DamionS's comments

Interested parties may enjoy this GDC postmortem of the game. Note: Sound at the beginning is REALLY jacked for about 3 minutes, turn your volume down a little before launching.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016637/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

I can tell you that most of us who coded Meridian 59 knew what MUDs were =)

In retrospect, there were a lot of things that Meridian wanted to claim we were first at, but there were people who beat us on almost everything: graphics in a MUD, 3D controls to a virtual world, etc. The one exception MAY be that we were the first MMO/MUD to have a box product and a subscription fee (most online games before us used daily or hourly charges, but we came out right around when AOL changed the billing model, and everyone else rearranged their billing models to match).