| MUD1 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) |
|
| Platform(s) | Platform independent |
| Release | 1978 |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy MUD |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD (referred to as MUD1, to distinguish it from its successor, MUD2 , and the MUD genre in general), is the first MUD.
MUD was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex on a DEC PDP-10. [1] [2] Trubshaw named the game Multi-User Dungeon, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork , which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. [3] [4] Zork in turn was inspired by an older text-adventure game known as Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT. [5]
MUD1 was written in the domain-specific programming language Multi User Dungeon Definition Language (MUDDL). [6] Its first version was written by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in BCPL. It was later ported to C++ [7] and used in other MUDs such as MIST . [6]
In 1980, Roy Trubshaw created MUD version 3 in BCPL (the predecessor of C), to conserve memory and make the program easier to maintain. [8] Richard Bartle, a fellow Essex student, contributed much work on the game database, introducing many of the locations and puzzles that survive to this day. Later that year Roy Trubshaw graduated from Essex University, handing over MUD to Richard Bartle, who continued developing the game. [9] That same year, MUD1 became the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game as Essex University connected its internal network to the ARPANET. [10]
In 1983, Essex University allowed remote access to its DEC-10 via British Telecom's Packet Switch Stream network between 2 am and 7 am each night. [11] MUD became popular with players around the world, and several magazines wrote articles on this new trend. [12]
Between 1984 and 1987, MUD was hosted on the DEC-20 of Dundee College of Technology [13] which was one of the few institutions to allow outside access.
In 1984, Compunet, a UK-based network primarily for Commodore 64 users, licensed MUD1 and ran it from late 1984 until 1987, when CompuNet abandoned the DEC-10 platform they were using. [14]
Trubshaw and Bartle (with the assistance of Simon Dally) subsequently formed the company Multi-User Entertainment Limited, and proceeded to work on MUD version 4, also known as MUD2 (released in 1985). [15] MUD2 was intended to be run as a service for British Telecom. [16]
In 1987, MUD1 was licensed by CompuServe, who pressured Richard Bartle to close down the instance of MUD1, better known as 'Essex MUD', that was still running at Essex University. This resulted in the deletion of the MUD account that October. This left MIST , a derivative of MUD1 with similar gameplay, as the only remaining MUD running on the Essex University network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity. MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991. [17]
MUD1 ran under the name British Legends until late 1999 and was retired along with other software during CompuServe's Y2K cleanup efforts. [18]
In 2000, Viktor Toth rewrote the BCPL source code for MUD1 to C++ and opened it alongside MUD2 on British-legends.com. [19]
In 2014, with permission from the authors of MUD1, the C++ reimplementation of MUD1 was deposited within the archives of Stanford University for historical purposes. [20] [21]
In 2020, the full source code for the PDP-10 implementation of MUD1 (as of 1986) was released on Github (with permission from the authors), under the GPL v3 license. [22]
Computer Gaming World in 1993 called British Legends on CompuServe as a "typical text-based multi-player role-playing game" with an emphasis on magic. [23]
BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. BCPL introduced several features of many modern programming languages, including using curly braces to delimit code blocks. BCPL was first implemented by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1967.
B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
A multi-user dungeon, also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
AberMUD was the first popular open source MUD. It was named after the town Aberystwyth, where it was written. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at University of Wales, Aberystwyth for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987.
DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of multi-user domain (MUD). It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
TOPS-10 System is a discontinued operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for the PDP-10 mainframe computer family. Launched in 1967, TOPS-10 evolved from the earlier "Monitor" software for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers; this was renamed to TOPS-10 in 1970.
LPMud, abbreviated LP, is a family of multi-user dungeon (MUD) server software. Its first instance, the original LPMud game driver, was developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö. LPMud was innovative in its separation of the MUD infrastructure into a virtual machine and a development framework written in the programming language LPC.
A persistent world or persistent state world (PSW) is a virtual world which, by the definition by Richard Bartle, "continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it". The first virtual worlds were text-based and often called MUDs, but the term is frequently used in relation to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and pervasive games. Examples of persistent worlds that exist in video games include Battle Dawn, EVE Online, and Realms of Trinity.
Richard Allan Bartle is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created MUD1 in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds.
MUD2 is the successor of MUD1, Richard Bartle's pioneering Multi-User Dungeon. MUD2 is not a sequel to MUD1, instead being a heavily updated version of MUD1 - with the engine being implemented in C, featuring significantly more content than MUD1, and uses a flexible object-oriented scripting language (MUDDLE) to define content as opposed to MUD1's 'glorified table lookup system' (MUDDL).
