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LambdaMOO, MUDs, and 'When the Internet Was Young' (undark.org)
Slashdot reader travers_r shares "a peek into the early days of internet culture and multiplayer gaming." (Apparently this MOO has been running continuously for 28 years.) "From the looks of it, squatters run it now..."
LambdaMOO was different from the earliest MUDs, which were Tolkienesque fantasies -- hack-and-slash games for Dungeons & Dragons types with computer access, mostly college students. LambdaMOO was one of the first social MUDs, where people convened largely to play-act society, and what might have been "one of the first MUDs to be run by an adult," [co-creator Pavel] Curtis believes... Everybody comes through the Coat Closet the first time they visit LambdaMOO, entering the Living Room through a curtain of clothes, like children into Narnia. In between the textual rooms and objects they explore, there's a faster-moving flow of words, the coursing real-time chatter of LambdaMOO's other users. This is a Multi-User Domain: a chatroom and a world at once, a place where telling takes the place of being...
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
My neckbeard just grew out from reading the summary.
Beware of the Leopard.
Cheeseplant's House was the first talker I was aware of, in 1990. Might be the first ever too. Used to hang out in Cheeseplant's House waiting for MIST to open - fantastic, and rather player v player bloodthirsty game before all the Diku and Tickle muds started taking over.
Great days. I was playing MIST one day in the spanking new University X Term labs, very expensive, when a bunch of six formers came in to look the wonders of higher education. I did a 'shout' on the game - "oh god, hordes of potential first years staring at me and I'm playing a game". Got back loads of shouts "Greetings from the Netherlands", "Hello from Germany"....etc. Bet you I did more for recruitment that day than the entire rest of the tour.
I am one of the few (and I am not proud of it, quite the contrary) who aren't affected by rosy retrospection.
When the Internet was young, it was difficult to access, difficult to use and didn't have much value outside of niche use(r)s.
MUDs were "multiplayer notepad" of sorts, and they were awesome because they were "the new thing". After a while, they stopped being that. It is debatable whether their replacement was an "improvement" or not. The best of them were very difficult to improve, even through adding multimedia files (images, audio, video,later 3D etc) - but this is valid for anything: it's difficult to improve something that is very good.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I'd hike down to the town's library to fire up that good old fashioned stock telnet client included with Windows and connect to my favorite MUD. (PokeMUD, which doesn't exist anymore.) Easiest way to beat the heat during the summer I ever found.
I went out to *BSD's grave on Decoration Day. The old forgotten cemetery is to be found adjacent to the dark woods beyond the edge of town. There within olfactory distance of the municipal treatment plant you will find *BSD's final resting place.
*BSD's tombstone was shrouded by thick mosses and knots of noxious ivy. A mournful, bedraggled crow stood watch as I gently pulled aside the tangled twists of thorns, and cleaned the decaying marker the best I could. A suffocating melancholia filled my heart, while I pondered that this indeed was *BSD's figurative charnel house of which so many have plaintively spoken.
Nothing is so pitiful as an untended grave, a loved one now forgotten. The short sad life of this doomed and fated OS makes us realize that there but for the grace of God go all of us.
I planted some wilting marigolds, found discarded in the waste heap behind the caretaker's shack, hoping that by some miracle these fleurs de mort take root and bring a modicum of cheer to *BSD's God forsaken plot. My fervent hope is that the torpid colored boy who so carelessly mows the cemetery doesn't slice them down, inadvertently mirroring *BSD's own doomed encounter with death's irresistible scythe.
Funny how things work out. Linux, that brilliant novam stellam, now runs the Internet and the world's fastest computers, while *BSD lies moldering within its forgotten crypt. Let the barren silence of *BSD's tomb be a mute reminder that hubris and braggadocio were no defense on that woeful day when the Angel of Death's bleak umbra was cast upon *BSD.
Still think fondly of the days of 100+ people on 139.102.12.14 2150 :) Mel treated us well. For those wondering it is still running although sometimes on an alternate IP... one or two people still haunt it most days.
I used to code for a MUD back around 2002. It was called Age of Legacy and I had a lot of fun working on it, setting up quests, fixing code, creating new spells. To me, having a text world accessible over telnet was more appealing than the stuff like World of Warcraft which soon came along and replace it. I was sorry to see it (and many other MUDs) taken off-line.
