*So, our story here starts in 1977 or 1978. It’s around about that time that Roy Trubshaw, a student at University of Essex played an early build of a game called Zork. We briefly mentioned Zork when we talked about Eamon; it was also influenced Donald Brown.
*At around this time, the dungeon crawler was kind of becoming a thing. Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the first, but people were making them for fun. You know, text based dungeon crawlers, I should say. Games where you basically explored and found loot and occasionally fought things. Eamon would build on that foundation by expanding on the complexity of the stories you could tell. MUD was a dungeon crawler evolution in a different direction.
*Roy Trubshaw enjoyed dungeon crawlers. But University of Essex had an advanced, for the time, intranet and Trubshaw had access to some of the servers. What might make crawling a dungeon even more fun? Crawling it with your friends.
*And so MUD was born. It was to be a text based dungeon crawler where you could explore the world, find loot and secrets, fight enemies, etc. But it was uploaded to the intranet at the university and students and faculty alike could logon to the shared server.
*The game was named MUD. It stands for Multi-User Dungeon.
*Multi-User. Or, as we might say today, Multi-Player.
*That’s right . . . just like that, the first online multiplayer game.
*Like some other early games, including one we’ll talk about pretty shortly here, MUD gave its name to the genre it created. The Multi-User Dungeon became a genre of game and so you may see this game, the original MUD, referred to as MUD1 or Essex MUD. Those are all the same game though.
*It was in 1980 that Roy Trubshaw moved on from the university and a student named Richard Bartle came into the equation. Trubshaw had worked at upgrading MUD already, but when Bartle took over he created a third upgrade of MUD and it’s this third version that the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play recommends.
*And you might have noticed that I said this game started in 1978, but the book places in 1980. Well, that’s because it’s in 1980 that the game steps out into a larger world. That third version of MUD went public. The University of Essex intranet connected to the ARPANET, an early iteration of the Internet. And MUD was out there in the wild, waiting to be discovered by people outside of Essex.
*And, boy, oh, boy, did it ever? MUD became popular with people around the world and the game quickly spawned a catchphrase, “You haven’t lived . . . until you’ve died in MUD.”
*That’s a pretty good catchphrase, honestly.
*Trubshaw and Bartle would reunite to create MUD2, yet another upgrade of the game. But the original MUD kept on running on the Essex servers until 1987. CompuServe had licensed MUD at that point and it got moved to their servers under the title British Legends.
*Honestly a much worse title. I mean, MUD may not seem that great either, but it’s memorable and somewhat evocative.
*CompuServe hosted British Legends until 1999 when it went dark. I have no idea how many people were still playing it at that time. I suspect that it kind of set on their servers without much going on until the Y2K bug kicked them into clean-up mode and it was a casualty of that.
*So, has MUD been lost to the MISTs of time?
*MIST was a second generation MUD that was developed . . . oh, forget it. I thought it would be funny.
*Anyway, the answer is no. In fact, you can access that 1980 version of MUD at british-legends.com, a site maintained by Viktor Toth.
*This one isn’t as easy to play as Eamon. You could at one time play MUD in your browser there, but the great Java shutdown basically destroyed that. There was a program you could download called WizTerm, but it hasn’t been updated in well over a decade, at least not that I could see.
*But you can access and play the 1980 version of MUD I’m talking about in this post if you know how to telnet.
*I haven’t telnetted since . . . well, since I played the original 1975 version of The Oregon Trail for this very project.
*Anyway, I reminded myself of how to do it and after a false start or two, I found myself on the brink of MUD, a player persona created.
*I entered the world of MUD, finding myself on a path between an old house on one side and a graveyard on the other. Also, fields of gorse and . . . you know.
*I went into the house and was able to investigate several rooms, go up to the second floor, etc. There were a lot of items to pick up here, ranging from the obviously useful (potatoes) to the obscure (a violin bow). I found my way into the basement where I was attacked by a rat and violently killed.
*Okay, well, I’ve died in MUD. That’s like . . . my life has meaning now or something? What was the catchphrase?
*Okay, so I’ll talk about a couple of things just based on this first, very brief run at MUD.
*It’s a lot harder to keep directions straight in a game like this than I would have thought. I would like to once again underline just how great it is that Eamon tells you at the end of each descriptive paragraph which directions you can go in. You know, like (N/S/E/W) if you can go all directions or just (W) if you’ve walked into a dead-end from the East. That’s just super-helpful and I missed it here.
*Secondly, combat plays like a cut-scene. Like it’s turn based because it tells what you did and then what the enemy did and goes back and forth like that. But it just plays. It just goes until somebody dies. You can’t type any commands or pause or anything while combat is going on. I find this less satisfying than the way it was done in Eamon.
*Thirdly, there’s a bit where the game told me in the description that a door was locked, but I went up to it and did the OPEN command on it anyway and the game then said, and I quote, “Can’t you see it’s locked you berk?” And if you use a command that the game doesn’t understand it says, “It’s all double Dutch to me, mate!”
*What is the deal with these early RPGs having dreadful humor?
*Also, I had to look up “berk,” because I’d never heard it before and all I can say is oh dear.
*And to be fair, those are the only two bits of humor I encountered in MUD. I think it is, overall, probably a much more serious game than Eamon.
