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Games Entertainment

MUDs Turn 30 Years Old 238

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-mod-10 dept.
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?
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MUDs Turn 30 Years Old More

MUDs Turn 30 Years Old

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    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 )

      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: (Score:2)

        by CaseM ( 746707 )
        Hurray for Batmud! It was double-edged sword for me - on the one hand it completely fucked up my grades my freshman year of college. On the other hand it hooked me up with a sweet piece of ass.

        Or maybe it was the other way around...dunno.
    • Man! I played FieryMud [fierymud.org]. Good times! I recently popped back by and it is still there, pretty amazing.

  • ahhh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@ g m a i l . com> on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:21PM (#25459085) Homepage
    So much wasted time. Best MUDs I found were the highly modified diku/circles, like ThunderdomeII and MUME.

    • Re:ahhh (Score:4, Funny)

      by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @07:07PM (#25462135) Homepage
      Time wasted? Ha! :) I taught myself object-oriented software engineering playing around on a MOO (MUD, Object Oriented). That's one of the reasons I was able to get myself more than $70k/yr straight out of college.

      (disclaimer: it is also very possible to teach yourself software engineering the wrong way using MUDs and MOOs and such. Especially in a learn-by-example environment...)

      • Haha, same here. The only reason I think I passed my 2nd semester C++ class was because I learned LPC as a wizard that semester. I'm still not sure if "this_player()" showed up on any of my code answers for the final in that class! And, as someone else mentioned in this thread, I learned to type as fast as I do on MUDs. My pseudonym came about because I wanted a hard-to-type name on a PK MUD. Heh.

        I thought it was mostly time wasted, too, until I realized how much I had learned. These days I'm an onlin

      • I came here to post the exact same thing.

    • MUME was my first as well!
    • Its funny that most people mention things like TinyMUD, diku and its ilk. While I certainly played them, what really got me hooked was Gemstone III and Dragonrealms by Simutronics. They had some of the most vibrant communities I've seen in an online game to date. No other game I've seen has an empath's guild where healers will just sit there and chat all day and heal people that come in. Who would have thought that if you created a healer class, and a hospital, that people would actually *gasp* GO TO TH

  • Aardwolf! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lookin4Trouble ( 1112649 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:22PM (#25459103)
    Aardwolf - where the men are MEN, and most of the women are too... http://www.aardmud.org/ [aardmud.org]

  • Kobra mudding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:22PM (#25459113)
    I played Kobra [kobramud.org] (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!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Atario ( 673917 )

      In my dorm in college, there was a guy who quickly slid into a state of MUD addiction, and I'm not being cute. Eventually, he stopped going to his classes, he stopped going to the dining hall (opting for Domino's delivered constantly), he stopped interacting with most of us. We were sure he must have dropped out after that year. It was a sad case, though none of us felt too bad about it because he was kind of a dick even apart from MUDs.

  • 30 years old (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bastard of Subhumani ( 827601 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:22PM (#25459117) Journal
    30 years old ... and they still haven't got laid.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by smellsofbikes ( 890263 )

      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 s

    • Actually both the MUDs addictions I've had (Animud.net and Dragonball Evolution) have unfortunately been broken by girls. I wish I'd stuck with the MUDs to be honest, they were a far more rewarding use of my time.

      I've never been a big fan of modern MMORPGs, but I love MUDs for some reason :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CFTM ( 513264 )

        I'm the same way and it's really quite simple, my imagination powns modern graphics cards and MMO environments!

  • I'm still playing Terris, over 10 years and still going strong.
    Absolutely love MUDs.

    • Re:What MUDs "did" I play? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Luyseyal ( 3154 ) <swaters@@@luy...info> on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:42PM (#25459499) Homepage

      D'oh, I thought you said "Tetris" and I was like "Tetris is a MUD?" and tried to imagine a Tetris based MUD.

      Weird.
      -l

      • Re:What MUDs "did" I play? (Score:5, Funny)

        by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @05:57PM (#25461397) Journal

        There is a shape made up of four squares arranged 3 on one side and one sticking out to the left at the bottom. The next shape after this is four squares arranged in a two by two square.