I pretty much lost my first year of college to Muddog, run out of the University of Florida. In fact, I still use my original avatar name as one of my logins all over the net. Then I moved on to Three Kingdoms once Muddog died out. Man, I loved it when they got the Portal client for windows with 3k. It was soooo much better than tinyfugue that we had been using.
They are still there if you know where to look. Connected on one know.
I think the MUSH variant really is the best explanation: Multi-User Shared Hallucination.
It is like cowriting a book, a massive tangled story that doesn't have to make sense and which only exists in the moments you are there. It is like Second Life, except you don't need to be a coding genius or rich kid to have pose balls and great graphics - the poses are anything you can think up, the graphics are in your mind's eye.
It is a freedom to move past not just reality, but the imagination of everyone else. For all the freedoms offered in Second Life, or in WoW, or in VR Chat, or anywhere else, there are constraints, things that can't be done either because no one else ever thought to do it or because the code isn't advanced enough.
On a MU* all you need is to think it and type it and then it happens because you will it into existence.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I grew up playing Zork and online text games. I was a longtime player of the World of Norrath(mud), which was the precursor to EverQuest. I was in grade school when the original D&D red box came out and I can remember the first time a group of 5 of us got together to battle the forces of darkness in the school library. I was an elf when that was a class unto itself. I still play pen and paper RPG's with a group twice a month, it is GURPS these days but little else has changed.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
....games for Dungeons & Dragons ...
We'd say "D and D" or "D&D"
Summary writer is a poser - isn't that what you kids say, "Poser"?
The article says "Multi User Domain." MUD actually was multi-user dungeon, as in online dungeons and dragons.
E
I remember thinking back in 1996 that everyone should get an Internet connection. It would be so awesome, everyone able to connect at the same time! Imagine the possibilities!
I was horribly, painfully wrong. The modern Internet is painful. Sure, it's much more useful, but damn... always on, all the time, never ending trite and drivel. I never thought I'd say this but I actually miss AOL dial-up. There were fewer idiots online then, including New Members Lobby... and that's a grand statement to make.
I know Batmud got into Steam greenlight before Valve discontinued submissions. As far as I know they're fairly close to completing the process.
As for graphical games and Wow, I don't recall them hurting the userbase much. The userbase on Bat was growing even after Wow had been out for a while. What precipitated a decline was a) there being tens of thousands of games that work on any hardware now, and b) logging in and being killed three rooms from the entrance by an event monster is a proud legacy of Muds, but also not a great way to attract new players.
Easy now. Isn't "incel" a little harsh? I mean the dude whacks off like a madman to tentacle porn. That has to at least count for something.
I remember playing a MUD called Barren Realms in college. Had no idea what I was doing. Spellcasters needed to pick up and use gear with the "flaming" modifier to boost their damage, a bit of knowledge I somehow missed, so I went around for months tickling mobs to death with acid blast, unable to do any better.
BR is also where I first inadvertently got introduced to the shadier aspects of online life. There was a "girl" I used to talk with, who one day asked me to help with some inventory management. It sounded odd to me but sure, why not? It wasn't until I read the whole interaction afterwards that I realized what had been done to me. The last two lines were something like "Evitalle drops the girdle. Ziyat gives Evitalle the spiked helmet."
I remember playing Medievia a lot. Color graphics (er, text)!
And being on DyrtDev; learning how to create your OWN worlds that others could play in.
Good times.
RealmsMUD was the best MUD. EVER!
Tsunami and Highlands were also really good. I remember back in '99 I logged into Tsunami after 5+ years of being gone (I had joined the Marine Corps) and my character was still there!
Good times.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I'm not sure any of them were tied to a database, but I'm sure MERC wasn't. Flat files for the win.
I know there's a meme in here somewhere...
Oh here it is!!!
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic...
Goddamn kids today and their nvida video cards and custom gamer chairs. When I was young we had MUDs.. Text on the screen and we had to use our imaginations to soo our tenno brothers and sisters in their spectacular nuclear war mud attire.
AND WE LIKED IT!
Played for about 5 years when it came out in 96. I just looked, and I think it is still going!
Wonder how many folks actually still play?
It sure does bring back memories. I was on LambdaMOO for a while, also worked with Pavel Curtis much later at a different job. Did my years on MUCKs and MUSHes, too. It's amazing how much this stuff is both ancient history and recent history all at the same time.
