MUDs Turn 30 Years Old 238
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?
ahhh (Score:3, Interesting)
Kobra mudding (Score:4, Interesting)
AnimeMUD (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Tinyworld and the Univ of Northern Iowa (Score:5, Interesting)
SWR muds... Bad addiction (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Creeping Death! All the way! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Abermud explained it all for me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:God Bless (Score:3, Interesting)
I never got into MUDs for gaming. For me, it was partly the social aspect but mostly for the construction and coding. I played TinyMUDs, then later TinyMUCKs. I learned Forth by learning MUF.
I think I was the first person to code an elevator that wasn't just a set of numbered exits. Instead, choosing a floor number swapped out an invisible object with a new exit attached leading to the floor you chose. It would also swap the object on that floor to indicate that the elevator was there waiting for you to enter (otherwise you'd have to press the call button to bring the car to the floor). It didn't even need MUF until I wanted to figure out how to make it take time (because otherwise someone could just keep summoning the elevator to one floor keeping anyone else from getting off where they wanted to). I never got around to implementing that part though.
Working on that and other state machines got me to come up with the line, "Invisible objects aren't really invisible; they only look that way." For most people it's just a funny line, but in TinyMUCK it references that an invisible object can always be seen by its owner. There was a bit of a complaint in that: there didn't seem to be an option to hide my own invisible objects from myself.
I remember wishing that someone would create a client that would remember all the object IDs returned by @dig and @open and the like so that construction of complicated structures was simplified, to the extent where I could say "dig a room from here linked as north and backlinked as south" and other constructs that would negate my need to know actual object numbers.
I had also intended to implement my own version of TinyMUD in ACOS (GBBS Pro), and later in METAL (FutureVision), for use on a single-line dial-up BBS. Players left in a room would act as recorders of what happened in that room, creating a messaging system which you had to seek out the people you wanted to converse with and avoid interlopers you didn't want listening in. Implementation was to use the message forum file format for the object database, each object being a single message in that database, and each player object recording the size of the room they were in to know where to start reading anew. Once a room was vacated, its message history would be archived. Unfortunately, it was difficult to code such a system on a BBS intended to be live 24/7, and then the BBS scene ending and my educational requirements prevented me from implementing it.
Dude... (Score:1, Interesting)
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!
Re:30 years old (Score:3, Interesting)
Ya know, I have to say, of all the places I've ever hung out: bars, rock concerts, bike races, SecondLife, IRC, MySpace -- MUDs were the places that most reliably turned acquaintences into lovers. Dunno what it was about that social space but it seemed like all you had to do was sit there and type long into the night and eventually you'd end up negotiating where and when you were going to meet.
I'm not saying *easiest* -- there are lots more people on SecondLife, and a lot stupider people on MySpace. I'm saying the most *reliable*.
And the best part is that, unlike people I've met through other places, I'm still friends with a lot of the people I met through MUDs.
There was just an energetic dynamic going on there.
Re:What do you mean did? (Score:3, Interesting)
www.bat.org
BatMUD was my first foray into the world of online gaming as well. The amazing thing is that it's nearly two decades old itself, and still going moderately strong (although it doesn't get the 300+ peak simultaneous users it had back in the '90s).
Re:MajorMUD (Score:3, Interesting)
Time wasted? (Score:1, Interesting)
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/ [bat.org] 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
Holy Mission (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Kingdoms + TinyFugue (Score:2, Interesting)
You wield the Annihilator.
Annihilator says: Let's kick some butt!