| Part of a series on |
| Role-playing video games |
|---|
 |
| Subgenres |
| Topics |
| Lists |
Amulti-user dungeon (MUD,/mʌd/), also known as amulti-user dimension ormulti-user domain,[1][2] is amultiplayerreal-timevirtual world, usuallytext-based orstoryboarded. MUDs combine elements ofrole-playing games,hack and slash,player versus player,interactive fiction, andonline chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, andnon-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble anatural language, as well as using a character typically called anavatar.[3]
Traditional MUDs implement arole-playing video game set in afantasy world populated byfictional races and monsters, with players choosingclasses in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slaymonsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story byroleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice-rolling rules of theDungeons & Dragons series of games.
Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others havescience fiction settings or are based on popular books, movies, animations, periods of history, worlds populated by anthropomorphic animals, and so on. Not all MUDs are games; some are designed foreducational purposes, while others are purelychat environments, and theflexible nature of many MUD servers leads to their occasional use in areas ranging fromcomputer science research togeoinformatics tomedical informatics toanalytical chemistry.[4][5][6][7] MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, includingcommunications,sociology,law, andeconomics.[8][9][10] At one time, there was interest from the United States military in using them for teleconferencing.[11]
Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to play; some may accept donations or allow players topurchase virtual items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee. MUDs can be accessed via standardtelnet clients, or specialized MUD clients, which are designed to improve the user experience. Numerous games are listed at various web portals, such asThe Mud Connector.
The history of modernmassively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) likeEverQuest andUltima Online, and relatedvirtual world genres such as the social virtual worlds exemplified bySecond Life, can be traced directly back to the MUD genre.[10][12] Indeed, before the invention of the term MMORPG, games of this style were simply calledgraphical MUDs. A number of influential MMORPG designers began asMUD developers and/or players[13] (such asRaph Koster,Brad McQuaid,[14] Matt Firor, andBrian Green[15]) or were involved with early MUDs (likeMark Jacobs andJ. Todd Coleman).
Colossal Cave Adventure, created in 1975 byWill Crowther on aDECPDP-10 computer, was the first widely playedadventure game. The game was significantly expanded in 1976 byDon Woods. Also calledAdventure, it contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlleddungeon master.[16][17]
Numerousdungeon crawlers were created on thePLATO system at the University of Illinois and other American universities that used PLATO, beginning in 1975. Among them were "pedit5", "oubliette", "moria", "avatar", "krozair", "dungeon", "dnd", "crypt", and "drygulch". By 1978–79, these games were heavily in use on various PLATO systems, and exhibited a marked increase in sophistication in terms of 3D graphics, storytelling, user involvement, team play, and depth of objects and monsters in the dungeons.[18]
Inspired byAdventure, a group of students atMIT in the summer of 1977 wrote a game for the PDP-10 minicomputer; calledZork, it became quite popular on theARPANET.Zork wasported, under the filename DUNGEN ("dungeon"), toFORTRAN by a programmer working atDEC in 1978.[19][1]
In 1978Roy Trubshaw, a student at theUniversity of Essex in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in theMACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the gameMUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to theDungeon variant ofZork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.[20] Trubshaw converted MUD toBCPL (the predecessor ofC), before handing over development toRichard Bartle, a fellow student at the University of Essex, in 1980.[21][22][23] The game revolved around gaining points till one achieved the Wizard rank, giving the character immortality and special powers over mortals.
MUD, better known asEssex MUD andMUD1 in later years, ran on theUniversity of Essex network, and became more widely accessible when a guest account was set up that allowed users onJANET (a British academicX.25 computer network) to connect on weekends and between the hours of 2 AM and 8 AM on weekdays.[24] It became the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980 and started the online gaming industry as a whole[25] when the university connected its internal network toARPANET.[26]
The originalMUD game was closed down in late 1987,[27] reportedly under pressure fromCompuServe, to whom Richard Bartle had licensed the game. This leftMIST, a derivative ofMUD1 with similar gameplay, as the only remaining MUD running on the University of Essex network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity.MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, aPDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.[28]
1985 saw the origin of a number of projects inspired by the originalMUD. These includedGods byBen Laurie, aMUD1 clone that includedonline creation in its endgame, and which became a commercial MUD in 1988;[29] andMirrorWorld,[30] atolkienesque MUD started by Pip Cordrey who gathered some people on a BBS he ran to create aMUD1 clone that would run on a home computer.
