In the autumn of 1978 an eighteen-year-old from Hornsea, on the Yorkshire coast, arrived at Essex University to read mathematics. In his first full week he met Roy Trubshaw, a second-year student who wanted to write a fantasy game that several people could play at once. Within two years Trubshaw had handed the unfinished program to Richard Bartle, and Bartle turned it into MUD, the Multi-User Dungeon: the first of the online worlds whose descendants, by Bartle’s account, still carry design decisions the two of them made on the university’s DECsystem-10.
Fast facts
- Born: 10 January 1960, Ripon, North Yorkshire; grew up in Hornsea.
- Education: Essex University, a first in computer science and a PhD in artificial intelligence.
- Known for: MUD (from 1978, with Roy Trubshaw), MUD2, the four player types, Designing Virtual Worlds (2003).
- Career: lecturer at Essex (1984–87); programming director of MUSE Ltd (1987–2000); consultant and writer; back at Essex from 2002, as Honorary Professor from 2013 and Emeritus Professor from 2025.
Before MUD
Bartle came to computers through games. His own biography describes a father who played every kind of board game, a schoolboy who ran a play-by-mail gaming fanzine, Sauce of the Nile, for two years before university, and nightly sessions of Dungeons & Dragons after he bought one of the first sets of rulebooks to reach Britain by mail order in 1975. Hornsea School had a subsidised line to the county council’s timesharing computer, so he learned to program there, and he wrote a programmed-text adventure book (“if you wish to open the door immediately, go to 19C”).
Essex, 1978–1987
Trubshaw had found a way for two copies of a program on the DECsystem-10 to share memory, so that, as Bartle told Edge, they “could communicate with one another instantly, without having to use files”. He used it to build a multiplayer version of Adventure. Bartle supplied ideas while Trubshaw wrote, and when Trubshaw’s course ended he passed on the shell of a third version. “When I took it over from Roy it wasn’t really a game, although we all called it one,” Bartle said. “I made a conscious decision to ‘gamify’ it so that people could play it as a game if they wanted.” His own estimate is that he wrote about three-quarters of the finished program.
The MUD entry tells how the game worked and spread: players dialling in at night and at weekends, the climb to wizard or witch, Compunet in Britain and CompuServe’s British Legends in America. Bartle was its public face. From September 1984 Micro Adventurer ran a series of articles on MUD by “the mad wizard Richard Bartle”, on its wizards and on Christmas in the Land, and in February 1985 he introduced Compunet’s version to Commodore Horizons readers, asking them to write to him at the university’s Department of Computer Science. Sinclair User noted in November 1985 that only three people were allowed to use his wizard persona, Debugger, “a powerful character”.
Through MUD Bartle met Simon Dally, a book publisher at Century Communications, which bought the rights to the game in 1984. Dally commissioned Bartle’s first book, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games (Century, 1985), and with Trubshaw they set up MUSE (Multi-User Entertainment) to sell it. MUSE signed with British Telecom in April 1985 to publish a new version. Bartle had already started again from scratch: MUD2, written in his own language, MUDDLE, which Computer Gamer found the pair designing in 1985 with about a thousand rooms in mind. By then he had stayed on at Essex for a PhD and become a lecturer in computer science, a post he held from 1984 until he left in 1987 to work on MUD2 full time.
MUSE and after
MUD2 never became the business its makers hoped for. BT’s launch, planned for late 1985, was still delayed by “Murphy’s Law” in August 1986, according to Computer Gamer, and Dally’s death in 1989 left the company, in Bartle’s words, “in a thoroughly awful mess”. Bartle stayed as MUSE’s programming director until 2000. He then spent a year as head of online games at the start-up Gameplay, where, Edge reported, a team of six on a budget of almost nothing built a text-only virtual world that was cancelled after eight months.
He never lost faith in text. Edge quoted him in 2006: “In a textual world, I can stand in my own mouth, seeing my surroundings get light and dark as I open and close it. I can be part of a painting I am carrying under my arm.”
