MUD1

~ the eulogy ~

In 1978 a student named Roy Trubshaw started writing a program on the DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex that would let more than one person be inside the same imaginary place at the same time. He called it MUD, for Multi-User Dungeon, the Dungeon part borrowed from the version of Zork he had been playing. Richard Bartle came on board and added most of what the game eventually contained, incrementally, across the next three years. There were no graphics. There was a room, a description of the room, and other people in it who were not characters the computer was running.

The Essex machine ran MUD from 1980 until around 1988, with Bartle's own record putting the end of his university involvement at 30 September 1987, when he left to work on commercial versions full time. The game went onto CompuNet in Britain and onto CompuServe in the United States, where it was renamed British Legends and sold by the hour to Americans.

CompuServe is where my distance from this one sits, and it is a billing problem rather than a chronology problem. British Legends had about eighteen months left in it the first time I dialed up, but CompuServe billed in dollars against a US credit card, and that was not an arrangement a fourteen-year-old in Turkey was going to make. The first multiplayer worlds I could actually get to were Ultima Online private servers a few years later, which are descended from this program by a line you can trace.

~ the dossier ~

~ the y2k cleanup ~

CompuServe shut British Legends down in December 1999. The cause of death was Y2K housekeeping: the company was going through its machines retiring software that nobody wanted to certify against the century rollover, and a text game from 1978 was an obvious candidate for the pile. Bartle's own page records it with the word "doomed."

By then it had been on CompuServe since the mid-eighties, which made it, in the estimate of the people who ran it, probably the longest continuously running MUD anywhere in the world on the day it was switched off, twenty-one years after Trubshaw opened the file on the Essex PDP-10.

~ the words it gave us ~

The name escaped the program. MUD stopped meaning this specific game and started meaning the entire category, so that for twenty years afterward anybody writing a text-based multiplayer world was writing a MUD, and the DikuMUDs and LPMUDs of the nineties carried a piece of Essex in their names without most of their players knowing why.

Bartle got a second vocabulary out of it. In 1996 he published a paper on the kinds of people who show up in these worlds and sorted them into achievers, explorers, socializers and killers. Game designers still argue about that taxonomy today, usually without mentioning that it was derived from watching the players of one program at one English university.

The mechanical inheritance is just as direct. Persistent characters in rooms that have descriptions, sharing those rooms with other humans who may help you or rob you: EverQuest and World of Warcraft are this design with a renderer bolted on. Bartle has spent decades pointing out that the genre solved most of its social problems in the early eighties and then forgot it had.

~ where it runs now ~

You can still play it. A player named Viktor Toth rebuilt the MUD1 engine from scratch after CompuServe dropped it, writing by his own account more than fourteen thousand lines of C++ to do it, and reopened the game as British Legends in 2000. It has been up ever since on a fan server, which is why the thing this grave marks is the commercial service rather than the game. CompuServe stopped selling it. Nobody stopped running it.

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