. I believe it ran on a PDP-11, and is now running on an emulator for said machine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Tradewars 2002 was a great game. I would dial up with my 2400 baud modem and warp around the universe in my Scout Maurader. I had to watch our for those dang Ferrangi. I was usually evil, but not too evil because I still needed to go to Federation space.
I remember why Cluster became Cluster II, actually, and have only my robotics corporation to blame.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Screw that, dude, my first girl ever, I met on PernMUSH. Ah, PernMUSH. Come for the dragons, stay for the 95% female player base. Those were the days!
Not to start a holy war, but I always thought MOOs were cooler.
Education is the silver bullet.
That was a masterpiece of a MUD. Truly amazing.
Eternal Twilight - Xera, I'm sure there are others out there that miss it too, I spent 2 years in college not going to classes, but wandering ET...
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
I was a wizard there, ahh the memories :)
avpmud.com 4000
11 1/2 years old
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
*cough*3 Kingdoms*cough* ...when MUDs sell out...
I really miss the richness in story telling that textual information gives and customizability that plain text offers. For example, I loved the complex puzzles on the quests in my favorite MUD -- it's difficult to get that kind of sophistication on a gui MMORPG where you are limited to whatever 3D models are available and what kinds of actions your characters can do. I used to DM on an NWN server which had a huge amount of community content, but it was a pain in the neck to get the administrators to add or change content. One admin also tried at one point using more text contextual clues about what's going on, e.g., "a strong breeze stars blowing" due to a change in weather, etc., but it made the server lag so much it was dropped. Overall I felt it was pretty confining in terms of story-telling ability as a DM. Far too many quests are find a monster and kill it and not enough flexibility in what you could do, it's much easier to just type something than code the 3D action.
Besides that, MUDs had all the drama of a graphical RPG: guild wars, cruel DMs, rampant PKers, it was great! I spent countless hours in college on lostsouls. I can remember three of us would go to the library to use the computer lab there so we all could play at the same time and talk to each other IRL while we were playing. This is in the days when only the university had broadband internet, the rest of us were on 2400 baud modems. Actually, lostsouls is still up, and in fact there's a DM posting there who was there when I played there, and making improvements, I think I'll go make a character.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Dark Mists officially celebrates its 12th year on the Internet.
Ayup
I couldn't handle MUDs -- my idea of a fun time was a good ol' turn-based game with turn files exchanged by floppy. NOW we're rocking.
I played MUD1 very briefly, but I made wizard on MIST, the later mud run at Essex by Lorry. MIST was fast, furious, biased and addictively fun. You waited in a chilling university lab until it opened in the wee hours of the morning, using a BBC micro over JANET. In later years I played Abermud run by Alan Cox, and a lot of LPmuds, from Ephemeral Dales, Discworld and Genesis to Nightmare and TMI; but I'll always have fond memories of MIST and that damn gun.
Alas I was late to the MUD scene. I stumbled across a nice UK-based MUD (see sig). Plenty of UK and geek-centric references. The server is all but abandoned now. No-one to group with to level up.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I played too much Moosehead SLED (one of the bases for ROM2.4, diku based) in the mid/late 90's until I dropped out of college. A friend and I founded Daedal Macabre which had a heyday for a while then slowly died, and is still slowly dying. I learned to type, debug, and code... and it got me a nice job, or at least helped attribute to it.
Kingdoms of the Lost, best one I'd played. www.kotl.org
I haven't been to trippyMUSH in years.
In a way I miss it ... but not that much.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"What MUDs did you play?"
Who said we've stopped? There's still a rather large MUD'ing community out there, and though it's slowly dying, there are still places that boast hundreds of players online at any given time. My first MUD was a p2p called Dragons Gate, hosted off AOL. I ran up hundreds of dollars worth of play time. After they moved to a private server and I could no longer simply leech it onto my AOL bill, I stopped playing for a while. But then I came across a place, and though it's small, it's been my home ever since.
a shadowrun game that DOESN'T suck *i'm looking straight at you, Xbox 360* been playing there for years, and before that, anime mud, and crimson II via auggie BBS way back in the early 90's mud.awake2062.net 4000
http://www.play.net/dr
Heh. Started on TinyMud then TinyMuck then Mushes.