Back when I was young (and there was still snow THIS high, i.e. before global warming, and before the invention of boots) internet access in my country was pretty much something that you either had when you were rich or when you went to a technically inclined university. Now, transporting graphics on an internet link was pretty much unheard of or at the very least frowned upon (the university had a lightning fast 2mbit connection... still pretty impressive when you were used to 9.6kbit), so text it was.
This was also the time when I started playing a new kind of RPG, unfortunately one nobody else wanted to play, so when I found a MU* that did, my life was complete.
And my university progress took a sharp decline...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Played a lot on the Alfa Diku-MUD back in 1991 and also on Alex the next 2-3 years when Alfa shut down. Was loads of fun, though for a while it did affect university studies a bit... I guess this wave of muds in the early nineties were the precursors to modern day MMO/MMORPG. AlexMUD is still up to this day, with all characters intact (telnet alex.stacken.kth.se 4000). Quite desolate, but once a year or so I pop in a minute or two and check the immortals bulletin board and remember the good old times *smile*. /Mech
After the sad demise of Cheeseplant's house, I went looking for a new home.. And came across Igormud.. It's still going (igormud.org 1701).
I met a load of people on there that I became friendly with, and that got me to start travelling the world. Been round Europe and the States visiting people I'd met there. A good many of them have stayed friends with me, nigh on 30 years later!
Wow, what a time travel! I played Medina (telnet nescafab 4000) in 1997, which was actually an spanish adaptation of D&D. We used to connect from unix terminals at University's laboratories....
It was before the days of MMORPGs and the Graphical stuff they have now.
All the things that plague those now, used to be prevalent on the MUD: PKing, cyber bullying, code/glitch abuse, VAPEing of offenders, multi-logging, ALT characters, "illegal Trade" of EQ, "Twinking", etc.
All in all, they were training grounds for the admin staff of the new environs.
Ah, the good old days...
Still, I made a handful of friends there, and ticked off more than a few offenders, too.
I still play on the Discworld MUD to this day. It's been online since 1991 and my character is 17 years old now.
We were poor and my parents ignorant. My brother and I read a book in 1994-95 describing MUDs. We wanted in.
Put our work money together to buy a $500 Windows95 (Iâ(TM)m certain nowadays; pirated) from a guy who literally sold rigs out of his house. Weâ(TM)d pay for our internet access, too. We would run the 100â(TM) ohone Line from our parents room, army crawling after theyâ(TM)d gone to bed to hijack the line at my momâ(TM)s dresser. Suffering the yelling and âGet off the goddamn phone!â(TM) 3am reprimands. Who the f*** was going to call at that time? Cellphones werenâ(TM)t a thing, mom!
First game: TOS TrekMUSE. Iâ(TM)d watch my brother play. Heâ(TM)s watch me play. Weâ(TM)d hit seat the connection, convince the admin we werenâ(TM)t alts, and had a blast. Then OtherSpace MUSH. Then admin of my own MUSH for three successful years in the twilight of the medium.
Teenage me had access to adults from walks of life without the concern of predators. We were in equal footing. Adult me learned basic programming and logic and workarounds I still use to this day in my professional career. My MU** experience gives my excellent quality of life despite never attending college.
I havenâ(TM)t logged in for almost a decade. It makes me sad. Sad to even type this. A great golden age of the internet where it was still free, albeit slow and cumbersome.
But damn if I donâ(TM)t think about downloading PennMUSH and HSpace again and inviting some close friends.
Gonna have to start my server back up. Love scripting!
Star Trek MUSHes were my thing. Lord I loved those. Built in starship combat systems in them that, while text based, hands down beat for authenticity any ST game ever made. Multiple people at multiple "consoles", handling navigation, helm, weapons, engineering, shield control. What course do I need to go to put three different ships on three different shields? Any smart game company would have taken those systems, wrapped a GUI around it, and kept that game play. It's what STO should have been.
I was an administrator at PixieMUD (same handle). Yes, it was fantasy adventure themed. But the features that drove player attention was not the combat and treasure, but rather the range of "emotes" supported and the social chat lines and the ability to emote over them.