Neil Newell, an avidMUD1 player, started programming his own MUD calledSHADES during Christmas 1985, becauseMUD1 was closed down during the holidays. Starting out as a hobby,SHADES became accessible in the UK as a commercial MUD via British Telecom'sPrestel andMicronet networks.[31] A scandal onSHADES led to the closure ofMicronet, as described inIndra Sinha's net-memoir,The Cybergypsies.[32]
At the same time,Compunet started a project namedMulti-User Galaxy Game as a science fiction alternative toMUD1, a copy of which they were running on their system at the time. When one of the two programmers left CompuNet, the remaining programmer, Alan Lenton, decided to rewrite the game from scratch and named itFederation II (at the time noFederation I existed). The MUD was officially launched in 1989.[33]Federation II was later picked up by AOL, where it became known simply asFederation: Adult Space Fantasy.Federation later left AOL to run on its own after AOL began offering unlimited service.
In 1978, around the same time Roy Trubshaw wroteMUD, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game calledScepter (Scepter of Goth), and later calledMilieu using Multi-Pascal on aCDC Cyber 6600 seriesmainframe which was operated by theMinnesota Educational Computing Consortium.[34] Klietz portedMilieu to anIBM XT in 1983, naming the new portScepter of Goth.Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. It was the first commercial MUD;[35] franchises were sold to a number of locations.Scepter was first owned and run by GamBit (ofMinneapolis, Minnesota), founded by Bob Alberti. GamBit's assets were later sold toInterplay Productions.[36][37]
In 1984, Mark Peterson wroteThe Realm of Angmar, beginning as aclone ofScepter of Goth. In 1994, Peterson rewroteThe Realm of Angmar, adapting it toMS-DOS (the basis for many dial-inBBS systems), and renamed itSwords of Chaos. For a few years this was a popular form of MUD, hosted on a number of BBS systems, until widespread Internet access eliminated most BBSes.[citation needed]
In 1984,Mark Jacobs created and deployed a commercial gaming site,Gamers World. The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD calledAradath (which was later renamed, upgraded and ported toGEnie asDragon's Gate) and a4X science-fiction game calledGalaxy, which was also ported toGEnie. At its peak, the site had about 100 monthly subscribers to bothAradath andGalaxy. GEnie was shut down in the late 1990s, althoughDragon's Gate was later brought toAOL before it was finally released on its own. Dragon's Gate was closed on February 10, 2007.[38]
In the summer of 1980,University of Virginia classmates John Taylor andKelton Flinn wroteDungeons of Kesmai, a six player game inspired byDungeons & Dragons which usedroguelikeASCII graphics. They founded theKesmai company in 1982 and in 1985 an enhanced version ofDungeons of Kesmai,Island of Kesmai, was launched onCompuServe. Later, its 2-D graphical descendantLegends of Kesmai was launched onAOL in 1996. The games were retired commercially in 2000.[39]
The popularity of MUDs of the University of Essex tradition escalated in the United States during the late 1980s when affordablepersonal computers with 300 to 2400 bit/smodems enabled role-players to log into multi-lineBBSs andonline service providers such asCompuServe. During this time it was sometimes said that MUD stands for "Multi Undergraduate Destroyer" due to their popularity among college students and the amount of time devoted to them.[40]
Avalon: The Legend Lives was published by Yehuda Simmons in 1989. It was the firstpersistent game world of its kind without the traditional hourly resets[41] and points-based puzzle solving progression systems.[42] Avalon introduced equilibrium and balance (cooldowns), skill-based player vs player combat and concepts such as player-run governments and player housing.[43]
In 2004, significant usages of MUDs included "online gaming, education,...socializing", and religiousrituals or other religious activities.[3]
The first popular MUDcodebase was AberMUD, written in 1987 byAlan Cox, named after theUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth. Alan Cox had played the originalUniversity of Essex MUD, and the gameplay was heavily influenced by it.[44] AberMUD was initially written inB for a Honeywell L66 mainframe under GCOS3/TSS. In late 1988 it was ported toC, which enabled it to spread rapidly to manyUnix platforms upon its release in 1989. AberMUD's popularity resulted in several inspired works, the most notable of which wereTinyMUD,LPMud, andDikuMUD.[45]