Helped run a TinyMuck, the Dreamtime, that ran inside DEC as a semi sanctioned employee activity. There was an LPMud too in DEC. I miss them. Played nearly 15 years on RP Mushes before heading to WoW. WoW is fun but I like people being able to make the world.
What no one remembers Genesis ?
This is a great opportunity for those of you who have never played a MUD to give one a try. The majority are free to play, and you don't even need to download a client. All you have to do is pick one out and point the telnet client you already have at it and you will be playing in no time.
Free MUD source code is easy to find, so there is not alot of overhead in starting a new MUD. This means that you can often find MUDs that employ concepts your run-of-the-mill MMO won't touch. For example, characters at The Abandoned Realms can die 61 times, then they die a permanent death and cannot be brought back. Players within a range of levels of you can attack and kill you, and then loot everything you were carrying from your corpse. While this seems harsh, it gives the game an element of paranoia you really can't find anywhere else.
Swing by www.abandonedrealms.com and give it a try.
MUME was - and surprisingly still is! - one of the best. I still fondly recall my deadly battles with the crafty orcs, trolls, and black numenoreans or standing watch at guard towers or tracking footprints so I could inform my fellow elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits about the movements of a raiding party.(I played a legendary Elven scout named Vosh many years ago)
The non-PvP parts were great, too; the world was so huge since so many people around the earth have contributed to it(Tolkien has been translated into 30+ languages, so many international fans). I loved exploring it and I also recall my fast-beating heart the first time I had to sneak into Moria for a quest and heard the BOOOM, BOOOM, BOOM, of the Orcish wardrums.
You can see a lot of features in modern MMOs - like WoW and of course LotRO - that existed in MUME 15 years ago. A war between player characters of different races(and you usually lost all your eq when you died :), a warpoint system specifically for pvp kills separate from xp, a questing system, travel points, gathering herbs to make potions, fishing, even the drunk feature which would insert random *hic*s and agrble your words when you spoke, :)
http://mume.org/
Might want to try it out if you want a free game or to see something of the beginning of these types of games. I see that folks have even developed some graphical addons for representing/mapping the rooms of the text-based world.
Two classics pure storytelling ability:
3-Kingdoms (3k.org): Unique classes/guilds, great quests and different areas focused on sci-fi, fantasy and just plain wacky (game shows? care bears?)
SWMud (swmud.com): The one and only. Unique vector-based space combat, about 40 planets to explore (spend a day or so trying to map the Death Star), optional pk and one of the coolest online help systems with both mud-help and backstory.
I only play one mud at I've played it for SEVERAL SEVERAL years. PhoenixMud.
phoenixmud.mine.nu:4000
Its an addicting game. You have to use your imagination.
I once was the host for Moral Decay (telnet://playdecay.com:3003/) ... and MD was founded in 1992.
I talk about stuff.
I must have tried half the muds on this list:
http://www.mudconnect.com/zmud/mudlist.txt
And what a horrible way to find out that crappy Vista has no telnet client installed by default. :( ... might have to try and find zmud (or was it gmud?) to try and see if a couple of my old haunts are still running
Medievia, Toril/Sojourn, Duris, and Waterdeep, among many others
I played Retromud (still around, retromud.org:3000, 14 years old) obsessively for about three months when I was fourteen and something like half the age of everyone else on the mud. Needless to say I was a bit of an asshat. Hell of a lot of fun though, and I learned to type too.
The best part of Retromud is the diversity of races and guilds (aka classes). There are dozens of races and a system of guilds where you advance through one guild as you level, until you reach the maximum guild level, and join a second, and then a third, and so on.
My character was a flying raccoon druid, fun times...
I used to play LPmuds back in '90-91 and I had a few evil wizard toys.
Evil toy#1: Would look for two mudders in the same room, it would then call the player_attack function on the each character. A fight would ensue, and it looked to each player like the other guy started it. It worked even when player killing was disabled as self defence bypasses the is_playercharcter check. The fights, accusations, confusuion and general chaos was AWESOME.
Evil toy #2 Find random player online, shout random obscenity aimed at randon online wizard. It did it in such a way that everyone BUT the victim saw the shout. More fun times.
Evil toy #3 Would randomly add experience and set quests for players. Senior wizards were always spying on low level wizards suspected of cheating to help players wiz out. This gave them something to do. After an hour spying on one character trying to figure out what wizard was helping him, they noticed it was happening to everyone.
