Multi-user dungeon
A multi-user dungeon, also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-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 a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.
Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice-rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.
Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others have science 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 for [|educational] purposes, while others are purely [|chat environments], and the flexible nature of many MUD servers leads to their occasional use in areas ranging from computer science research to geoinformatics to medical informatics to analytical chemistry. MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, including communications, sociology, law, and economics. At one time, there was interest from the United States military in using them for teleconferencing.
Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to play; some may accept donations or allow players to purchase virtual items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee. MUDs can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients, which are designed to improve the user experience. Numerous games are listed at various web portals, such as The Mud Connector.
The history of modern massively multiplayer online role-playing games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, and related virtual world genres such as the social virtual worlds exemplified by Second Life, can be traced directly back to the MUD genre. Indeed, before the invention of the term MMORPG, games of this style were simply called graphical MUDs. A number of influential MMORPG designers began as MUD developers and/or players or were involved with early MUDs.
Early history
Origins
Colossal Cave Adventure, created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely played adventure game. The game was significantly expanded in 1976 by Don Woods. Also called Adventure, it contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlled dungeon master.Numerous dungeon crawlers were created on the PLATO 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.
Inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT in the summer of 1977 wrote a game for the PDP-10 minicomputer; called Zork, it became quite popular on the ARPANET. Zork was ported, under the filename DUNGEN, to FORTRAN by a programmer working at DEC in 1978.
In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL, before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at the University of Essex, in 1980. The game revolved around gaining points till one achieved the Wizard rank, giving the character immortality and special powers over mortals.
Wider access and early derivatives
MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the University of Essex network, and became more widely accessible when a guest account was set up that allowed users on JANET to connect on weekends and between the hours of 2 AM and 8 AM on weekdays. It became the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980 and started the online gaming industry as a whole when the university connected its internal network to ARPANET.The original MUD game was closed down in late 1987, reportedly under pressure from CompuServe, to whom Richard Bartle had licensed the game. This left MIST, a derivative of MUD1 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, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.
1985 saw the origin of a number of projects inspired by the original MUD. These included Gods by Ben Laurie, a MUD1 clone that included online creation in its endgame, and which became a commercial MUD in 1988; and MirrorWorld, a tolkienesque MUD started by Pip Cordrey who gathered some people on a BBS he ran to create a MUD1 clone that would run on a home computer.
Neil Newell, an avid MUD1 player, started programming his own MUD called SHADES during Christmas 1985, because MUD1 was closed down during the holidays. Starting out as a hobby, SHADES became accessible in the UK as a commercial MUD via British Telecom's Prestel and Micronet networks. A scandal on SHADES led to the closure of Micronet, as described in Indra Sinha's net-memoir, The Cybergypsies.
At the same time, Compunet started a project named Multi-User Galaxy Game as a science fiction alternative to MUD1, 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 it Federation II. The MUD was officially launched in 1989. Federation II was later picked up by AOL, where it became known simply as Federation: Adult Space Fantasy. Federation later left AOL to run on its own after AOL began offering unlimited service.
Other early MUD-like games
In 1978, around the same time Roy Trubshaw wrote MUD, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game called Scepter, and later called Milieu using Multi-Pascal on a CDC Cyber 6600 series mainframe which was operated by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Klietz ported Milieu to an IBM XT in 1983, naming the new port Scepter of Goth. Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. It was the first commercial MUD; franchises were sold to a number of locations. Scepter was first owned and run by GamBit, founded by Bob Alberti. GamBit's assets were later sold to Interplay Productions.In 1984, Mark Peterson wrote The Realm of Angmar, beginning as a clone of Scepter of Goth. In 1994, Peterson rewrote The Realm of Angmar, adapting it to MS-DOS, and renamed it Swords 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.
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 called Aradath and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was also ported to GEnie. At its peak, the site had about 100 monthly subscribers to both Aradath and Galaxy. GEnie was shut down in the late 1990s, although Dragon's Gate was later brought to AOL before it was finally released on its own. Dragon's Gate was closed on February 10, 2007.
In the summer of 1980, University of Virginia classmates John Taylor and Kelton Flinn wrote Dungeons of Kesmai, a six player game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons which used roguelike ASCII graphics. They founded the Kesmai company in 1982 and in 1985 an enhanced version of Dungeons of Kesmai, Island of Kesmai, was launched on CompuServe. Later, its 2-D graphical descendant Legends of Kesmai was launched on AOL in 1996. The games were retired commercially in 2000.
The popularity of MUDs of the University of Essex tradition escalated in the United States during the late 1980s when affordable personal computers with 300 to 2400 bit/s modems enabled role-players to log into multi-line BBSs and online service providers such as CompuServe. 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.
Avalon: The Legend Lives was published by Yehuda Simmons in 1989. It was the first persistent game world of its kind without the traditional hourly resets and points-based puzzle solving progression systems. Avalon introduced equilibrium and balance, skill-based player vs player combat and concepts such as player-run governments and player housing.