Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Multi-user dungeon" in English language version.
[...] muds had evolved to the point where the original name was too confining, and people started to say that "MUD" stood for the more generic "Multi-User Dimension" or "Multi-User Domain".
[pp. 10] The ancestors of MMORPGS were text-based multiuser domains (MUDs) [...] [pp. 291] Indeed, MUDs generate perhaps the one historical connection between game-based VR and the traditional program [...]
1980 [...] Final version of MUD1 completed by Richard Bartle. Essex goes on the ARPANet, resulting in Internet MUDs!
1985 [...] "My memory says that Island of Kesmai went live on CompuServe on December 15, 1985, after a very long internal test. The price was actually $6 an hour for 300 baud, $12 for 1200 baud. Serious players paid the bucks." —Kelton Flinn [...] 2000 [...] In May, Electronics Arts announces the shutdown of most of the Kesmai games, including Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior Classic.
1989 [...] Lars Penjske creates LPMud and opens Genesis. "Having fun playing TinyMUD and AberMUD, Lars Penjske decides to write a server to combine the extensibility of TinyMUD with the adventures of AberMUD. Out of this inspiration, he designed LPC as a special MUD language to make extending the game simple. Lars says, '...I didn't think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this.' The first running code was developed in a week on Unix System V using IPC, not BSD sockets. Early object-oriented features only existed accidentally by way of the nature of MUDs manipulating objects. As Lars learned C++, he gradually extended those features. The result is that the whole LPMud was developed from a small prototype, gradually extended with features." —George Reese's LPMud Timeline
[...] established Habitat as a result. This is described as a 2D graphical MUD, and while we now know that Habitat was the first of many massively multiuser graphical chat spaces, we also know that the connection is not direct. [...] Its owners and makers (particularly F. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar) [...]
Some people describe it as a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) with a 3D interface and role playing character.
It made perfect sense for us to combine the two technologies and make a graphical MUD.
Richard Garriott first coined the term MMORPG in 1997.
"The Mud Connector" is a complete on-line service designed to provide the most up-to-date listings of registered Multiuser on-line games. Every entry lists the site of the game, the base code used, descriptions of the game as submitted by the administrators, links to WWW homepages (when available), and Telnet links to the game.
The word "mud" is also used as a verb. For example, you might hear someone say, "I like to mud more than I like to sleep," or "I am a bit tired, as I was up all night mudding, so maybe you better go to class without me".
Programs in LPC programming language were developed to perform the following tasks: First, each set of CVs was separated into single CVs, and each of them were plotted. An average CV from all the CVs in one set was calculated and plotted as well. All images belonging to one set of CVs were combined into short animated movies to visualize the changes over time. The graphs of the averaged CVs from all measurement points within a line scan were combined into an animation for demonstrating the systematic changes along each of the Pt stripes. After that, specific parameters were extracted from each CV (see below). These parameters and some derived values were tabulated and plotted versus the x-coordinate of the measurement point. Thus, different graphs for each line scan were created showing the changes in specific properties along the thickness of the Pt stripe. The combined tabulated data for each wafer was then used to plot a 3D image of several parameters vs substrate composition and nominal thickness. The LPC programs were compiled using LDMud (V3.3.719).
December, 1996 - GemStone III and DragonRealms are the top two titles (hours/month) in industry
When I went to university, I discovered text-based MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. I loved the fact that these sorts of games had all these players playing at once - even when you were not playing, the world carried on without you. Because of this, I began creating my own text-based MUD, but I quickly realized that with so many of them out there, there was no way that mine would ever get noticed. So I began to search for a way to make mine stand out, and the obvious way, of course, was to add graphics. With my game, I was trying to emulate text MUDs at the time, purely as a hobby.
Simutronics was originally the brain-child of David Whatley. As a teenager, he'd been big into the old BBS days and had even written some Fantasy Game BBS software that he sold all over the world, and he did this all from his parents' home. He'd also gotten involved as a player in some of the early multiplayer games that were out there such as Sceptre and Island of Kesmai, and, like many others who play these games, he thought to himself, "I can do this too." So in 1987, at the age of 21, he founded Simutronics Corporation with Tom and Susan Zelinski.
The MUDs I played extensively: Genocide (where I first used the name "Psychochild"), Highlands, Farside, Kerovnia, and Astaria.
The point of the game was to gain points until you achieved the rank of wizard, at which point you became immortal and gained certain powers over mortals. Points were scored by killing things or dropping treasure into a swamp. The game gained some popularity in Britain when a guest account was set up that allowed users on JANET (the British academic network) to play during the small hours of the morning each day.
Milieu was originally written for a CDC Cyber owned by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. High school students from around the state were given access to the machine for educational purposes; they often ended up writing chat programs and games instead. I am uncertain of the precise time frame, but I believe Milieu probably predates MUD.
