MUD was a text adventure in which the other characters might be people. Its rooms, objects and puzzles looked like those of any adventure game, but the other characters were real players, typing at their own terminals, who could talk to you, help you, rob you or kill you. “If you are alone in the Land of Mud, that’s just what it seems like — an ordinary adventure,” Computer Gamer explained in 1985. “It’s only when more than one person is playing that the Land really comes alive.”
It began on a university computer in Colchester and spread the way university software did, by being copied. By 1994 Computer Gaming World counted “about 300 MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHs, MUSEs in operation, mostly running on university computers”. Richard Bartle, one of the two students who wrote the first, later claimed that MUDs “owned ten per cent of the bits on the internet in 1994, before the world wide web”.
Fast facts
- First game: MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle on Essex University’s DECsystem-10 from 1978.
- Getting in: outside players dialled in by modem when the university did not need the computer, at night and at weekends.
- Commercial versions: Compunet in Britain and CompuServe in America in the mid-1980s; MUD2, run by MUSE Ltd with British Telecom.
- Descendants: AberMUD (Aberystwyth), TinyMUD, LPMud, DikuMUD, and social worlds such as LambdaMOO.
- Legacy: the graphical online role-playing games of the late 1990s; see MMORPGs.
Essex, 1978
Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, had found a way for two copies of a program on the university’s DECsystem-10 mainframe to write to shared memory, so that, as Bartle put it to Edge, “two instances of the same program could communicate with one another instantly, without having to use files”. He used it to build a multiplayer version of Adventure. Bartle, in his first year in 1978, joined him, and when Trubshaw’s course ended Bartle finished the third version. “When I took it over from Roy it wasn’t really a game, although we all called it one,” he said. “I made a conscious decision to ‘gamify’ it so that people could play it as a game if they wanted.”
What he added was a reason to keep playing. MUD had no ending. Players earned points by collecting treasure, by fighting monsters or each other, and by doing small things the game rewarded, such as “making the bed or giving the beggar a coin”, and climbed through the levels towards the top rank of wizard or witch. A wizard gained “immense powers which can then be used to pester mortals”, Computer Gamer reported, though an unwritten code said a wizard who teased a player too hard should make amends with treasure or a useful hint. In four years more than 50 players had made it. “I’ve never thought of the game as having a particular object to achieve,” Trubshaw said. Bartle put it another way: “We provide the environment, you provide the play.”
Players from outside
During the day the DECsystem-10 belonged to the whole campus. Micro Adventurer explained in September 1984 that only at night did the university open MUD up to “people out in the real world”, the “externals”, as players called them, who dialled in over the national packet-switching network; “internals” played from the university itself. The magazine counted players in Australia and Japan, and copies of MUD running in Portugal and Sweden. Its first externals, it said, had played from the USA back in 1980.
In 1984 Century Communications bought the rights to sell the game. Micro Adventurer reported the company’s plan to buy or rent a VAX to run it on, and a claim that there was “no reason why you cannot have up to 1000 people playing at one time”. Simon Dally, Century’s senior editor, then left to set up a new company to market MUD, and a deal with British Telecom created MUSE Ltd to write a bigger version. Computer Gamer found Trubshaw and Bartle in 1985 designing it in their own language, MUDDLE (Multi-User Dungeon Design LanguagE), aiming for about a thousand rooms: “ten rooms for every potential player — that way it’s not so small you get bored, and not so big you never meet anyone.”
Compunet and CompuServe
In Britain, Commodore 64 owners could play it through Compunet. In February 1986 Commodore Computing International called MUD a popular feature of Compunet, the network for Commodore owners, “a massive on-going adventure with hundreds of other players”, and ran a monthly column on it by “Zaphod the Arch-Wiz”. The column gives a flavour of the game’s culture. It advertised a “MUD Spectacular”, a free-for-all in which the doors closed after ten minutes and the last player alive won 1,000 points for every mortal who had started. It also reported that MUD was about to open “in the states on one of the country’s biggest networks, Compuserve”, identical to the British game but without the Rock database, left out “for obvious copyright reasons”. CompuServe called its version British Legends.
