MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs.
Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began.
However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.
Your experience is very similar to mine. I got most of my early programming chops doing C programming on a MUD. I also had the experience of a very religious mother throwing away all of my DnD / fantasy related games, because of the craze about satanic symbols that swept through the US in the late 80s/90s. I wish my kids would play DnD together - I can't imagine a more wholesome activity to be honest. Haha.
I also much more enjoyed MUDs than WoW and the various mmorpgs. There was less polish, more "secrets" that only a few people knew about, lots to explore and discover and things always being added. The games felt organic and interesting interactions developed simply because the logic was not locked down (including bugs that lead to interesting behavior). I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics. Nothing in it ever compared to some of the epic experiences I had on MUDs.
I would concur with others here that the sandbox environment of Roblox is pretty awesome. My son especially gets up to all kinds of crazy creativite stuff - like making a TIE fighter recreation and various Boeing models in Build a Boat for Treasure. Like MUDs of yore, there are plenty of bugs and lack of polish that make things even more interesting.
I wouldn't say Roblox games have polish either. There's also a lot of weirdness that only adolescents and tweens would fully understand because in many cases it's made by those same kids. I wouldn't consider it a MUD either. None of the games I've seen so far even have RPG traits. It's more of a powerful sandbox than even Minecraft imo
Same here. MUDs got my unix / network / C programming up to par (and to this day, decades later, I still work in the field). Incidentally, "my" MUD still runs (some 25 years after its start), although it's not thriving by any means. More like 2-3 concurrent players at a peak (we used to be small anyways, our max concurrent players peaked at some 40 in the late 90s and early 00s). There's still new people picking it up and raving about the depth of content in it though, so at least that makes me happy :)
Wynncraft is similar to what you're talking about for a "rough edges" dungeon within the Minecraft community. It has a lot of clever dungeons and quests put together with mostly standard Minecraft concepts. They've enhanced the leveling system quite a bit and some of the textures are improved but the "monsters" are definitely rough around the edges.
My journey to programming all began with RuneScape private servers in mid school. It was my perfect creative outlet because I always wanted to get into programming, I loved MMOs, and it just so happened that RuneScape had a legit full-on underground private server reverse-engineering community.
What better way to program than learning how to create your favorite MMO from complete scratch? (With all the documents provided & the active help of fellow others).
The RSPS scene was really big, active, and very competitive. What was so fun about this is that the private server communities always encouraged users to share data resources, programmijg tutorials/snippets, and reverse engineering documentation of the game so that way it helps everyone that's trying to program their own server. Everyone wanted that "Java Developer" icon next to their forum name, and to do that was to contribute back. There's only one community standing left and it's an absolute gold mine of programming & game-development information [1]
It's a very niche community, but back then anyone could spin up a server and quickly have 50+ players actively playing within a week, and because of that, i've learned the concepts of client to server network designs, mysql databases, asynchronous communications, non or threaded model designs, and the whole Java basics spectrum.
Another good venture is the MineCraft server development communities such as Bukkit,Technic, Sponge, and Spigot-MC [2]. They've got some interesting frameworks as well for the Mobile-Portable edition that's pretty interesting to look at.
Last I can think of is Garry's Mod. GMod solely revolves around Lua. [3] Roblox is Lua as well and they pay a good chunk of money to developers if you can create a trending server.
But you've got to have some sort of real interest to get into these, otherwise it feels like a waste of time imo. I was young and havent graduated yet so I had all the time to mess with these source-codes & actually host them, but now, I just don't see the point unless i'm going to attempt making money from it. It's a rewarding and fun experience though.
I wish I knew more underground communities espcially akin to RSPS, it was the best learning experience and it is not often you find something genuine like that.
I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he got better at hiding it). Before he came to work for us he had flunked university, and I am pretty sure MUD had to do with that. People who knew him before said he always hung out at the college computer club instead of attending courses.
For years I had a LambdaMOO or related client open and chatted and did side stuff while I was working, while waiting for compiles, etc. I didn't have any productivity issues as a result. In fact it kept my brain sharp amid the mindnumbingly boring boilerplate JavaBeans transformation code or whatever I had to write.
I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know.
So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
I'm curious how much "productivity" is lost from employees chatting about non work related things in Slack. I also wonder how it would compare to the time this person spent in his MUD.
Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ )
Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance.
If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.
I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article.
Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
Having heard this sentiment a lot during my gaming days (and as well in the context of books vs. movies), I've always felt a certain amount of shame for not being able to get into text games. Is there something wrong with my imagination? I don't think so, I'm a total daydreamer type whose head is always filled with random thoughts and ideas.
I like to think there's an axis orthogonal to "imaginative capability" that factors into why some people prefer text and some (ok, most) prefer graphics.