Four kinds of player
Bartle’s best-known idea came out of an argument. Between November 1989 and May 1990, about thirty wizards on a commercial British MUD debated on its bulletin board what people wanted from the game. Bartle sorted their answers into four types, first in a short 1990 article, “Who Plays MUAs?”, and then in “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs”, written in April 1996:
| Type | Suit | What they want |
|---|---|---|
| Achievers | Diamonds, “always seeking treasure” | to set themselves goals in the game and meet them |
| Explorers | Spades, they “dig around for information” | to find out as much as they can about the world |
| Socialisers | Hearts, they “empathise with other players” | to talk to the other players |
| Killers | Clubs, “they hit people with them” | to impose themselves on other players |
The paper’s real argument was about balance: a MUD’s mix of types shifts as one group drives another away, and a designer can tip it. Others later built an online quiz on the scheme, which became known as the Bartle Test. In 2020 Wireframe was still recommending the four types to designers deciding which players a game should be aimed at.
Designing virtual worlds
In 2003 Bartle published Designing Virtual Worlds, a book of more than 700 pages on the history, design and ethics of MUDs and their graphical successors; a second edition began appearing in 2025. Edge had called him “the father of it all” in 1998, and in 2004 he put his own view of that inheritance plainly: design decisions “Roy and I made for MUD have been passed down unaltered through generations of virtual worlds, often without designers even realising that they had a choice in the matter”.
He returned to Essex in 2002 to teach on its new computer games degree, wrote for Edge, and became a visiting professor at Uppsala University (2017–21). In 2005 the Game Developers Choice Awards gave him the First Penguin award for his part in the first MUD. He retired from teaching in April 2025 and is now Emeritus Professor at Essex. MUD2 outlived its company: in 2004 Edge gave readers the address where they could still log in and play it.
Sources
- “The making of MUD”, Edge issue 141, October 2004, pp. 114–116: Bartle’s first year in 1978; Trubshaw’s shared-memory mechanism and multiplayer Adventure; the handover of the third version and “gamify”; the BT deal and MUSE Ltd; MUD2; design decisions “passed down unaltered”; Bartle as development consultant and game design lecturer at Essex.
- Micro Adventurer, September 1984, contents (p. 22, the first “in a series of articles on Multi User Dungeon” by “the mad wizard Richard Bartle”); October 1984, p. 20 (Bartle on the wizards); December 1984, p. 8 (Christmas in MUD); February 1985 and March 1985 contents (further Bartle columns; MUSE).
- Commodore Horizons, February 1985, p. 55: Bartle introduces MUD on Compunet; his address at Essex University’s Department of Computer Science.
- Computer Gamer issue 6, September 1985, pp. 48–49: Trubshaw and Bartle designing MUD2 in MUDDLE, about a thousand rooms. Computer Gamer issue 17, August 1986: Simon Dally on the delayed BT launch.
- Sinclair User issue 44, November 1985: MUSE formed in 1984, the BT agreement of April 1985, the Debugger persona.
- Edge issue 54, January 1998: “Dr. Richard Bartle (the father of it all, as creator of M.U.D.)”.
- Edge issue 164, July 2006: Bartle’s year as head of online games at a start-up, its cancelled text world, and his quotation on textual worlds.
- Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000: the death of MUSE’s business manager.
- Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, pp. 57–58: the four player types as a design tool.
- Richard A. Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” (April 1996, extending “Who Plays MUAs?”, Comms Plus!, October/November 1990) (web, secondary): the 1989–90 debate, the four types and their suits. https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
- Richard A. Bartle, “Biography” and “Curriculum Vitae”, mud.co.uk (web, secondary; his own pages): birth, Hornsea, Sauce of the Nile, D&D, the programmed-text book, Essex degrees, meeting Trubshaw, his share of MUD, Dally and Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games, MUSE, posts and dates, awards. https://mud.co.uk/richard/biog.htm and https://mud.co.uk/richard/cv.htm
- “Richard Bartle”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Designing Virtual Worlds (New Riders, 2003) and its second edition (CRC Press, 2025); the Bartle Test; retirement in April 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle