
Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs - Kinrany
https://medium.com/@felipepepe/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of-virtual-worlds-muds-mmorpgs-12e41c4cb9b
======
waprin
MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid,
although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had
to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating
with DnD or MUDs.

Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a
"coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I
would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I
desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD
hierarchy, thus the journey began.

However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that
something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part
of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun
than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the
internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may
come the closest.

~~~
chaostheory
I wouldn't say Roblox games have polish either. There's also a lot of
weirdness that only adolescents and tweens would fully understand because in
many cases it's made by those same kids. I wouldn't consider it a MUD either.
None of the games I've seen so far even have RPG traits. It's more of a
powerful sandbox than even Minecraft imo

~~~
nsxwolf
Some are quite polished. Take a look at Phantom Forces, an FPS that plays as
well as Call of Duty.

~~~
chaostheory
That's the exception and far from the norm.

------
kieckerjan
I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD
addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing
his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals
was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He
got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he
got better at hiding it). Before he came to work for us he had flunked
university, and I am pretty sure MUD had to do with that. People who knew him
before said he always hung out at the college computer club instead of
attending courses.

~~~
seneca
Yeah, MUDs were very much the spiritual precursors to the modern MMORPG. Both
have the same extremely addictive property.

~~~
orthoxerox
Everquest was basically a Diku/ROM/Circle/Smaug MUD in 3D.

------
freediver
Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can
appreciate the difference.

Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth
medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD).

I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior
to any other medium:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg)

Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding
and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text
and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less
hardcore [http://playlom.com:4001/](http://playlom.com:4001/) )

~~~
manfredo
Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think
about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance:
color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs
to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a
glance.

If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force
us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is
exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low
bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.

~~~
matt_heimer
Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make
a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all
in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in
someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a
better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to
activate your own and I think that is what the quote was about.

~~~
manfredo
There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any
text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction.
You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of
visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and
there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And
those few that do exist and are popular like Dwarf Fortress, Tales of
Maj'Eyal, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, etc. all support graphical tiles.

~~~
lostmsu
> You'll never have a racing game, a shooter

We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.

~~~
manfredo
And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered
paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you
created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by
some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints
of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn
based simulation. Shooters in these kinds of games do exist:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/)
but they exhibit the same constraints I mentioned

~~~
lostmsu
Of course it was not real time. You just picked a shooting direction along one
of the two axis.

------
whywhywhywhy
This Twitter thread about Roblox really enlightened me about it, had no idea
how it was more of a game engine and how much money people were making with
it.

[https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128376418142720000...](https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283764181427200000)

~~~
wy35
It's crazy how people still consider Roblox a single game. The platform has so
many games that it went through distinct cycles of popular genres. Back when I
played (2009ish) the dominating genres were "zombie defense" [1] and "build to
survive X" [2]. Only a few years later, those games became completely empty.
It's also interesting to note that these games held the top spots at Roblox
for years, but have a small number of the total visits compared to the most
popular games today due to Roblox's exploding playerbase.

1\. [https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-
Defence...](https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-
Defence-v3-0-8) 2.[https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-
Drakob...](https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-
Drakobloxxers)

------
VadimPR
MUDs are still thriving to this day. I work on Mudlet
([https://mudlet.org](https://mudlet.org)) which is a popular FOSS client to
play them with.

~~~
Hitton
Mudlet is great, thanks for your work. It's a pity though that it took nearly
until MUDs are dead to such good client appear. I'm rather sure that if
comparable clients existed 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, MUDs wouldn't be in
this state.

~~~
VadimPR
One can always dream to bring the genre back.