Evil toy #4 Randomly turn off wimpy setting for characters. With wimpy turned on, your character automaticaly runs away at 1/3 hp, something people rely on. That 1/3 exp loss for player death really hurts I bet.
The real fun with muds doesn't even start until you hack the player.c file to log passwords. Lots of people used to play the same character with the same password on different muds.
You'd think a sysadmin would have the root password the same as his mud character, wouldn't you? Well, who ever ran lone star mud in '91 at the U of Texas, that was me.
And it's still going strong too... Sure beats WoW, that's for sure. Solving a text based quest beats clicking on hellboars anyday.
towers.angband.com:9999 Back when online games were based on social interactions and intrigues. Modern MMO's are great, but they've perfected the formula a bit to well, meaning real conflicts are avoided in fear of loosing customers.
I once heard NannyMUD was the oldest MUD still in use. I still log on once in a while, and it has on average around 20 active people logged on (last time at least)
Good grief, I remember playing these things for "days" at a time. The likes of which include:
-Viking
-Boiling Mud
-Abraxas
-Diskworld
-Some DikuMUD somewhere on a Cray
. . . and even a Lambda Moo as part of a subject at University.
For those that don't require pretty shiny things to keep them amused, they can still be a lot of fun . . even to administer one as a small project.
*sigh* back to WoW :P
www.icesus.org
The word "did" implies none of us are playing anymore. mud.arctic.org still lives on. After about 12-15 years playing it, I don't think any other game comes close to the amount of hours of my life it has taken.
I always compare MUDs to G-MMOs using the analogy of the book vs the movie. Which is better? The book is better. Always. Use of your imagination is often more enticing then someone telling you how it should look.
dismount soapbox;put soapbox chest
I recall playing Qwest in 1990 that Jeff Prothero ran - it had up to 130 simultaneous users which was a lot in those days - I think it ran on an SGI.
Before that was hack which we used at the office after hours on a Xenix machine, that was about 1986. MOOs came later and there were a few used for academic purposes. I recall given a talk in a MOO set up to discuss VR and multi-user environments by the Midlands(UK) VR-SIG, that would have been in the early 90s I guess.
I remember a game that was written on a BBS chat channel that loaded as a client (modified terminal software) and was pretty good. That was in mid 80s using a 300baud modem - phew!
modern day MMORPGs owe an awful lot to MUDs and MOOs. Often because you don't need as much imagination, a MMORPG like WoW is pretty disappointing. I'm yet to find a game that has the immersion level of those early MUDs, but maybe that's because I was younger then. These days something has to be very impressive to get me interested and pretty much all modern games fail in that. To my mind, none are sufficiently open ended and diverse to replace those older games. It seems modern games have gone down a particular direction and left a massive field of gaming/socialising open which has been filled (partially) from time to time by things like CuCMe, or IRC or SMS txting, ICQ etc but then each of these specialises and as the world's communities unite more and more vistas open up that are not being addressed. I think there's a lot of scope for imagination based gaming with high social networking and dynamic (or on the fly) content creation that just doesn't exist at all today. Combine this with almost permanent availability (phones), GPS and the HUDs (heads up displays) that we don't have yet and I suspect there's significant new genres of games to come that will redress some of the things we've missed sinced those very early days of gaming.
On the other hand, maybe kids todays are just as excited, captivated and immersed by the latest version of Crysis, WoW, Quake, SMS txting, MSN or whatever - somehow I don't see it. My kids aren't as impressed, enthralled or excited about games as I (and my friends) were. It's a bit like when William Gibson said he wrote Neuromancer on an old mechanical typewriter and then later got an AppleII and realised how primitive computers actually were. He said if he'd know computers were that bad he never could have written such a cybertech advanced book. In the same way I think todays computers limit kids imaginations.
pithy comment
SFMud stole more hours, more days of my teenage years than most anything else. Not to mention all the hours I spent building on spinoffs!!
And Act of War. Which is probably still going strong, somewhere online.
discworld.atuin.net -- I've played the Disccworld MUD for about 6 years now. It's a great game, especially if you're a Pterry fan or a fan of the books. It's true to the story, but also involves all those great class MUD ideas.
--"Forget the nectar of the Gods, just give me some Mountain Dew."
The beauty of muds is that they do not rob you of the beautiful imagination that unfolds in your mind unlike single persons envisioning of how things are - how boring, how stale, how dumbing, and unimaginative. For that, MUD will always rule supreme for me, like a good book over a movie.
