Been a while since I did but sometimes I hop on one I played back in the day, like Ishar or Materia Magica, to scratch a certain itch. Looks like a good number of the old ones are still going.
discworld.atuin.net. If it's still up it's not to be missed. Easily the richest MUD experience I've encountered in decades of playing, regardless of how you feel about Terry Pratchet.
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans a...
I'm heavily involved in DragonRealms [0]. Its older brother GemStone is still kicking around too.
Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.
Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.
I haven't played a MUD in the last 25 years, but I think I would enjoy playing this one if I had time. In some ways MUDs were much more fun than modern games. I wonder what codebase it derives from.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
A persistent online world with an always progressing historical timeline would be a really interesting concept to explore. Complicated though, as for example you don't really want new players to join when the world is on fire (unless that is your setting).
Some MMORPGs handle this alright (although tbh I only really know FFXIV at this point), where every player goes through their own timeline of sorts - you are The Warrior of Light, and as you progress through the story, you're pivotal in some great events like the defeat of the big bad or preventing the world from ending. That kinda thing. But the world is persistent, so it's only you that unlocks new areas and, in some cases, only you see some changes in the world or some NPCs. It's mostly through what NPCs tell you though.
Yeah I kinda dislike that approach to MMO storylines, it's hard to suspend one's disbelief that you're "the chosen one" when there's a conga line of chosen ones behind you waiting for you to get on with it and start some story quest. Bonus points if they're all clipping through you lol.
There are some that take the MOBA type approach of just letting you go in a not-so persistent world with the story of the season going on that happens regardless if people participate in it or not, but if there are any quests they tend to be kinda generic and get old fast.
There are few that can manage a good middle ground, if any. I could never get into EVE Online but I respect their organic-ish approach to this, where the players make the story.
https://www.medievia.com has a concept of kingdoms and clans will battle to gain control over territory for the kingdoms, so there's a bit of a persistence due to the ebb and flow of clan membership and how they can hold back the other clans.
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
When I was starting out with Python, I found a library that implemented a Python version of MOO. It was brilliantly named "POO" (although in later versions it lamentably changed its name to "MOOP"). The cool thing about it was the in-world coding language was also Python, so when you code for custom rooms and objects, etc., it was all Python. I had a lot of fun with it.
Wow, I (kind of, my friends were way better at it than I was) played The Two Towers in like '95-'96. Honestly should get back into it; I bet I'd love it now.
It's a bit surreal to see this on the frontpage. I'm one of the main developers working on new content and maintaining the existing content. Happy to answer any questions, if people have them.
T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or other technical jobs, which I've always found really cool.
How can other developers help and participate in building, maintaining and operating the MUD? I've always wanted to be able to contribute to it. Am I correct that the source code isn't public?
The 30th anniversary post has an overview of events in the game’s history (content updates, community, server upgrades) that was very interesting. Congrats on the beefy 486/100 server with 64M of RAM upgrade in ‘94!
I used to be heavy into this MUD in the 90s. It's where I learned to program and made some good life-long friends (and even more life-long enemies lol).
As others have said, I also learned coding on a MUD - the one linked to in this thread, actually. LPC and the TMI codebase, and having something I was passionate about to work on, was a great way to get started with C-based programming. What I learned there easily translated to doing web work with PHP and then later to real-word app dev with C++ and C#. Thirty years, hundreds of thousands of lines of code and several dozen in-game projects later, I'm still there as an admin. It's a funny old world.
44 comments
[ 9.2 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadhttps://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds
https://www.mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD2
I played the original MUD1 over the ARPANET at 300 baud via a (very slow, very expensive, taxpayer funded) US/UK trans-Atlantic gateway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677438
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans a...
Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.
Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.
[0]: https://www.play.net/dr/ [1]: https://github.com/elanthia-online/lich-5
Then I clicked into the MUD, just to have a look, and the intro page said "celebrating 31 years online!"
It's cool to come across software that's both historical and current!
I used to spend hours on telnet playing this game with my friend. What a fun blast to the past!
Still play now and then. Got a friend into it too.
Great way to game in a terminal window at work.
Check out KBtin MUD client!
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
- Balzhur: https://balzhur.org/ is have been running from january 2000
- Medina: medinamud.top sometimes was offline but it have been running from 1995
https://anguish.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Anguish
It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
Some MMORPGs handle this alright (although tbh I only really know FFXIV at this point), where every player goes through their own timeline of sorts - you are The Warrior of Light, and as you progress through the story, you're pivotal in some great events like the defeat of the big bad or preventing the world from ending. That kinda thing. But the world is persistent, so it's only you that unlocks new areas and, in some cases, only you see some changes in the world or some NPCs. It's mostly through what NPCs tell you though.
There are some that take the MOBA type approach of just letting you go in a not-so persistent world with the story of the season going on that happens regardless if people participate in it or not, but if there are any quests they tend to be kinda generic and get old fast.
There are few that can manage a good middle ground, if any. I could never get into EVE Online but I respect their organic-ish approach to this, where the players make the story.
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
https://duris.fandom.com/wiki/Duris_Wiki
https://www.durismud.com/
Any other clients I should be looking at, for this particular MUD but also others? Are they generic enough to be used with multiple games?
[1] https://t2tmud.org/clients.php
I wonder what it would be like to write one from scratch in 2025. Maybe I have a new project.
T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or other technical jobs, which I've always found really cool.
https://t2tmud.org/history/30th_anniversary_reboot_script.ph...