------
cmrdporcupine
Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were
100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with
only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire
world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up
being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not
RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never
really caught on.

~~~
qvrjuec
I've played a LambdaMOO based MUD off and on for about 10 years now. Players
would inevitably quit or transition to working on the game core, such an
awesome community to be a part of.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I was young but it was heady days back then in the early 90s playing with that
stuff. The most disappointing thing for me at the time was how the Internet
went the direction of the web browser / HTTP instead of the direction we were
trying to go with stuff like LambdaMOO. The web in those days was all about a
non-persistent connection and a fairly non-interactive experience. It wasn't
until the mid-2000s that "web 2.0" took off and the web got some of the
interactivity and dynamic programmability we had in mind with what we were
playing with in the early 90s -- but it got it in this awful bolted-on way.

That idea of a massive shared authoring environment, I still think that's the
future of computing. But for me it isn't about the 3d VR-ish immersion stuff,
I actually fear the isolating box that that puts people in. Which is why I
haven't played with Roblox or let my kids use it either. I don't want them in
another world. I want these kinds of tools to enrich the world we already
have, instead.

------
bemmu
Now it makes sense.

I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in
realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.

Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can
interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my
code.

~~~
sharedfrog
> I used to be a wizard in a MUD.

Not Discworld MUD[1], by any chance?

[1]
[http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/](http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/)

~~~
edejong
I don’t know about bemmu, but I was. Ended up being a creator there.

~~~
Zolomon
Hey, what a coincidence - same here!

------
SagelyGuru
I was Richard's tester, in as much as I was one of the first to reach
Wizardhood and thus able to use FOD (Finger of Death) on annoying and
misbehaving newbies. I guess that was a precursor of today's Facebook bans but
without its unfortunate PC connotations.

We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who
thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing
something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for
this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.

------
warpspin
It is a pity the article dismisses the whole eco system around LPMuds that
much by basically only including them in that screenshot from Bartle's book.
They were an interesting middle ground between the Diku-likes (think:
precursors to Diablo) and the MOOs, being online programmable in an object-
oriented C dialect called LPC which today lives on in e.g. the Pike
programming language.

~~~
em-bee
lpc/pike is a runtime compiled language much closer to python and java than to
c. it is as much of a c dialect as javascript is a java dialect. other than
c-style syntax they don't have much in common.

the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that
is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class
would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker:

in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile
classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change
to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored,
and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects
lived on until they were destroyed.

lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live
server in production

~~~
warpspin
You are right of course, just tried to be concise with the description - it's
basically how we always explained it to the players back then. A Java or
Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at
the time while I was programming on an LPMud driver.

It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its
early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last I tried.

~~~
em-bee
_A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even
exist at the time_

hah, good point.

yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike
when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator.
but i don't want to get into politics.

what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my
machines and don't remember any serious issues. i do install from source
usually though.

i am not using roxen but a different platform also written in pike called
sTeam or open-steam, which incidently is a web development and object storage
platform designed like a MUD.

~~~
warpspin
It was already a while ago, stumbled across the hand coded i386 assembler in,
if I recall correctly, nettle at that time. On a later attempt, getting the
mysql driver into the thing was a pain on my Mac. It's not that it did not
work with some debugging experience, just that each and every time I install
it, something else is broken on first attempt.

And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the
one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that
used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never
update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.

~~~
em-bee
oh bummer. writing native c bindings for pike is not to hard though. maybe
that is an option.

------
kevingadd
Context for people considering whether it's worth reading this whole article:
Roblox is a wildly successful online game popular with kids where they can
create and share their own content, including video games they created
themselves. Some Roblox game content (created by kids or adults) has 100k+
concurrent players. The origins of this title are pretty interesting and it's
especially interesting given that you generally don't see people talking about
Roblox inside or outside of the video games-focused press.

~~~
indigodaddy
My daughter loves Roblox and plays all the time on Xbox (we restrict it to
Xbox because of the lack of in-game chat). When you refer to the dearth of
media attention, I guess that doesn’t include YT right? Roblox is absolutely
huge on YouTube.

------
kingrolo
MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the
article is still running and free to play (I believe),
[http://mud2.com/](http://mud2.com/). I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999
or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to
start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend
months building a character only to have to start again.

I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I
did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little
while later. I've never really got into another online game since.

I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for
MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't
really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to
make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to
time.

Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very
different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly
know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to
programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short
lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting
impression with me.

------
evanelias
Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned
dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's
length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling
aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players
generally lived in your metro area.