Copies everywhere
The game’s real success was in being copied. Amiga Format recalled in 1997 that MUD became popular once students could reach it over JANET, the network linking British universities, and that “over the following few years, various MUD-style games sprang up on other academic servers”. It named the best-known: Alan Cox’s AberMUD, “so named because it originated at Aberystwyth University in Wales”, and James Aspnes’ TinyMUD, versions of which were “still popular nearly eight years after its appearance”. The Discworld MUD, set in the world of the Discworld books, ran on another engine, LPMud, as Amiga Shopper showed readers in 1993.
The copies split into kinds. Computer Gaming World’s 1994 guide found most MUDs still “built around the sword-and-sorcery motif”, where “the object in these MUDs is to gain experience points and thereby advance through the levels, perhaps eventually to join the immortal gods of the MUD and gain the power to create dungeons and monsters of your own”. To keep from running out of monsters and treasure, it added, most reset “every day or so”, so it was wise to “put your gold in the bank before you log off”. Others were role-playing worlds, such as a Star Trek MUSE, or MUDs for children run by the MIT Media Lab. Then there were “make-it-up-as-you-go-along” worlds such as LambdaMOO, “housed inside of some computers in Palo Alto”, with little theme and few rules, where players built their own rooms and objects and the magazine’s writer kept a home called “Cyd’s Place”. LambdaMOO had nearly 8,000 users, 200 at a time.
From MUDs to MMORPGs
The graphical online role-playing games of the late 1990s grew out of these worlds. In 2010 Edge put Raph Koster’s view, that EverQuest had “a strong heritage in DikuMUD games”, to John Smedley, “the man who started it all”. He agreed that “the influence from DikuMUDs was there”, but said the game was “more inspired by playing Dungeons & Dragons than anything”. Bartle’s own view, in 2004, was that design decisions he and Trubshaw made “have been passed down unaltered through generations of virtual worlds, often without designers even realising that they had a choice in the matter”. The MMORPG entry follows that line from MUD to Ultima Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft.
MUDs also gave game designers a way to talk about players. In the 1990s Bartle sorted the players he saw in MUDs into four types: achievers, who want to complete everything; explorers, who want to see a game’s sights and understand its rules; socialisers, who come for the company; and killers, who play to disrupt others. In 2020 Wireframe was still recommending the scheme to designers as a way to aim a game at particular groups of players.
Sources
- “The making of MUD”, Edge issue 141, October 2004, pp. 115–116: Trubshaw’s shared-memory mechanism, the multiplayer Adventure, Bartle’s first year in 1978, the third version, “gamify”, BT and MUSE Ltd, MUD2, “ten per cent of the bits on the internet in 1994”, design decisions passed down; British Legends as CompuServe’s name.
- Micro Adventurer, September 1984, p. 7 (news: Century Communications buys the rights, the VAX, “up to 1000 people”, Century the Wizard) and p. 22, “Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud” (the DECsystem-10 by day and night, externals and internals, the packet-switching network, players in Australia and Japan, copies in Portugal and Sweden, the first externals in 1980).
- Computer Gamer issue 6, September 1985, pp. 48–49: MUD at Essex (what playing alone and together is like, points for making the bed, wizards and witches and their code, more than 50 wizards in four years, Trubshaw and Bartle quoted, Simon Dally and BT, MUDDLE, a thousand rooms for MUD2).
- Commodore Computing International, vol. 4 no. 7, February 1986: p. 17, MUD on Compunet; p. 50, “Zaphod the Arch-Wiz” column (the MUD Spectacular, MUD coming to CompuServe without Rock, MUD2).
- Amiga Format issue 97, May 1997, p. 78: MUDs online (JANET, AberMUD, TinyMUD, Bartle’s MUD-2).
- Amiga Shopper issue 22, February 1993, p. 103: connecting to Discworld, running on LPMud.
- Computer Gaming World issue 123, October 1994, p. 38: “The 31 flavors of MUD” (about 300 MUDs, the sword-and-sorcery, role-playing, children’s and LambdaMOO kinds, resets and banks, LambdaMOO’s users).
- “An Audience With… John Smedley”, Edge issue 215, June 2010, p. 68: EverQuest and DikuMUD.
- Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, p. 62: Bartle’s four player types.