There is nothing greater of envisioning a game, from words it created pictures, movies, feelings - always tailored to each individual player.
There were also MUSE (real time battletech on line universes) - all text based, with ascii maps (that move in real time corresponding to your mechs movement.)People were able to pilot mechs at full speeds between buildings, while keeping track of rotation of the turret (or body), and enemy movement all in real time, and just from text.
Nothing will beat that - except for porn that is ;)
p.s.
It ate a lot of my youth; the only way you could log on if you weren't an Essex student was through nefarious means, through the UK's pre-Internet packet-switched-system. I spent a lot of Summer nights waiting for an open incoming slot. It was a fantastic environment to explore in the dead of night, by the glow of a 1200/75 modem. What was especially strange was reading lots of tech magazines and science fiction predicting that one day you'd be able to converse using your computer in a mystical, virtual environment -- and then at night, I'd go there.
Till the day it died. That thing ate up my freetime for years, along with its various spinoffs. Also Act of War and a dozen or two or ten other MUDS off and on.
Many of you are claiming about time wasted on MUDs. I'm not certain about that. I've traveled to many different countries meeting people and seeing places I would've never seen without MUDs.
I learned Object Oriented coding by twiddling, and later administrating a MUD with a playerbase of tens of thousands of users. That skill has proven to be worthy later on in life through job opportunities, experience and ease of studies.
Mud development may also act as a way to channel your creativity. And in when it comes to content coding, the feedback is usually very punctual and straightforward.
Some muds still evolve, take for example BatMUD which has a graphical client which makes it easier to understand for the less telnet-literate.
(The game's still an authentic text-based MUD and just as playable by through telnet, tf and other clients. But the GUI of BatClient makes things easier to understand by customable triggers, macros, windows and maps.) Some new and old players have found a new spark for the game just because of that little extra.
There are some screenshots available at http://www.bat.org/client/ to further illustrate the client.
All in all, I have to say that MUDs have brought richness and networking possibilities to my life beyond that which many of my peers have enjoyed through their hobbies. May some view it just as a game, but in the end, the best things about MUDs come from the community. And that tight knit community is something most of our new games lack. And that, for me, is the thing which still keeps me logged. That, and keeping the mortals in order and trying to keep the new developers from breaking my dear game:)
-j
He's a mudder. His father was a mudder. His mother was a mudder!
-Cosmo Kramer
The amusing part of MUDs within Universities and Colleges....
There were as many students that learned how concurrency and Event-Driven programming worked due to coding them, as there were students that failed their subjects because they did no study and played them instead.
Hence why the acronym MUD was also used with the meaning "Multi-Undergraduate-Destroyer" by many a College/University's faculty members.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
If anyone wants to give shouts, reply to this thread, don't use my email.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
My MUD addiction of choice was AlexMUD, one of the first Dikus after the original. Good times. I think it's still around, though sadly without many players left.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Well, my first and longest MUD presence was in Holy Mission (the original one) until it slowly died (less and less players). It was a great place, with great people, it was fun to play and to code, I still remember most of the commands. The only game I ever felt close to the old feeling was the baldur's gate and icewind dale series.
:)
MUDs were a good challenge too, I used to know huge parts of the map by heart and I still can recall some places of it. Newbies had large hand-drawn maps and pieces of papers lying around with directions to specific places
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I remember way back when my student friends started playing the original Essex MUD. Some of them would hog two or more terminals in the computer centre in order to play multiple characters. At around 17:45 they would start keyboard mashing just to get a login on the Essex system (MUD was only available after 18:00, and there was a player limit). They would have to have certain terminals since they had more programmable function keys, and they would program the function keys for swift escapes or rapid fighting moves. These guys would then play until the small hours.
Today it's World of Warcrack. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
http://www.last-outpost.com
I've been running the Last Outpost for over 16 years. The thing that never ceases to amaze me is the performance range of the hardware that we've run it on.
When we started running the mud, the problem was always finding a computer to host the program. The first system we ran on was an appolo DN2500 workstation at the U of Mn. It was a motorola 68020 based system. Whenever we needed to do a full recompile of the mud server code, it was pretty much a 'go to bed, and fix the errors in the morning' kind of thing. The game's boot time was always too slow. Early in development, we put a lot of code into trying to make the game boot up in under three minutes. Computers in the early 90's were pretty slow.