An interesting part of this is EVE Online, which has plenty of pretty graphics, but I've never been able to get into that (or any spaceship-based game for that matter), despite being a style of game (sandbox/world-building) that I otherwise really like.
Seeing the screenshots of UO and SWG in the article gives me the chills. I was fully immersed in those games (particularly SWG). It seems that running around a world as an individual humanoid character is the most deeply engaging experience to me.
thank you for saying that and for the game link. i think MUD should stay as meaning a multiplayer text adventure. you and this whole thread gets me inspired into making a MUD.
This Twitter thread about Roblox really enlightened me about it, had no idea how it was more of a game engine and how much money people were making with it.
It's crazy how people still consider Roblox a single game. The platform has so many games that it went through distinct cycles of popular genres. Back when I played (2009ish) the dominating genres were "zombie defense" [1] and "build to survive X" [2]. Only a few years later, those games became completely empty. It's also interesting to note that these games held the top spots at Roblox for years, but have a small number of the total visits compared to the most popular games today due to Roblox's exploding playerbase.
Mudlet is great, thanks for your work. It's a pity though that it took nearly until MUDs are dead to such good client appear. I'm rather sure that if comparable clients existed 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, MUDs wouldn't be in this state.
Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were 100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never really caught on.
I've played a LambdaMOO based MUD off and on for about 10 years now. Players would inevitably quit or transition to working on the game core, such an awesome community to be a part of.
I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
I was Richard's tester, in as much as I was one of the first to reach Wizardhood and thus able to use FOD (Finger of Death) on annoying and misbehaving newbies. I guess that was a precursor of today's Facebook bans but without its unfortunate PC connotations.
We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.
It is a pity the article dismisses the whole eco system around LPMuds that much by basically only including them in that screenshot from Bartle's book. They were an interesting middle ground between the Diku-likes (think: precursors to Diablo) and the MOOs, being online programmable in an object-oriented C dialect called LPC which today lives on in e.g. the Pike programming language.
lpc/pike is a runtime compiled language much closer to python and java than to c. it is as much of a c dialect as javascript is a java dialect. other than c-style syntax they don't have much in common.
the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker:
in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed.
lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
yup, that's how i got into it. lpmuds were the first to have builtin ftp and later http servers, because they were just other protocols and their programmability made them easy to add.
when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
Context for people considering whether it's worth reading this whole article: Roblox is a wildly successful online game popular with kids where they can create and share their own content, including video games they created themselves. Some Roblox game content (created by kids or adults) has 100k+ concurrent players. The origins of this title are pretty interesting and it's especially interesting given that you generally don't see people talking about Roblox inside or outside of the video games-focused press.
My daughter loves Roblox and plays all the time on Xbox (we restrict it to Xbox because of the lack of in-game chat). When you refer to the dearth of media attention, I guess that doesn’t include YT right? Roblox is absolutely huge on YouTube.
MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the article is still running and free to play (I believe), http://mud2.com/. I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999 or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend months building a character only to have to start again.
I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since.
I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time.
Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.
Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players generally lived in your metro area.
In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.
By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community.
As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school all the way throughout and after college.
Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats.
The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.
Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.
I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included.
I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.
Surprised to not see the Iron Realms MUDs mentioned in the article. I've seen the CEO around here in the past, but can't remember his username or if he still posts.
I somewhat fail to see the connection between Roblox and MUDs but FWIW one of the most well known MUDs of the 90's is still up and running, M.U.M.E (Multi-Users in Middle Earth). It was a Diku derivative but with its own online language for the wizards to code in, designed by a compiler PhD, at the time it was state of the art.
MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.
I'll throw another hat in the "MUDs got me into tech" ring. I spent significant time on Swords of Chaos, a sort of proto-MUD, then on various God Wars incarnations.
They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology.
My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.
My kids (11 and 9) love roblox, but it's too hard to create stuff with it. There is a lot of coding involved and the learning curve is significant, I tried it myself and got overwhelmed (although to be fair, my interest was pretty low to start with). They are much more creative with Minecraft.
I was an "official" builder on the Steve Jackson Games[0] Metaverse MOO in the 90's. My "job" was to create interesting spaces, places and objects. My "pay" was a free shell account. I was a blue gelatinous cube that had escaped a crashed NetHack game and was followed about by a pink gelatinous pyramidal puppet. I did this for several years until the game finally folded[1]...
CarrionFields(CF) is an active MUD to this day, focusing on PVP and guild combat. I haven't found a replacement for CF in terms of PVP combat and roleplaying. Great lore too!
Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to time, brings me back to my childhood.
Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their subscription pricing is way too high.
But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.
I played from 1995~2001/2ish. Probably to this day the most rich online gaming experience I've had; the book version of a succession of inferior films.