Monster was a multi-user adventure game created byRichard Skrenta for theVAX and written inVMS Pascal. It was publicly released in November 1988.[46][47]Monster was disk-based and modifications to the game were immediate.Monster pioneered the approach of allowing players tobuild the game world, setting new puzzles or creating dungeons for other players to explore.[48] Monster, which comprised about 60,000 lines of code, had many features which appeared to be designed to allowColossal Cave Adventure to work in it. Though there never were many network-accessible Monster servers, it inspiredJames Aspnes to create a stripped-down version ofMonster which he called TinyMUD.[49]
TinyMUD, written in C and released in late 1989, spawneda number of descendants, includingTinyMUCK andTinyMUSH. TinyMUCK version 2 contained a full programming language namedMUF (Multi-UserForth), whileMUSH greatly expanded the command interface. To distance itself from the combat-oriented traditional MUDs it was said that the "D" in TinyMUD stood for Multi-User "Domain" or "Dimension"; this, along with the eventual popularity of acronyms other than MUD (such as MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, and so on) for this kind of server, led to the eventual adoption of the termMU* to refer to theTinyMUD family.[1][2] UberMUD, UnterMUD, andMOO were inspired by TinyMUD but are not direct descendants.[50]
TinyMUD is also used to refer to the first database run under the TinyMUD codebase, which is also known as TinyMUD Classic;[51] it ran from August 1989 to April 1990, and still comes back up every August during a holiday called Brigadoon Day, a reference to the Scottish village in the musicalBrigadoon.
In 1989, LPMud was developed byLars Pensjö (hence theLP in LPMud). Pensjö had been an avid player ofTinyMUD andAberMUD and wanted to create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the gameplay of AberMUD. In order to accomplish this he wrote what is nowadays known as avirtual machine, which he called the LPMud driver, that ran the C-likeLPC programming language used to create the game world.[52] Pensjö's interest in LPMud eventually waned and development was carried on by others such asJörn "Amylaar" Rennecke,Felix "Dworkin" Croes, Tim "Beek" Hollebeek and Lars Düning. During the early 1990s, LPMud was one of the most popular MUD codebases.[53]Descendants of the original LPMud includeMudOS,DGD,SWLPC,FluffOS, and the Pike programming language, the latter the work of long-time LPMud developer Fredrik "Profezzorn" Hübinette.
In 1990, the release of DikuMUD, which was inspired by AberMUD, led to a virtual explosion ofhack and slash MUDs based upon its code. DikuMUD inspirednumerous derivative codebases, includingCircleMUD,Merc,ROM,SMAUG, andGodWars. The original Diku team comprised Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt. DikuMUD had a key influence on the early evolution of theMMORPG genre, withEverQuest (created by avid DikuMUD playerBrad McQuaid[14]) displaying such Diku-like gameplay thatVerant developers were made to issue a sworn statement that no actual DikuMUD code was incorporated.[54][55]
In 1987, David Whatley, having previously playedScepter of Goth andIsland of Kesmai, founded Simutronics with Tom and Susan Zelinski.[56] In the same year they demonstrated a prototype ofGemStone toGEnie. After a short-lived instance ofGemStone II,GemStone III was officially launched in February 1990.GemStone III became available onAOL in September 1995, followed by the release ofDragonRealms in February 1996. By the end of 1997GemStone III andDragonRealms had become the first and second most played games on AOL.[57]
The typical MUD will describe to the player the room or area they are standing in, listing the objects, players andnon-player characters (NPCs) in the area, as well as all of the exits. To carry out a task the player would enter a text command such astake apple orattack dragon. Movement around the game environment is generally accomplished by entering the direction (or an abbreviation of it) in which the player wishes to move, for example typingnorth or justn would cause the player to exit the current area via the path to the north.[58]
MUD clients are computer applications that make the MUDtelnet interface more accessible to users,[59] with features such assyntax highlighting,keyboard macros, and connection assistance.[60][61] Prominent clients include TinyTalk, TinyFugue, TinTin++, and zMUD.[62][63]
While there have been many variations in overall focus,gameplay and features in MUDs, some distinct sub-groups have formed that can be used to help categorize differentgame mechanics,game genres andnon-game uses.
