Armageddon MUD

» see armageddon.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem and I found the graphical end of this world, not the text end. Armageddon had already been running for seven years by then. Telnet roleplaying games were an English-language subculture with an entrance exam made of reading, and the version of this hobby that reached me was Ultima Online, on private servers, with a mouse.

Dan Brumleve started it in Urbana, Illinois in 1991. Nasri Hajj and Santiago Zorzopulos were the other two names on the founding. The code was a DikuMUD derivative in C that accumulated three decades of additions, and the world it ran was Zalanthas: a dying desert planet with two city-states on it, Allanak in the south under a sorcerer-king and Tuluk in the north, tribes and outposts scattered across the sand between them. Water was scarce enough there to work as money. By 1994 it was already being counted among the top twenty telnet destinations at National Capital Freenet, which is what a hit looked like before the web took the traffic.

There were no levels. Skills went up by using them and the game reported your standing in words rather than numbers, novice through master, so you could not min-max a character you had not actually played. Every character needed a written physical description before it could exist. The staff enforced roleplay as a rule, not a preference, and the term for that whole design school, RPI, roleplay intensive, was largely defined by this game.

The population was never big and it got smaller. 267 unique logins a week in late 2010, 171 by late 2020, roughly 150 a week by 2021. For thirty three years those people showed up.

~ the record ~

~ permadeath meant permadeath ~

When your character died on Zalanthas, that was the end of it. Staff would reverse a death caused by a bug or their own mistake and they would not reverse one caused by a bad decision, which meant every fight carried the weight of everything you had put into the character. Years of it, in some cases. People wrote about grieving characters the way you grieve something real, and the game's own tagline, the desert takes all, was a warning rather than marketing.

The rules around what players could do to each other were unusually specific for a text game. Cybersex required prior consent from the other player. In 2019 the minimum age for a player character was raised to sixteen. A thirty year old game accumulates policies the way it accumulates code, and reading the list is a decent history of what a small closed community learns the hard way.

~ the staff problem ~

A game run entirely by volunteers for three decades accumulates a politics, and Armageddon's was unusually visible because the player boards were public and nobody moderated the argument away. Staff were called Immortals, with the senior ones Producers. They wrote the plots and played every non-player character of consequence, and there was nobody above them to appeal a ruling to. In 2023 one of the longest-serving administrators, known as Shalooonsh, was removed from the game.

~ the leak ~

On 21 October 2024 the staff announced that Armageddon was closing permanently. The reason given was an internal leak: staff planning documents had gotten out, they contained player information, and out-of-game networks had formed to pass the material around and use it for in-character advantage. In a game whose entire structure depends on your character not knowing what you know, that is not a scandal, it is a broken engine.

The game closed on 29 October 2024, eight days after the announcement. Afterward the community boards lifted the rule against discussing confidential in-character information, because there was no longer any game for it to spoil. Decades of secrets came out at once.

~ the successor ~

armageddon.org still resolves. It redirects to zalanthas.org, where the same staff are building Tales of Zalanthas. Same desert, roughly the same command set, rebuilt from nothing in Evennia, a Python MUD engine, instead of thirty three years of accumulated C. Roleplay will be required but not intensive, and they have said openly that the strict find-out-in-character model is not coming back. That model is what the leak destroyed, so it is hard to read the decision as anything else.

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