        Which direction do you wish to move the current peice?
        (left, right, down)

        100hp 56ma 13456exp > d

        You have made 2 complete lines. Gained 148 experience.

        The pieces are moving faster now.

        There is a shape made up of four squares arranged in a two by two square. The next shape after this is four squares arranged with two on the bottom left and two on the top right.

        Which direction do you wish to move the current peice?
        (left, right, down)

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Atl_kevin ( 591907 )
          I play Genesis http://genesis.tekno.chalmers.se/ [chalmers.se] LPMud. been playing for a long time since around the time it opened i think. really love it. always changing and new things to explore and do.

  • Woot go batmud! I wish WoW hadn't sucked me away.

  • AnimeMUD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NCatron ( 103418 )

    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/ [igormud.org] 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...)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )

      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 ent

  • forests edge (Score:3, Funny)

    by farker haiku ( 883529 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:30PM (#25459277) Journal

    http://www.theforestsedge.com/ [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.

  • 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

    • I started playing MAREs, which are based off of MUSEs, in 2002 and continued for two or three years. It was limited to a small community, but I had a lot of fun programming in the engine's scripting language. I developed some clever tricks with the parser and queue-based execution system to get some interesting results, expanding my programming experience (this was around the same time I was learning C/C++).

      This culminated in my writing a scripted mapping engine that would take in static geographical data a

    • Ahh Genocide! I'll never forget my "I trashed Vargas!" tattoo! I played that mud for years (as Xqwzwc and Azurensis) and never got any good at it, either.

  • Tinyworld and the Univ of Northern Iowa (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Foofoobar ( 318279 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:36PM (#25459399)
    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).
  • 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!).

  • 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

    • I played GemstoneII in the eighties via Compuserve (for free with a CIS sysop account)

      Had to write my own frontend to beat the fast typists.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        I played GemstoneII in the eighties via Compuserve (for free with a CIS sysop account)

        That's odd, because Gemstone II ran on the GEnie system. (I started in the last month of GSII beta.) GE's mainframes made for some fun times when they did backups and such, when the whole game would come to a halt. Except for the monsters, hitting you every ten seconds like clockwork. GSIII was a complete rewrite that either ran on a Unix machine from the start, or quickly moved to one.

        The Compuserve game was (IIRC) Island of Kesmai, which was a 2-D game with a rogue-like interface. Gemstone used a Zork-st

        • "The Compuserve game was (IIRC) Island of Kesmai, which was a 2-D game with a rogue-like interface. Gemstone used a Zork-style interface."

          They had that one too, yep. Never played it though.

  • Thirty years... (Score:4, Funny)

    by hvatum ( 592775 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @03:43PM (#25459511) Homepage

    Thirty years, and the graphics still suck.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Crabmaster ( 1391023 )
      I'm one of the creators of MajorMUD -- it's quite interesting and a little humbling to see people still remember it. It was a blast to develop, we started it before I had finished high school, and had a good many years developing it further until we sold the whole shebang to Metro. Good times :D

  • 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 sk

  • Igor Mud [igormud.org] 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.

    • Wooo! Best mud ever.

      http://mud.arctic.org/ [arctic.org] port 2700

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CFTM ( 513264 )

        So good and yet so bad, hours and hours and hours of my life wasted over the past 12 years.
        But hey, I'm an awesome typist and there's a mob in that Knights of Solamnia city (can't remember it's name, but the one with the regen room just south of it) named after my character!

        Wait, I shouldn't be proud of those things ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dpille ( 547949 )
      It's just 'cause you're weak, lazy, and kept no logs of zone info. Look at the bright side: at least you can now eat ham without paying a tax to the mafia.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CFTM ( 513264 )

        Bah! I eat Tarsis Ham when I want and drink from the Tarsis Fountains when I want :)
        Fond memories of 50 person battles in Balifor come to mind...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CFTM ( 513264 )

      Throtex....erm...name seems so familiar...Kali? WarCraft 2?
      Alfonso right?

      Remember a CornFlakes?