Perhaps the most common approach to game design in MUDs is to loosely emulate the structure of aDungeons & Dragons campaign focused more on fighting and advancement than role-playing. When these MUDs restrictplayer-killing in favor ofplayer versus environment conflict andquesting, they are labeledhack and slash MUDs. This may be considered particularly appropriate since, due to the room-based nature of traditional MUDs, ranged combat is typically difficult to implement, resulting in most MUDs equipping characters mainly with close-combat weapons. This style of game was also historically referred to within the MUD genre as "adventure games", but video gaming as a whole has developed a meaning of "adventure game" that is greatly at odds with this usage.
Most MUDs restrict player versus player combat, often abbreviated as PK (Player Killing). This is accomplished through hard coded restrictions and various forms of social intervention. MUDs without these restrictions are commonly known asPK MUDs. Taking this a step further are MUDs devotedsolely to this sort of conflict, calledpure PK MUDs, the first of which wasGenocide in 1992.[64]Genocide's ideas were influential in the evolution ofplayer versus player online gaming.[65]
Roleplaying MUDs, generally abbreviated asRP MUDs, encourage or enforce that players act out the role of their playing characters at all times. Some RP MUDs provide an immersive gaming environment, while others only provide a virtual world with no game elements. MUDs where roleplay is enforced and the game world is heavily computer-modeled are sometimes known asroleplay intensive MUDs, orRPIMUDs.[66] In many cases, role-playing MUDs attempt to differentiate themselves from hack and slash types, by dropping the "MUD" name entirely, and instead usingMUX (Multi-User Experience) orMUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination).
Social MUDs de-emphasize game elements in favor of an environment designed primarily for socializing. They are differentiated from talkers by retaining elements beyond online chat, typicallyonline creation as a community activity and some element ofrole-playing. Often such MUDs have broadly defined contingents of socializers and roleplayers. Server software in theTinyMUD family, orMU*, is traditionally used to implement social MUDs.
A less-known MUD variant is thetalker, a variety ofonline chat environment typically based on server software likeew-too orNUTS. Most of the early Internet talkers wereLPMuds with the majority of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication commands. The first Internet talker wasCat Chat in 1990.
Taking advantage of the flexibility of MUD server software, some MUDs are designed for educational purposes rather than gaming or chat.MicroMUSE is considered by author Lauren P. Burka to have been the first educational MUD,[67] but it can be argued[weasel words] that its evolution into this role was not complete until 1994,[68] which would make the first of many educationalMOOs,Diversity University in 1993, also the first educational MUD. The MUD medium lends itself naturally toconstructionist learning pedagogical approaches. The Mud Institute (TMI) was an LPMud opened in February 1992 as a gathering place for people interested in developing LPMud and teaching LPC after it became clear that Lars Pensjö had lost interest in the project. TMI focussed on both the LPMud driver and library, the driver evolving into MudOS. The TMI Mudlib was never officially released, but was influential in the development of other libraries.
Agraphical MUD is a MUD that usescomputer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors.[69] A prominent early graphical MUD wasHabitat, written byRandy Farmer andChip Morningstar forLucasfilm in 1985.[70] Some graphical MUDs require players to download a special client and the game's artwork, while others provide a rich experience by being website-based. Graphical MUDs range from simply enhancing theuser interface (e.g. Wolfery provides an option to set the room picture, but otherwise remains a text-based interaction) to simulating 3D worlds with visual spatial relationships and customizedavatar appearances (e.g.Ultima Online provides a rich point-and-click experience).