Over the years we've run the Last Outpost on an Apollo, a Next Cube, a Sun Sparc, a Cray, an Apple running A/UX, and a variety of Intel PC's running Linux starting with a 90 Mhz pentium. Every time we've moved to a new server platform, I've been blown away by performance increase.
These days we run LO on an older Intel P4 2.6Ghz pc running linux. The full compile time is down from 'overnight' to just under a second. The game's reboot time is basically instantaneous.
Running a codebase for this long has really underscored just how far computing has come in the last 16 years.
Wheel of Time mud. Woohoo.
Shameless? :)
dragonfiremud.com 1999
100s? I don't remember all of them anymore. Some ones I do remember include:
Silicon Realms
PhoenixMud
Puddle of Mud
Carrion Fields
Turning Point
PKMud
Mirkwood II
SillyMud
Circle of Glory
Realms of Chaos
(plus many many others)
I do recall being a Rabbit admin on one Mud. I forget the name.
I know it was nto a thread about MUSHes, but did anyone play Elendor? I played a fairly well known fat bad guy from Rohan and was granted a role as a troll later on. That game was probably only second to Ultima I-V in sucking up time I should have spent doing other things.
I still remember the first time I accidentally stumbled onto MUDs (MUSHes in particular) via gopher on CapAccess (a sort of proto-internet service run by the local PBS station in Virginia).
:)
That's when I discovered Transformer: 2005 MUSH. Aaaaaaaaaaand... 13 years later, yeah, I still play. A lot. There's just something about a text-based game that you don't get from this modern fancy-pants MMOs. There, I said it!
tf2005.net 5555 for those that are curious to see one of the longest-running PennMUSH games in existence.
I also appreciate all the awesome MUDs being posted here... I think it's time I revisited that particular part of the MU* universe.
I play on several MU*s: Tapestries, Pokemorph MUSH, Shangrila, SPR (yay for it still being hosted on ctrl-c.liu.se)
I have a text log of that first MUD session by the two guys who set it up:
# Welcome to MUD1 at Essex University!
#
# Time: 18:57:32
# There are 1 users on currently, including you.
#
# You are in a room with one door on the north wall.
#
> n
# You go north.
> look
# You see one door to the south.
> s
# You go south.
> look
# You are in a room with one door on the north wall.
> search
# What?
> examine
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> find
# What?
>
# TimTheEnchanger logged in.
#
# Time: 19:02:12
# There are 2 users on currently, including you.
#
>
*** TimTheEnchanter attacks YOU ***
*** You are hit for 26721 damage! ***
*** You DIE! ***
> n
# You can't do that, you are dead.
> nnnn
# What?
> nn
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> nnnnnnnnnnnn
# What?
>
TimTheEnchanter shouts, "hahaha dumbass!"
> q
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> quit
# What?
> exit
# Goodbye, and thanks for playing! Come back soon!
# Elapsed time: 0 hours 6 minutes 33 seconds.
^(*@#CONNECTION LOST
And we've never looked back!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was part of 3 muds back in 1994 started when I was a freshman in college. Infinity was what I was introduced to through my roommate and then to AdamAnt which was a MUD out of Germany. Then the Hills of Megiddo was created on a Syracuse server and had a small gathering but I had fun on this one because I became a wizard and was able to create levels to expand it.
But it is interesting that this article came up today because I was just talking to one of my best friends the other day about mudding and how much fun it was to interact with people all over the world and play games like this.
Are in your head! Books, remember them? They take you to places where you have never been and can only... imagine. MUDs are the same thing. Tweek the imagination about a Dragon and you will invent something in your head 100 times better than a current day operation.
Come to a place where the graphics are out of this world because they are in your head. Come to a place where incredible conflict rages and all modern day battles pale in comparison.
http://www.mageslair.net/ - Where reality becomes addition and your addition is reality.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
I played on:
"Douglas" gives a shout out to everyone from those MUDs.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Ahh, yes, MUDs. Such great time wasters. I too saw many people flunk out because of them. Actually, some of them were probably my fault since I'm the one who introduced them to the game!
I cut my teeth on Eltanin but spent most of my time on CrystalShard (Shout out to Rush, Ganja, and Dracos!).