As micros became cost effective, the MECC mainframe became obsolete and was shut down in 1983. Scepter then went commercial in a collaboration between several ex-MECC (and by then also post-highschool) game hackers. It was rewritten in C and ran on a PC XT running QNX. It supported 16 dialup users, and dialup installations were set up in 5 states and Canada. This exposed Scepter to a lot of budding MUD developers at a time when the Internet was just getting started.
Monster was written in VMS Pascal under VMS 4.6.
TinyMUD 1.0 was initially designed as a portable, stripped-down version of Monster (this was back in the days when TinyMUD was designed to be up and running in a week of coding and last for a month before everybody got bored of it.)
Programs in LPC programming language were developed to perform the following tasks: First, each set of CVs was separated into single CVs, and each of them were plotted. An average CV from all the CVs in one set was calculated and plotted as well. All images belonging to one set of CVs were combined into short animated movies to visualize the changes over time. The graphs of the averaged CVs from all measurement points within a line scan were combined into an animation for demonstrating the systematic changes along each of the Pt stripes. After that, specific parameters were extracted from each CV (see below). These parameters and some derived values were tabulated and plotted versus the x-coordinate of the measurement point. Thus, different graphs for each line scan were created showing the changes in specific properties along the thickness of the Pt stripe. The combined tabulated data for each wafer was then used to plot a 3D image of several parameters vs substrate composition and nominal thickness. The LPC programs were compiled using LDMud (V3.3.719).
Then, in 1996, I was hired by Sony Interactive Studios to create a graphical, commercial MUD.
Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
August 19, 1989. Jim Aspnes announces the availability of TinyMUD to a few friends. Its port, 4201, is Aspnes' office number. TinyMUD is written in C for Unix, and was originally conceived as a front-end for IRC.
Summer 1991. koosh (Nils McCarty) ports MicroMush to Chezmoto. The name is changed to MicroMuse at the suggestion of Wallace Feurzeig of BBN. MicroMuse evolves into the first educational Mud, with emphasis on K12 outreach.
Containing many of the features of a D&D game, it added an interesting twist -- the dungeon master, the person who set-up and ran a D&D world, was played by the Adventure computer program itself.
The original LPMUD was written by Lars Pensjö and others, and became one of the most popular MUD's by the early 1990s.
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.
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.
This is the "classic" MUD, played by many people both internal and external to the University. Although eventually available only during night-time due to the effects of its popularity on the system, its impact on on-line gaming has been immense. I eventually closed it down on 30/9/87 upon leaving Essex University to work for MUSE full time.
Some would insist however that 'MUD' does in fact stand for Multi Undergraduate Destroyer, in recognition of the number of students who may have failed their classes due to too much time spent MUDding!
When you leave the game, objects can be kept for when you restart (eg. that weapon you commissioned from a smith), and you restart in the room from which you quit. This means some objects can be kept unavailable for long periods if their owner isn't playing. There are no resets.
Experience is obtained by visiting new places, wandering around exploring, and even by simply chatting. This contrasts with the usual MUA scheme where points are obtained for finding treasure or performing specific tasks.
Almost anything can be bought, including houses, shops, taverns, animals, weapons, food and drink. Personae may use certain skills to create objects, eg. potions, which can be sold to other players for use on their adventures.
Although the present system went live in October 1988, Gods began in 1985 as a non-commercial MUA; its author was inspired by MUD1 to write his own game, and was among the first people to do so. Gods was Shades' only rival to be the Prestel Micronet MUA.
Pip Cordrey used to run a BBS called 'Labbs', which had a section devoted to MUD1 in its early days. Six people from St. Paul's School worked on that section, and Cordrey organised them into a team to develop a MUA that would run on a home computer. The system was named MirrorWorld because it had rolling resets (as in the film "Westworld"). It went live in 1986.
The Multi-User Galaxy Game project was begun in 1985 by CompuNet as a SF alternative to MUD1, which then ran on the system. When the other programmer left CompuNet, Lenton rewrote the game from scratch as Federation II. It was officially launched on CompuNet in 1989; reported also to run on MicroLink, and on any other commercial system willing to take it.
The MUD Connector at http://www.mudconnect.com has just about everything you could possibly need to get on a MUD. It has MUD-related links to FAQs, newsgroups and clients; as well as player discussions and forums about different MUDs. This site also has a listing of over 500 MUDs, with pretty useful descriptions of what you can expect to find on most games. You can even click on the MUD or home page you'd like to see and link right to it. If you're shopping for a new MUD and aren't sure what you're looking for, this is the place to park it. We're talking big time bookmark material here.
{{cite book}}: External link in |quote=Programs in LPC programming language were developed to perform the following tasks: First, each set of CVs was separated into single CVs, and each of them were plotted. An average CV from all the CVs in one set was calculated and plotted as well. All images belonging to one set of CVs were combined into short animated movies to visualize the changes over time. The graphs of the averaged CVs from all measurement points within a line scan were combined into an animation for demonstrating the systematic changes along each of the Pt stripes. After that, specific parameters were extracted from each CV (see below). These parameters and some derived values were tabulated and plotted versus the x-coordinate of the measurement point. Thus, different graphs for each line scan were created showing the changes in specific properties along the thickness of the Pt stripe. The combined tabulated data for each wafer was then used to plot a 3D image of several parameters vs substrate composition and nominal thickness. The LPC programs were compiled using LDMud (V3.3.719).