Games such asMeridian 59,EverQuest,Ultima Online andDark Age of Camelot were routinely called graphical MUDs in their earlier years.[71][72][73][74]RuneScape was actually originally intended to be atext-based MUD, but graphics were added very early in development, during which it was called DeviousMUD.[75][76][77] However, with the increase in computing power and Internet connectivity during the late 1990s, and the shift of online gaming to the mass market, the term "graphical MUD" fell out of favor, being replaced by MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) a term coined byRichard Garriott in 1997.[78]
Within a MUD's technical infrastructure, a mudlib (concatenation of "MUD library")[79][80] defines the rules of the in-game world.[81] Examples of mudlibs includeAin Soph Mudlib,CDlib,[82]Discworld Mudlib,Lima Mudlib,[83]LPUniversity Mudlib,MorgenGrauen Mudlib,Nightmare Mudlib, andTMI Mudlib.
MUD history has been preserved primarily through community sites and blogs and not through mainstream sources with journalistic repute.[84] As of the late 1990s, a website calledThe Mud Connector has served as a central and curated repository for active MUDs.[85][86][87] In 1995,The Independent reported that over 60,000 people regularly played about 600 MUDs, up from 170 MUDs three years prior.The Independent also noted distinct patterns of socialization within MUD communities.[88]
In 2004, MUDs were relatively popular in theUnited States and mostly text-based.[3]
Seraphina Brennan ofMassively wrote that the MUD community was "in decline" as of 2009.[84]
Sherry Turkle developed a theory that the constant use (and in many cases, overuse) of MUDs allows users to develop different personalities in their environments. She uses examples, dating back to the text-based MUDs of the mid-1990s, showing college students who simultaneously live different lives through characters in separate MUDs, up to three at a time, all while doing schoolwork. The students claimed that it was a way to "shut off" their own lives for a while and become part of another reality. Turkle claims that this could present a psychological problem of identity for today's youths.[8]
"A Story About A Tree" is a short essay written byRaph Koster regarding the death of aLegendMUD player named Karyn, raising the subject of inter-human relationships in virtual worlds.
Observations of MUD-play showstyles of play that can be roughly categorized. Achievers focus on concrete measurements of success such asexperience points, levels, and wealth; Explorers investigate every nook and cranny of the game, and evaluate differentgame mechanical options; Socializers devote most of their energy to interacting with other players; and then there are Killers who focus on interacting negatively with other players, if permitted, killing the other characters or otherwise thwarting their play. Few players play only one way; most exhibit a diverse style.[89] According toRichard Bartle, "People go there as part of a hero's journey—a means of self-discovery".[90]
Research has suggested that various factors combine in MUDs to provide users with a sense ofpresence rather than simply communication.[91]
As a noun, the wordMUD is variously written MUD, Mud, and mud, depending on speaker and context. It is also used as a verb, withto mud meaning to play or interact with a MUD andmudding referring to the act of doing so.[92] Amudder is one who MUDs.[93]Compound words andportmanteaux such asmudlist,mudsex, andmudflation[94] are also regularly coined.Puns on the "wet dirt" meaning of "mud" are endemic, as with, for example, the names of theROM (RiversofMUD),MUCK,MUSH, andCoffeeMUD codebases and the MUDMuddy Waters.
[...] muds had evolved to the point where the original name was too confining, and people started to say that "MUD" stood for the more generic "Multi-User Dimension" or "Multi-User Domain".
Programs in LPC programming language were developed to perform the following tasks: First, each set of CVs was separated into single CVs, and each of them were plotted. An average CV from all the CVs in one set was calculated and plotted as well. All images belonging to one set of CVs were combined into short animated movies to visualize the changes over time. The graphs of the averaged CVs from all measurement points within a line scan were combined into an animation for demonstrating the systematic changes along each of the Pt stripes. After that, specific parameters were extracted from each CV (see below). These parameters and some derived values were tabulated and plotted versus the x-coordinate of the measurement point. Thus, different graphs for each line scan were created showing the changes in specific properties along the thickness of the Pt stripe. The combined tabulated data for each wafer was then used to plot a 3D image of several parameters vs substrate composition and nominal thickness. The LPC programs were compiled using LDMud (V3.3.719).