A text game or text-based game is an electronic game that uses a text-based user interface, that is, the user interface employs a set of encodable characters, such as ASCII, instead of bitmap or vector graphics.
The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and earlier social games.
TinyMUCK or, more broadly, a MUCK, is a type of user-extendable online text-based role-playing game, designed for role playing and social interaction. Backronyms like "Multi-User Chat/Created/Computer/Character/Carnal Kingdom" and "Multi-User Construction Kit" are sometimes cited, but are not the actual origin of the term; "muck" is simply a play on the term MUD.
Muddle may refer to:
The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex is an academic department that focuses on educating and researching into Computer Science and Electronic Engineering specific matters. It was formed by the merger of two departments, notable for being amongst the first in England in their fields, the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering(1966) and the Department of Computer Science (1966).
Avalon: The Legend Lives is a text-based online multi-player role-playing game world that was first released on 28 October 1989 at the gaming convention Adventure 89. It has maintained a near-continuous on-line presence with consistent and intact persona files and player history since the late 1980s. Until regular outages began occurring in 2023, it was the longest continuously running online role-playing game in history.
Nigel Roberts is a British computer scientist.
In 1980, Roy Trubshaw, a British fan of the fantasy role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons, wrote an electronic version of that game during his final undergraduate year at Essex College. The following year, his classmate Richard Bartle took over the game, expanding the number of potential players and their options for action. He called the game MUD (for Multi-User Dungeons), and put it onto the Internet.
The "D" in MUD stands for "Dungeon" ... because the version of ZORK Roy played was a Fortran port called DUNGEN.
Zork was too much of a nonsense word, not descriptive of the game, etc., etc., etc. Silly as it sounds, we eventually started calling it Dungeon (Dave admits to suggesting the new name, but that's only a minor sin). When Bob the lunatic released his FORTRAN version to the DEC users' group, that was the name he used.
Many MUDDL databases were written by students at Essex University, the most well-known being 'Mist', 'Rock', 'Blud' and 'Uni' [...]
Viktor Toth had had a copy of the BCPL source code for MUD1 for some years, and decided that now was the time to do something with it. In a 9-day programming blitz over Christmas, he rewrote the BCPL MUDDL engine in C++ and opened it up alongside MUD2. The ex-CompuServe players gravitated there, where it now runs as a direct continuation of the defunct original BL incarnation.
The program was also becoming unmanageable, as it was written in assembler. Hence, he rewrote everything in BCPL, starting late 1979 and working up to about Easter 1980. The finished product was the heart of the system which many people came to believe was the 'original' MUD. In fact, it was version 3.
Roy graduates from Essex University, and Richard takes full control of the game, fleshing out the database and adding additional commands. A proper persona communication system is introduced, along with the concepts of points and wizards.
1980 ... Final version of MUD1 completed by Richard Bartle. Essex goes on the ARPANet, resulting in Internet MUDs!
Essex University allows outside users to access its DEC-10 via BT's Packet Switch Stream network (PSS) during the normally idle period from 2am to 8am each night.
Furthermore, it only ran on DEC-10, and although copies were sent to other institutions in the U.K., Sweden, and Norway, only two of these allowed outsiders access (Dundee Technical College and Oslo University).
The incarnation of MUD1 on the CompuNet network in the UK, the first commercial MUA in the world.
A new version of the game, which came to be known as MUD2, was written in 1985 to be run as a service for British Telecom.
October of 1987 was chaos. The MUD account was deleted, but the guest account on Essex University remained open. I guess it wasn't causing any trouble so they simply left it. ROCK, UNI and MUD all ran from the MUD account so they had gone but... MIST ran from a student account and it was still playable.
Due in part to a fortuitous coincidence (MUD was written for the same DECSystem-10 computing platform that CompuServe used for its information service) MUD was licensed by CompuServe in the mid-1980s where it ran as a popular game until late 1999. It was eventually retired along with other software during CompuServe's Y2K cleanup efforts.
Viktor Toth had had a copy of the BCPL source code for MUD1 for some years, and decided that now was the time to do something with it. In a 9-day programming blitz over Christmas, he rewrote the BCPL MUDDL engine in C++ and opened it up alongside MUD2. The ex-CompuServe players gravitated there, where it now runs as a direct continuation of the defunct original BL incarnation.
The code has landed at Stanford University, which says it has secured permission to redistribute the game's blueprints from the authors Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw.
Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) | |
|---|---|
| Major branches | |
| Minor branches, codebases, libraries | |
| Concepts, terminology |
|
| Publications | |
| Companies, organizations | |