*But let’s talk about the elephant in the room or rather the elephant that is conspicuously absent from the room. It’s right there in the title: the whole point of MUD is that it’s “multi-user.” What is MUD if you’re the only one there?
*Does MUD have a player base now? No, I don’t think so. The British Legends site has a nice blurb about how books didn’t go away when movies were invented and so text games like MUD shouldn’t go away just because of newer games. I actually agree with that. And I do find value in looking at old games in the way that I’m doing here. Those are fine sentiments.
*But the fact remains that I logged onto MUD three times and played, over those three sessions, for around an hour. And I was the only one there that entire time. There’s a command you can type that will just show you what users are currently logged on to MUD. I was always the only one.
*I suspect the site gets a small amount of traffic from people doing things kind of like I’m doing. Someone was there last month. I saw a message from them in the “forum” which is really just a very short list of a couple of comments from people. As recently as March of this year, there were actually two people using the site at the same time, two people that seemed not to know each other; they acknowledged each other in comments in the “forum,” but they also acknowledged that they never happened to be online at the same time and so never saw each other in the game itself. Within the last year, that’s it . . . three people who posted on the forum.
*That isn’t exactly a true metric of players. I mean, I didn’t post on the forum. I think I would have if I didn’t only notice after I’d played my hour and my last character had died. I would have had to create an entirely new character in order to post something.
*When you die, your “persona” is deleted and you have to create a new character. I mean, that’s basically just picking a name, but you have to set up a new password and e-mail address and everything, so anyway, I didn’t really feel motivated to go through all that just to post a variation on “ANY BODY ELSE HERE?”
*Bartle has called the game as it is now a museum piece and I think he’s right. There is something interesting and valuable in some ways about being able to visit this environment again. But it certainly doesn’t feel anything like it must have felt back in the late seventies & early eighties when the world was crowded and you might run into anyone from a dude who lived down the hall in your dorm to a guy from halfway around the planet.
*So, what do I mean when I say I “played” the game? Well, near as I can tell, there isn’t any real story to MUD. I mean, there’s lore, but not really a plot for the player to experience. It seems to basically be an open-world (and reportedly a pretty big one, all things considered) that you can explore. As you do that, you can find items and secrets and fight NPCs.
*For example, on my last run, I was exploring a house and I discovered a secret room behind a book-case. I couldn’t go in because it was too dark. So I knew that what I needed to do then was make a torch. Back in the day, I guess building a fire in MUD was like a big first-step achievement or whatever.
*So I went to the woods and looked for a stick and I ran into a bunny which I interacted with briefly and then a “sprite” attacked me and I died.
*So, I mean, there are mildly narrative elements like that: you find a room, but you need a torch, so you go to the woods to make a torch and then you come back to the room. There’s an element of fun mystery in that kind of fetch-quest. Like I was curious to see what was in the room.
*You know, not curious enough to start over. I would have been able, I think, to just go straight to that house and open up that secret room without all the exploring I’d done on my previous run before I got to it. So I could have gotten to it faster and it wouldn’t have taken as long. But still I just wasn’t particularly invested.
*Apparently, the ultimate goal of MUD was leveling up your character. You get points for things you find and things you kill and as you get points you level up until eventually you can become a Wizard, the highest rank in the game.
*I have no way to verify if this is true, but I saw one guy online say that achieving the rank of Wizard usually took a couple of hundred hours of playing the game.
*I have no idea how many of those hours “playing” is actually spent exchanging filthy, filthy chats with other players, but you know, either way I’m not doing it.
*Anyway, I think I’m done with MUD. I think it is good that the game is still out there online. Accessing it and just spending a little time exploring the environment was interesting just to see how the game actually worked mechanically. But did I really have anything approximating the “experience” of playing it in 1980? No, of course not.
*This is always the problem with the multi-player game, right? It ultimately depends on that community and once it dries up, the game just usually isn’t much.
*I will say that it was kind of an interesting feeling to be wandering around a world like this, a world built for many players that I knew was empty. It does have a kind of ghost-towny feel.
*There was an indie horror game came out a couple years ago now called No Players Online where the premise was that you log into an online capture the flag server that is abandoned, but still operational. It had some nice atmosphere, but ultimately they didn’t really do enough with it in my opinion. But it is a cool premise.
*Going to any space that should be crowded but is actually empty is always creepy, right? No Players Online just transferred that feeling into a digital space. And there’s maybe a little of that feeling still to be found while wandering around the empty streets of MUD.
*So for pure curiosity, it might be worth checking out. But it feels unfair to even really judge the game as such; it’s just not the game it was before and it probably never will be again. Worth checking out? Your mileage may vary, but I can’t imagine anybody wanting to spend very much time there.
*Anyway, that’ll be that for MUD, I guess. Anybody that’s curious and wants to go check it out, PM me and we’ll set up a time and go together. Assuming I don’t hear from anyone (probably an extremely safe assumption), I’ll bid goodbye to the world of MUD, a groundbreaking and visionary game that remains a melancholy reminder of the perils of loving a multiplayer.
*This, I think, is going to be the last of these Playing Through the History of Video Games posts for a while. I’ll definitely be swinging back to it though and when we do come back, we’ll still be in 1980 and we’ll be introducing a true icon of gaming and by “icon” that’s exactly what I mean. Next time, Namco introduces the first genuinely great main character in video games with Pac-Man!