[pp. 10] The ancestors of MMORPGS were text-based multiuser domains (MUDs) [...] [pp. 291] Indeed, MUDs generate perhaps the one historical connection between game-based VR and the traditional program [...]
The thing is, though, that even if the likes of Oubliette did count as a virtual world, they had pretty well zero effect on the development of today's virtual worlds. Follow the audit trail back from World of Warcraft, and you wind up at MUD.
The MUDs I played extensively: Genocide (where I first used the name "Psychochild"), Highlands, Farside, Kerovnia, and Astaria.
Containing many of the features of a D&D game, it added an interesting twist -- the dungeon master, the person who set-up and ran a D&D world, was played by the Adventure computer program itself.
Zork was too much of a nonsense word, not descriptive of the game, etc., etc., etc. Silly as it sounds, we eventually started calling it Dungeon. (Dave admits to suggesting the new name, but that's only a minor sin.) When Bob the lunatic released his FORTRAN version to the DEC users' group, that was the name he used.
In 1980, Roy Traubshaw, a British fan of the fantasy role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons, wrote an electronic version of that game during his final undergraduate year at Essex College. The following year, his classmate Richard Bartle took over the game, expanding the number of potential players and their options for action. He called the game MUD (for Multi-User Dungeons), and put it onto the Internet.
The program was also becoming unmanageable, as it was written in assembler. Hence, he rewrote everything in BCPL, starting late 1979 and working up to about Easter 1980. The finished product was the heart of the system which many people came to believe was the "original" MUD. In fact, it was version 3.
The point of the game was to gain points until you achieved the rank of wizard, at which point you became immortal and gained certain powers over mortals. Points were scored by killing things or dropping treasure into a swamp. The game gained some popularity in Britain when a guest account was set up that allowed users on JANET (the British academic network) to play during the small hours of the morning each day.
1980 [...] Final version ofMUD1 completed by Richard Bartle. Essex goes on the ARPANet, resulting in Internet MUDs!
This is the "classic" MUD, played by many people both internal and external to the University. Although eventually available only during night-time due to the effects of its popularity on the system, its impact on on-line gaming has been immense. I eventually closed it down on 30/9/87 upon leaving Essex University to work for MUSE full time.
October of 1987 was chaos. The MUD account was deleted, but the guest account on Essex University remained open. I guess it wasn't causing any trouble so they simply left it. ROCK, UNI and MUD all ran from the MUD account so they had gone but... MIST ran from a student account and it was still playable.
Although the present system went live in October 1988, Gods began in 1985 as a non-commercial MUA; its author was inspired by MUD1 to write his own game, and was among the first people to do so. Gods was Shades' only rival to be the Prestel Micronet MUA.
Pip Cordrey used to run a BBS called 'Labbs', which had a section devoted to MUD1 in its early days. Six people from St. Paul's School worked on that section, and Cordrey organised them into a team to develop a MUA that would run on a home computer. The system was named MirrorWorld because it had rolling resets (as in the film "Westworld"). It went live in 1986.
Written by Neil Newell, originally as a hobby because he enjoyed playing- the original MUD so much on Essex University, SHADES has recently. been launched on Micronet, the computer network, which has a large Commodore user-base.
The Multi-User Galaxy Game project was begun in 1985 by CompuNet as a SF alternative to MUD1, which then ran on the system. When the other programmer left CompuNet, Lenton rewrote the game from scratch asFederation II. It was officially launched on CompuNet in 1989; reported also to run on MicroLink, and on any other commercial system willing to take it.
Milieu was originally written for a CDC Cyber owned by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. High school students from around the state were given access to the machine for educational purposes; they often ended up writing chat programs and games instead. I am uncertain of the precise time frame, but I believe Milieu probably predates MUD.
in 1983, Klietz formed a company, GāmBit, with Bob Alberti and two others to commercialize Sceptre.
