I used to mod /r/MUD on reddit - if you fancy getting back into MUDs that's a great place to start.<p>For my sins, I became very addicted to Shades on Prestel back in the day. Due to this, I prefer MUDs that are not deep on class progression, and just easy fun.<p>A lot of the still running MUDs have deep learning curves, due to some of them having been running for a good few decades. To the new or casual player, this makes them impregnable.<p>Whereas I don't think we need to change the beauty of the text based medium, I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs more accessible.... Even D&D finally accepted it needed to simplify again to gain new players.
My university had terminal labs in the early 90s, tables full of Wyse terminals hooked up to the central UNIX cluster. PCs and Macs were common in other labs, but a terminal lab was still a convenient place to check email or get on IRC between classes. I would log into two terminals next to each other in order to have a screen for IRC while coding on the other one.<p>One early morning, I walked into a lab that was vacant except for one person. He was slumped over the keyboard with a hand around an empty Coke can. The amber screen was scrolling upward every few seconds:<p><pre><code> YOU ARE HUNGRY...
YOU FEEL TIRED...
>
YOU ARE HUNGRY...
YOU FEEL TIRED...
></code></pre>
If anyone wants to try something less fantasy themed, I strongly recommend hackmud (<a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/469920/hackmud/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/469920/hackmud/</a>), in which you play as a recently sapient program in the ruins of a network long devoid of human users. The community is very savvy and have implemented some complex stuff in and out of game, including bridges between all the popular text channels and mirrors of them on Discord (<a href="https://discord.gg/h5K5fYuuMj" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/h5K5fYuuMj</a>), so you can monitor and even play the game without being logged in (to hackmud, you would still need to be on Discord).
As audio increasingly becomes a platform in-it-of-itself, experiences from the CLI world will become more and more relevant. Because audio as an interface has a lot more in common with the command line than it does with GUIs.<p>If it doesn't already exist, I could see a serious market for audio-based MUDs.
So basically the brutal Lord of the Flies-esque culture that dominates multiplayer survival games like Rust and Conan: Exiles is nothing new.<p>From the article:<p>> I worked out how to login (not easy), I worked out how to load the game and... I got killed. I tried again, I got killed again and eventually, when people were bored of killing me, I tried to talk to a wizard about how the game worked and was told to bugger off and then killed again. ...This was most people’s initial experience of MUD.
After 20 years I still play on Discworld MUD on a regular basis. I find there being a strong community - if a bit smaller than it used to be. The one thing I enjoy most with playing on the MUD (apart from the people) are the fact that I feel less limited in the game play compared to most graphical games.
My first experience with an online service was Prodigy sometime around 1995 or 1996 and one of the first things I stumbled across was the MUD Gemstone 3.<p>It blew my mind that hundreds of people were all existing in a shared world. I directly attribute my love of computers and software development career to MUD's.<p>Also, Gemstone is still running: <a href="https://www.play.net/gs4/" rel="nofollow">https://www.play.net/gs4/</a>
For anyone who has had extensive experience in MUD and early MMORPG, including Ultima Online, is there anything you would like to be implemented in modern MMO and is technically possible? For example I heard from time to time that people claim UO is actually more complex than modern MMORPG, but because I don't play either I'm wonderig what's missing here.
I played a bit of MUD II. Did anyone know how to get the 2 crowns? The one in the swamp vs the one in the tower? They forbid us from telling each other as it was one of the easiest ways to get experience in the game.
I'm hoping maybe some experience MUD players can help me out with this: every time I try to get into a MUD, the text just moves past the screen too fast and I feel like I miss important parts, and then I can't see it again. Or if I run a command, before I can interpret the output it flies off the screen in favor of some non important text. I can't imagine combat in text mode, trying to figure out what command to type while also trying to race against the buffer.<p>I've tried several different MUDs over the years because I like text based games, but they never stick.
Turkey had its share of MUDs in the 90's too. Turkish players would play on Bitnet on a MUD server hosted in Greece (IIRC), using 3270 terminals, before Internet arrived. There later came BizimMUD, a customized version of CircleMUD, hosted at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I used to play there a lot back in 1995. There was permadeath and PvP was always open which made it quite exciting. Then, the last one I remember was opened up at ADANET, a local ISP in Ankara. It was a stock DikuMUD instance. It might be called "Darkwood" but I'm not sure.<p>My favorite international MUD was Mirkwood, which was still up and running recently.<p>I was also enamored by MUSH servers as how detailed they can be, but could never get to play them for long.
oh right I should log into my LambdaMOO account to check what's up, it's been a long time<p>telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888<p>learned to program on that thing
I wrote a frontend for CompuServe's British Legends using Crosstalk Mk.4's scripting language CASL. It had a complete dungeon map and let me navigate using the PC's numeric keypad for directions. An onscreen keymap with labels for each number key showed where pressing that key would lead. It even randomized choices, so if NW and W both led to the same place it would pick one randomly if you hit either key. (This was to confuse wizards who could tell who you were by your habitual choices.)
I spent many hours of my youth spending $6.25 (in 1987 dollars!) an hour to play British Legends on Compuserve at 300 baud (plus telephone fees, which were, by today's standards, extremely expensive). Compuserve used to charge you $12 an hour if you logged in at 1200 baud.<p>Shoutout to Duris: Land of Bloodlust, which has been around for over 25 years and is still up and running.<p><a href="https://www.durismud.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.durismud.com/</a>
What a fun bit of history.<p>Incidentally, I was looking into the possibility of hosting my own MUD a while back and it seemed rather complicated for someone without web deployment experience. I do wish there was a simpler way to do it and customize your own world for a few friends to play around in. I guess we could just invade a less-active MUD but it seems more up our alley to roll our own so we can make a few extra areas ourselves and so on.
Great article. Messing around with MUDs in the late 90s was probably one of the factors that got me deeper into computers. Graphical games were super impressive, but there was something really cool about playing in a multiplayer simulated world that, by virtue of the fact it was text based, you could envision the underworkings of a bit more easily.