January 1992 ¶ _Genocide_ starts as the first MUD dedicated totally to inter-player conflict, which is a fancy way of saying that its theme is creatively player-killing.
Late 1991 ¶ After the retirement of Lars from _Genesis_, the _Genesis_ admins move to create the first LPMud-derived server, CD. CD stands for Chalmers Datorforening, Swedish for Chalmers Computing Club, where _Genesis_ and _Igor_ existed. In spite of his retirement from _Genesis_, Lars continued to develop LPMud.ad
Monster allows players to do something that very few, if any, other games allow: the players themselves create the fantasy world as part of the game. Players can create objects, make locations, and set up puzzles for other players to solve.
The thing is, though, that even if the likes of Oubliette did count as a virtual world, they had pretty well zero effect on the development of today's virtual worlds. Follow the audit trail back from World of Warcraft, and you wind up at MUD.
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.
Olifiers began with a brief history of Jagex and RuneScape: how Lead Developer Andrew Gower and his brother Paul founded the company in Cambridge in 2001, bringing their love for classic MUDs into the visual realm. The original RuneScape (now referred to as RuneScape Classic) was simply and exactly that: a 2D graphical interface placed on top of a MUD
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.
Although the present system went live in October 1988, Gods began in 1985 as a non-commercial MUA; its author was inspired by MUD1 to write his own game, and was among the first people to do so. Gods was Shades' only rival to be the Prestel Micronet MUA.
Pip Cordrey used to run a BBS called 'Labbs', which had a section devoted to MUD1 in its early days. Six people from St. Paul's School worked on that section, and Cordrey organised them into a team to develop a MUA that would run on a home computer. The system was named MirrorWorld because it had rolling resets (as in the film "Westworld"). It went live in 1986.
Written by Neil Newell, originally as a hobby because he enjoyed playing- the original MUD so much on Essex University, SHADES has recently. been launched on Micronet, the computer network, which has a large Commodore user-base.
The Multi-User Galaxy Game project was begun in 1985 by CompuNet as a SF alternative to MUD1, which then ran on the system. When the other programmer left CompuNet, Lenton rewrote the game from scratch as Federation II. It was officially launched on CompuNet in 1989; reported also to run on MicroLink, and on any other commercial system willing to take it.
Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Simutronics was originally the brain-child of David Whatley. As a teenager, he'd been big into the old BBS days and had even written some Fantasy Game BBS software that he sold all over the world, and he did this all from his parents' home. He'd also gotten involved as a player in some of the early multiplayer games that were out there such as Sceptre and Island of Kesmai, and, like many others who play these games, he thought to himself, "I can do this too." So in 1987, at the age of 21, he founded Simutronics Corporation with Tom and Susan Zelinski.
January 1992 ¶ _Genocide_ starts as the first MUD dedicated totally to inter-player conflict, which is a fancy way of saying that its theme is creatively player-killing.
Then, in 1996, I was hired by Sony Interactive Studios to create a graphical, commercial MUD.
Olifiers began with a brief history of Jagex and RuneScape: how Lead Developer Andrew Gower and his brother Paul founded the company in Cambridge in 2001, bringing their love for classic MUDs into the visual realm. The original RuneScape (now referred to as RuneScape Classic) was simply and exactly that: a 2D graphical interface placed on top of a MUD
Late 1991 ¶ After the retirement of Lars from _Genesis_, the _Genesis_ admins move to create the first LPMud-derived server, CD. CD stands for Chalmers Datorforening, Swedish for Chalmers Computing Club, where _Genesis_ and _Igor_ existed. In spite of his retirement from _Genesis_, Lars continued to develop LPMud.ad
Unzählige MUD-Nachfolger (wie etwa MOO, MUSH, MUCK, etc.) verwendeten ähnliche Systeme und Thematiken — v. A. aus Fantasy und Science Fiction — und verstärkten teilweise den Rollenspiel-Charakter bis hin zu den 'sogennanten Role Play Intensive MUD (RPIMUD)'. ["Countless MUD successors (such as MOO, MUSH, MUCK, etc.) used similar systems and themes from fantasy and science fiction, and increased degrees of role-playing focus up to the so-called 'Role Play Intensive MUD (RPIMUD)'"]
In 1980, Roy Traubshaw, 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.
Written by Neil Newell, originally as a hobby because he enjoyed playing- the original MUD so much on Essex University, SHADES has recently. been launched on Micronet, the computer network, which has a large Commodore user-base.
So after more than 15 years of great memories, with a heavy heart, I am going to officially declare Dragon's Gate closed... at least for now.