As micros became cost effective, the MECC mainframe became obsolete and was shut down in 1983. Scepter then went commercial in a collaboration between several ex-MECC (and by then also post-highschool) game hackers. It was rewritten in C and ran on a PC XT running QNX. It supported 16 dialup users, and dialup installations were set up in 5 states and Canada. This exposed Scepter to a lot of budding MUD developers at a time when the Internet was just getting started.
So after more than 15 years of great memories, with a heavy heart, I am going to officially declare Dragon's Gate closed... at least for now.
1985 [...]"My memory says thatIsland of Kesmai went live on CompuServe on December 15, 1985, after a very long internal test. The price was actually $6 an hour for 300 baud, $12 for 1200 baud. Serious players paid the bucks."—Kelton Flinn [...] 2000 [...] In May, Electronics Arts announces the shutdown of most of the Kesmai games, including Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior Classic.
Some would insist however that 'MUD' does in fact stand for Multi Undergraduate Destroyer, in recognition of the number of students who may have failed their classes due to too much time spent MUDding!
When you leave the game, objects can be kept for when you restart (eg. that weapon you commissioned from a smith), and you restart in the room from which you quit. This means some objects can be kept unavailable for long periods if their owner isn't playing. There are no resets.
Experience is obtained by visiting new places, wandering around exploring, and even by simply chatting. This contrasts with the usual MUA scheme where points are obtained for finding treasure or performing specific tasks.
Almost anything can be bought, including houses, shops, taverns, animals, weapons, food and drink. Personae may use certain skills to create objects, eg. potions, which can be sold to other players for use on their adventures.
Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Monster was written in VMS Pascal under VMS 4.6.
Monster allows players to do something that very few, if any, other games allow: the players themselves create the fantasy world as part of the game. Players can create objects, make locations, and set up puzzles for other players to solve.
TinyMUD 1.0 was initially designed as a portable, stripped-down version of Monster (this was back in the days when TinyMUD was designed to be up and running in a week of coding and last for a month before everybody got bored of it.)
August 19, 1989. Jim Aspnes announces the availability of TinyMUD to a few friends. Its port, 4201, is Aspnes' office number. TinyMUD is written in C for Unix, and was originally conceived as a front-end for IRC.
1989 [...] Lars Penjske createsLPMud and opensGenesis. "Having fun playingTinyMUD andAberMUD, Lars Penjske decides to write a server to combine the extensibility ofTinyMUD with the adventures ofAberMUD. Out of this inspiration, he designedLPC as a special MUD language to make extending the game simple. Lars says, '...I didn't think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this.' The first running code was developed in a week on Unix System V using IPC, not BSD sockets. Early object-oriented features only existed accidentally by way of the nature of MUDs manipulating objects. As Lars learned C++, he gradually extended those features. The result is that the whole LPMud was developed from a small prototype, gradually extended with features." —George Reese'sLPMud Timeline
The original LPMUD was written by Lars Pensjö and others, and became one of the most popular MUD's by the early 1990s.
Simutronics was originally the brain-child of David Whatley. As a teenager, he'd been big into the old BBS days and had even written some Fantasy Game BBS software that he sold all over the world, and he did this all from his parents' home. He'd also gotten involved as a player in some of the early multiplayer games that were out there such as Sceptre and Island of Kesmai, and, like many others who play these games, he thought to himself, "I can do this too." So in 1987, at the age of 21, he founded Simutronics Corporation with Tom and Susan Zelinski.
December, 1996 - GemStone III and DragonRealms are the top two titles (hours/month) in industry
A better way to connect to a MUD is by using a MUD client program: a program specifically designed for MUDding. A MUD program is really a telnet program that has had various MUD-related commands added.
January 1992 ¶ _Genocide_ starts as the first MUD dedicated totally to inter-player conflict, which is a fancy way of saying that its theme is creatively player-killing.