I also had a really cool house just over the river in TANSTAAFL in FurryMUCK, but I never finished it because I really, really, needed to get that next level over at CS. (And the next, and the next...)
Had an apartment on LambdaMOO too but I hardly ever went there.
I play them off and on. The hankering always comes back.
Currently, it's Achaea. IronRealms does some good stuff. Dragon Realms is pretty awesome too, but subscriptions aren't my thing really.
Long live the MUD!
Wow. 0.3 k modems. That sounds so sloooooow.
300 baud? Yeah, sure... I had one of those before I upgraded to 1200, and later, 2400 baud... 300 was slow enough to have clear difficulty keeping up with a user's typing...
Bow-ties are cool.
Back in college between 1994-1998 my MUD of choice was Kingdoms http://www.kingdoms.se/. But, what really held my interest was programming TinyFugue http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/. I had macros and autoresponders for everything. No one could touch me without some good autoretribution. I even created some remote controllable semi-AI bots such as Locutus of Borg who went around trying to assimilate people and one linked to an outside lisa/eliza type program that just went around chatting with people just to watch the hilarious conversations :-)
You wield the Annihilator.
Annihilator says: Let's kick some butt!
Nevermore.
The mysterious, post-apocalyptic, "dhalgren" MOO was much fun as well, you could start building right away, with the potential to get your area hooked up to the public world eventually. And you could have your programmer bit turned on just by asking nicely. I can't find this one any more, not sure if it still exists.
I especially miss "moosburg," which was a MOO copy of a small town. We built a lot of stuff there and I watched kids as young as 8 years old learn to program objects and places for it. It's was a student project and is gone now (but not forgotten).
Would LORD, Legend of the Red Dragon be considered a MUD? I spent many a fine hour tying up my parent's phone line playing it.
"Thematically the game is based on Wasteland, an old post-apocalyptic RPG set in the irradiated wastelands of the American Southwest. Desolation is not a newbie-friendly MUD, and intelligent roleplaying is heavily encouraged. "
Can you dig it?
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
I've spent a lot of time on a LP mud, and it was there I really learned the craft of coding. The coding environment is really a good way of becoming a good, thorough and paranoid programmer.
- Everyone can call your code, and use your items/code in ways you never intended. :)
- You can use others code to do fun stuff.
- You can make stuff that would be almost impossible to do in a graphical world. The written word is a very powerful
- LPC is object oriented and every item in the mud is also an object. (The room, the monster, the player, the drink, the sword, aso)
- The coding environment is a simulated unix environment with all the regular unix like commands.
- The environment is 100% dynamic where you as a creator (wizard) can load up new items, test and toy with them in the same environment as the players. You are though not supposed to interact with the gameplay though.
The mud I played on was connect.vikingmud.org 2001. The mud is still up with some players still finding the free gameplay fun. The game is pretty much hack & slash if you have played it for a while, but there is plenty of quests to solve too.
I have some areas there and a guild in play - Body Snatchers - where you play entities that take over game monsters to go kill with them.
Knubo
Shadow's Edge, Genocide, Discworld... a few other LPMud's I don't remember the names of...
lpc rocks.
imagination > graphics
Yeah, I learned everything I needed to know about social software from TinyMUD. Bring people with similar interests together, and give them tools to build and shape their environment from within, and you will be rewarded with a thriving community... provided you can keep them from sucking up all of the available cpu cycles and bandwidth.
I still want to build virtual-world-building tools. I still get excited when I think about online theatrical performances. I still think that information should be organized in logically linked three-dimensional spaces.
I would still rather call an object factory a "vending machine". It just makes more sense.
I guess no Essex University topic would be complete with out mention of Archipelago a Circle 2.2 derived MUD which I ran at Essex for three years from '93-'96.
-- Back to the shadows again...
Yeah, I've played TorilMUD/Sojourn since the early 90s. Totally got me hooked on the massive multi-player scene. Little do many people know, but Brad McQuaid played TorilMUD, and later used his knowledge to help launch Everquest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_McQuaid With over 50,000 rooms and a highly modified DIKU base, Toril was hands down my favorite mud to play.
Discworld was where I started. Ah, the memories.
Discworld
I used to play--and still DO play--both tinyTIM (yay.tim.org:5440) (which is down at the moment pending a new disk drive) and Trippy (pebkac.trippy.org:7567). Both are MUSHes.
MUD still lives. :) Viva MUDs!