The internal coding of the MUD environment meant that players who earned write permissions ("wizards") could code areas and objects. Many people got their first exposure to coding through this. (A C-like language, LPC). That's important because the games were not played only by comp-sci students, in fact mostly by people from other majors.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
I was an imm in Rivers of Mud way back in the day. Had to telnet in on a terminal with amber text and it was great. Diablo came along and was revolutionary. And then Warcraft turned into World if Warcraft. And then the snot nosed babies used to brag about being on WOW since vanilla. Really....if you had graphics when you first started playing you were late to the picnic.
Now where is that darn Donation Pit?
Trout.complex (or, John Rescigno) tried to fuck my girlfriend. Turned out he only managed to get her to give him head. Then I married her. Who's the idiot now?
Bunch of power trippy a-holes.
Only if that user has somehow never heard of MMORPGs. A MUD is just a text-based non-massive version of that. LambdaMOO itself was more like Second Life or VRChat than a traditional MMO, but the analogy still stands.
Rob
My favorite were the talkers you telneted to....speedway.net comes to mind.
This was ~1992 or 1993.
I still drop by RetroMUD (www.retromud.org, or telnet retromud.org 3000) every week or two to slay some goblins or kreen. BatMUD is alive and well too.
Lots of other multiplayer textual games as well. Look for door games in internet BBSes, or play-by-forum-post roleplayers.
http://discworld.atuin.net/
Literally years of my life were spent playing this.
for Discworld mud
http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/mudlist.html is still up
http://www.mudconnect.com/ is around too
and there's a bunch more..
I played on some RP-only MUSHes for a while, but got out of them because of player drama, our horrid social skills and top it off with a case of mistaken identity.
As for MUDs, preferred Ancient Anguish the best (loved that Shapeshifter!).
Now I play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup in the console emulator instead of "WebTiles", like a man! ;) I want to bash things with my imagination with only optional socializing on the IRC channel now.
Seriously, DCSS still has BIG tournaments after every main version of the games is released out of "trunk"; it's still exciting to play even after many years.
Hope to see even more people dying to an asshole D:2 Sigmund...
Is that's you, mustafa ?
Zgz ccuz
When I was half my current age I used to spend quite a lot of time playing on MUDs over a dial-up connection, and after some time of playing a lot of that, I started dreaming in text. That was quite a surreal experience, because it was like I was there inside the world, except somehow it was all text, the conversation, the location, everything was there at the same time the text was being parsed in that dream state. Seems like my mind was processing it as if it was some kind of reality and certainly with that I think it really does fulfil the virtual reality description.
Please direct all bug reports to
I got C's in typing in high school. I never could get the hang of touch-typing and when the teacher would put the 'covers' over our hands so we couldn't see the keyboard, I really didn't do well at all.
A couple years later when I went to college and joined the nascent Internet, I started hanging out on a MOO and talking with new friends that way. You did a lot of typing...you had to type fast...and you had to be looking at the screen so you could see what else was going on. After a week of playing a MOO, I had progressed farther in my touch-typing than all the classes in high school had ever helped me.
(It also helped with scripting. The MOO I was on (sorry, I have no details) allowed you to build your own rooms and objects. You could then add actions or 'verbs' to those things and directly enhance the game world as a player/programmer. That was some great stuff.)
My first serious program was a MUD written on a Honeywell terminal in Basic, in the fall of 1983. It was the coolest thing ever for this young teen and his friends, and allowed us to convince the teacher to let us hang out in the computer room after school and on the weekends.
MUSH is still very much alive... look no further than Luigi's 8Bit MUSH.
Hmm that is a tough call...
I once spent 14 hours straight playing a MUD that was hosted on a SparcStation at the University of Toronto. I even tried my hand at scripting new areas for it. MUDs were addictive, so much fun, and a collosal waste of part of my youth. And this was all before the public even knew what the Internet was!
Avatar, on the NovaNET system. moved from the MAINEI system to the USM system to now Cyber1. It's been played since the early 80s, or before, on the UICU PLATO systems.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yeah. I've used MOOs in Brazil when internet was starting here in 1994/95. There were two big brazilian MOOs, the Science Fiction, hosted in the federal univerisy of Santa Maria, in southest stage of the country, and CPDEE, one in the department of electrict engineering in Minas Gerais federal university. I currently host myself a backup of the SiFi MOO myself and try to keep those memories alive for those who want to recall it, entering the old ruins of an ancient internet.