Unzählige MUD-Nachfolger (wie etwa MOO, MUSH, MUCK, etc.) verwendeten ähnliche Systeme und Thematiken — v. A. aus Fantasy und Science Fiction — und verstärkten teilweise den Rollenspiel-Charakter bis hin zu den 'sogennanten Role Play Intensive MUD (RPIMUD)'. ["Countless MUD successors (such as MOO, MUSH, MUCK, etc.) used similar systems and themes from fantasy and science fiction, and increased degrees of role-playing focus up to the so-called 'Role Play Intensive MUD (RPIMUD)'"]
Summer 1991. koosh (Nils McCarty) portsMicroMush to Chezmoto. The name is changed toMicroMuse at the suggestion of Wallace Feurzeig of BBN.MicroMuse evolves into the first educational Mud, with emphasis on K12 outreach.
[...] establishedHabitat as a result. This is described as a 2D graphical MUD, and while we now know thatHabitat was the first of many massively multiuser graphical chat spaces, we also know that the connection is not direct. [...] Its owners and makers (particularly F. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar) [...]
Some people describe it as a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) with a 3D interface and role playing character.
Then, in 1996, I was hired by Sony Interactive Studios to create a graphical, commercial MUD.
It made perfect sense for us to combine the two technologies and make a graphical MUD.
When I went to university, I discovered text-based MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. I loved the fact that these sorts of games had all these players playing at once - even when you were not playing, the world carried on without you. Because of this, I began creating my own text-based MUD, but I quickly realized that with so many of them out there, there was no way that mine would ever get noticed. So I began to search for a way to make mine stand out, and the obvious way, of course, was to add graphics. With my game, I was trying to emulate text MUDs at the time, purely as a hobby.
Olifiers began with a brief history of Jagex and RuneScape: how Lead Developer Andrew Gower and his brother Paul founded the company in Cambridge in 2001, bringing their love for classic MUDs into the visual realm. The original RuneScape (now referred to as RuneScape Classic) was simply and exactly that: a 2D graphical interface placed on top of a MUD
Richard Garriott first coined the termMMORPG in 1997.
Late 1991 ¶ After the retirement of Lars from _Genesis_, the _Genesis_ admins move to create the first LPMud-derived server, CD. CD stands for Chalmers Datorforening, Swedish for Chalmers Computing Club, where _Genesis_ and _Igor_ existed. In spite of his retirement from _Genesis_, Lars continued to develop LPMud.ad
The MUD Connector at http://www.mudconnect.com has just about everything you could possibly need to get on a MUD. It has MUD-related links to FAQs, newsgroups and clients; as well as player discussions and forums about different MUDs. This site also has a listing of over 500 MUDs, with pretty useful descriptions of what you can expect to find on most games. You can even click on the MUD or home page you'd like to see and link right to it. If you're shopping for a new MUD and aren't sure what you're looking for, this is the place to park it. We're talking big time bookmark material here.
The Mud Connector has, at the time of this writing, links to 205 active Muds. The Muds are reviewed periodically, so there are few dead links. What sets this site apart from some of the other Mud link connections listed here is that each link includes the name of the Mud, the kind of code it is based on (nice for developers), the telnet address written out, an active hyperlink to the telnet site and Web home page if one exists, and a short but useful description of the Mud. The list is alphabetized and broken into four sections for easy loading. There are also forms for submitting your Mud to the list. There is even a page for dead links in case you want to see what has gone before.
"The Mud Connector" is a complete on-line service designed to provide the most up-to-date listings of registered Multiuser on-line games. Every entry lists the site of the game, the base code used, descriptions of the game as submitted by the administrators, links to WWW homepages (when available), and Telnet links to the game.
The word "mud" is also used as a verb. For example, you might hear someone say, "I like to mud more than I like to sleep," or "I am a bit tired, as I was up all night mudding, so maybe you better go to class without me".
Often MUD users (or MUDders, as they call themselves) [...]
Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) | |
|---|---|
| Major branches | |
| Minor branches, codebases, libraries | |
| Concepts, terminology |
|
| Publications | |
| Companies, organizations | |
| Action |
|  | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Action-adventure | |||||||||||
| Adventure | |||||||||||
| Digital tabletop | |||||||||||
| Puzzle | |||||||||||
| Role-playing | |||||||||||
| Simulation |
| ||||||||||
| Strategy | |||||||||||
| Other genres | |||||||||||
| Related concepts |
| ||||||||||