  • Abermud explained it all for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @04:05PM (#25459841)

    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: (Score:2)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )
      Raise your hand if your fascination with how computers work was born courtesy of a primitive game. For me, it was an EE uncle who taught me how to read the GW-BASIC code for a game I was playing, a LEM landing simulator (of the 2D variety), and suggested I put more of the data on the screen to make the game easier to play. Heck, even a lot of my instinct for when to use calculus came about later through programming a space engine for a MUSH. Plus ca change, eh?
  • Bah. DikuMuds? LP? I have no truck with you and your fancy modern ways.

    Naah - I started with MIST [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org]. I had previously considered this to be the first talker in the world, though wikipedia states it's the second.
  • Among The Stars: TrekMUSH (ats.trekmush.org:1701 / www.trekmush.org)

    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.

  • carrionfields.com (Score:3)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @04:28PM (#25460281)

    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.

    • Err, pardon my brain fart. The MUD is actually hosted at "carrionfields.com 9999". "www.carrionfields.com" is the website.

  • 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

    • I loved Muddog (and like many others, I'm still devastated it got simply wiped out and is lost to the ages). Still miss everything about it. I've heard Dragon's Den was a sort of sister MUD to Muddog but doesn't seem to be the same. I know Muddog is lost, but I'd still play it if someone ever managed to come up with something new that captured the spirit of it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dr_Ish ( 639005 )

      I remember Muddog well. It was my first mud and burned up many hours of grad school there. Wells2k, thanks for many a good time there! I am still in touch with Kane, Labatt, Semtex, Taylor and a few of the old crew. Many of them moved on to VargonMud [vargonmud.com], when the place shut. Not only was it one of the funniest muds of all time, with some bizarre twists (who can forget the Spy shades, or the Bucket O'Love!), it was also an amazing community. This is one of the things that modern visual games lack.

      Not only that,

  • 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 wobbl

  • Not to start a holy war, but I always thought MOOs were cooler.

  • avpmud.com 4000

    11 1/2 years old

  • 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 o

  • Dark Mists [darkmists.org] officially celebrates its 12th year on the Internet.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ruzty ( 46204 )

      I was the IMP of MooseHead SLED! How ya doing Yuki? I stopped running it when WoW came out and the average daily player population dropped down to 3 total. The machine it ran on near the end of its lifespan still sits in my basement gathering dust. But, the HD crashed and I just can't seem to get up to rescue booting it to tar up the directory structure for posterity.

      Remember the days when we were on the Ottawa Freenet BBS front page and there were over 200 people on at a time? I think my favorite thin

      • Oh sweet tears of MUD cloud my eyes. Your game brought years of joy, my first couple of girlfriends, and an addiction like no other.

        Yeah, I knew the ROM 2.4b thing, I think I just worded my response strangely. It's like when you play D&D the first few times, it can never really be recreated. The same can be said of playing MHS, playing other MUDs are boring. The days back then were magnificent for myself and my addicted friends.
        Thanks!

        I am doing fine now that I stopped being a crack addict and

  • 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 i

  • I once was the host for Moral Decay (telnet://playdecay.com:3003/) ... and MD was founded in 1992.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Atryn ( 528846 )
      Woot!!! I haven't been on in a bit but I'm a wizard on Moral Decay. And that went on to spawn a clan on Earth 2025, a group on Facebook and more... Wulf Michaelson

  • muds (Score:2)

    by Kwirl ( 877607 )

    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

  • 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 BB

  • 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 env

  • And Valhalla before that. Name: Silence. Ascended, wizzed. Hi everyone, especially Katywallops and Dio. Also, shouts to Darrik, Toris, Sunspot, Danger, Slampanda, Dhugal, Natural, Aahz, Emeritus, Witherspore, Stephus, etc. And Torg, who could forget Torg?

    If anyone wants to give shouts, reply to this thread, don't use my email.

  • Holy Mission (Score:3, Interesting)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @01:17AM (#25464977)
    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 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 fighti

  • I have a log of that first MUD session (Score:4, Funny)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @08:27AM (#25467275) Journal

    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!

  • I played on:

    • Gateway
    • Realms
    • Highlands
    • Tsunami

    "Douglas" gives a shout out to everyone from those MUDs.

  • 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 apartm

  • Back in college between 1994-1998 my MUD of choice was Kingdoms http://www.kingdoms.se/ [kingdoms.se]. But, what really held my interest was programming TinyFugue http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/ [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

  • 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

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