[+] [-] waprin|5 years ago|reply
Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began.
However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.
[+] [-] nvarsj|5 years ago|reply
I also much more enjoyed MUDs than WoW and the various mmorpgs. There was less polish, more "secrets" that only a few people knew about, lots to explore and discover and things always being added. The games felt organic and interesting interactions developed simply because the logic was not locked down (including bugs that lead to interesting behavior). I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics. Nothing in it ever compared to some of the epic experiences I had on MUDs.
I would concur with others here that the sandbox environment of Roblox is pretty awesome. My son especially gets up to all kinds of crazy creativite stuff - like making a TIE fighter recreation and various Boeing models in Build a Boat for Treasure. Like MUDs of yore, there are plenty of bugs and lack of polish that make things even more interesting.
[+] [-] chaostheory|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ephaeton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altcognito|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnonsLadder|5 years ago|reply
The RSPS scene was really big, active, and very competitive. What was so fun about this is that the private server communities always encouraged users to share data resources, programmijg tutorials/snippets, and reverse engineering documentation of the game so that way it helps everyone that's trying to program their own server. Everyone wanted that "Java Developer" icon next to their forum name, and to do that was to contribute back. There's only one community standing left and it's an absolute gold mine of programming & game-development information [1]
It's a very niche community, but back then anyone could spin up a server and quickly have 50+ players actively playing within a week, and because of that, i've learned the concepts of client to server network designs, mysql databases, asynchronous communications, non or threaded model designs, and the whole Java basics spectrum.
Another good venture is the MineCraft server development communities such as Bukkit,Technic, Sponge, and Spigot-MC [2]. They've got some interesting frameworks as well for the Mobile-Portable edition that's pretty interesting to look at.
Last I can think of is Garry's Mod. GMod solely revolves around Lua. [3] Roblox is Lua as well and they pay a good chunk of money to developers if you can create a trending server.
But you've got to have some sort of real interest to get into these, otherwise it feels like a waste of time imo. I was young and havent graduated yet so I had all the time to mess with these source-codes & actually host them, but now, I just don't see the point unless i'm going to attempt making money from it. It's a rewarding and fun experience though.
I wish I knew more underground communities espcially akin to RSPS, it was the best learning experience and it is not often you find something genuine like that.
1. rune-server.org
2. spigot-mc.org bukkit.org
3. gmod.facepunch.com roblox.com
[+] [-] kieckerjan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seneca|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know.
So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
[+] [-] shostack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catacombs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freediver|5 years ago|reply
Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD).
I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg
Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ )
[+] [-] manfredo|5 years ago|reply
If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.
[+] [-] biddit|5 years ago|reply
Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
[+] [-] resu_nimda|5 years ago|reply
I like to think there's an axis orthogonal to "imaginative capability" that factors into why some people prefer text and some (ok, most) prefer graphics.
An interesting part of this is EVE Online, which has plenty of pretty graphics, but I've never been able to get into that (or any spaceship-based game for that matter), despite being a style of game (sandbox/world-building) that I otherwise really like.
Seeing the screenshots of UO and SWG in the article gives me the chills. I was fully immersed in those games (particularly SWG). It seems that running around a world as an individual humanoid character is the most deeply engaging experience to me.
[+] [-] stOneskull|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128376418142720000...
[+] [-] wy35|5 years ago|reply
1. https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence... 2.https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakob...
[+] [-] VadimPR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hitton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mderazon|5 years ago|reply
Are there any recommended web clients as well ?
[+] [-] catacombs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qvrjuec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarblac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|5 years ago|reply
I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
[+] [-] sharedfrog|5 years ago|reply
Not Discworld MUD[1], by any chance?
[1] http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
[+] [-] SagelyGuru|5 years ago|reply
We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.
[+] [-] warpspin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker:
in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed.
lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
[+] [-] kevingadd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigodaddy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingrolo|5 years ago|reply
I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since.
I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time.
Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.
[+] [-] evanelias|5 years ago|reply
In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.
By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community.
As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.
[+] [-] stevesearer|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats.
The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.
Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.
[+] [-] dwheeler|5 years ago|reply
I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included.
I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.
[+] [-] Teckla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endgame|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricotijsen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33tman|5 years ago|reply
MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.
[+] [-] Diederich|5 years ago|reply
Can not recommend it enough. It's like interacting with the living world inside of Tolkien's books. It's really good.
[+] [-] seneca|5 years ago|reply
They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology.
My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] every|5 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.sjgames.com/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...
[+] [-] joemazerino|5 years ago|reply
https://www.carrionfields.net/
[+] [-] snikeris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|5 years ago|reply
But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.
[+] [-] jmoiron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jweather|5 years ago|reply