In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS
software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle
dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and
supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture.
However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were
its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few
MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.

By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also
some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos)
and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were
typically "stock" \-- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on
each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world.
Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS
just based on the local community.

As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but
the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD
as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC
was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time
period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large
concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to
aiming for the smaller boards.

------
stevesearer
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school
all the way throughout and after college.

Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ)
tallied your total playing time in your player stats.

The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and
talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I
decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.

Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my
level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know
that PKs were mostly frowned upon.

------
dwheeler
Wow, it even includes Scepter of Goth!

I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now
often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included.

I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a
text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved
then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create
parties so they could go adventuring.

~~~
Teckla
[https://github.com/shelches/scepter](https://github.com/shelches/scepter)

~~~
dwheeler
Excellent, thanks for the pointer. I've added that to my document on the
history of the Scepter of Goth. It looks like I'll be able to (eventually)
post other things, too!!

------
endgame
Surprised to not see the Iron Realms MUDs mentioned in the article. I've seen
the CEO around here in the past, but can't remember his username or if he
still posts.

~~~
ricotijsen
As a former coder for Achaea, I was surprised as well. You mean Matt Mihály.

~~~
Imnimo
I basically only learned how to touch type by playing Achaea. Gotta type fast
if you haven't figured out how to make single-character aliases for 'sip
health' and 'jab goblin'!

------
l33tman
I somewhat fail to see the connection between Roblox and MUDs but FWIW one of
the most well known MUDs of the 90's is still up and running, M.U.M.E (Multi-
Users in Middle Earth). It was a Diku derivative but with its own online
language for the wizards to code in, designed by a compiler PhD, at the time
it was state of the art.

MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details
and RPG.

~~~
Diederich
I still play MUME from time to time, and have been playing it since it
started: [https://mume.org/](https://mume.org/)

Can not recommend it enough. It's like interacting with the living world
inside of Tolkien's books. It's really good.

------
seneca
I'll throw another hat in the "MUDs got me into tech" ring. I spent
significant time on Swords of Chaos, a sort of proto-MUD, then on various God
Wars incarnations.

They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that
technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to
fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and
some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is
still at the core of what I love about technology.

My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a
little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via
tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a
laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.

~~~
toyg
My kids (11 and 9) love roblox, but it's too hard to create stuff with it.
There is a lot of coding involved and the learning curve is significant, I
tried it myself and got overwhelmed (although to be fair, my interest was
pretty low to start with). They are much more creative with Minecraft.

------
every
I was an "official" builder on the Steve Jackson Games[0] Metaverse MOO in the
90's. My "job" was to create interesting spaces, places and objects. My "pay"
was a free shell account. I was a blue gelatinous cube that had escaped a
crashed NetHack game and was followed about by a pink gelatinous pyramidal
puppet. I did this for several years until the game finally folded[1]...

[0] [http://www.sjgames.com/](http://www.sjgames.com/)

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com/io/metaverse/)

------
joemazerino
CarrionFields(CF) is an active MUD to this day, focusing on PVP and guild
combat. I haven't found a replacement for CF in terms of PVP combat and
roleplaying. Great lore too!

[https://www.carrionfields.net/](https://www.carrionfields.net/)

------
snikeris
Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but
switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to
time, brings me back to my childhood.

~~~
shostack
Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried
Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their
subscription pricing is way too high.

But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and
popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its
time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.

------
atsushin
I wouldn't be the person I was today without MUDs. They brought me to my first
foray into coding and gave me a sense of community that I never really was
able to find anywhere else during my high school years (2009 - 2013). The
magic has since long worn off for me and have since found other interests but
those years spent obsessively playing were just so formative and fun.

------
x87678r
Is it easy to create Roblox games? I know my kids love it but not sure if its
possible to try to do somthing yourself.

~~~
jweather
I wouldn't call it easy, but it is possible. The tools are not very polished,
but they exist and are free... (start with Roblox Studio)

------
ZacharyPitts
Played so much on BatMud in the early nineties. Bat Mud is still running at
[https://www.bat.org](https://www.bat.org)

Became a "wiz", and wrote my first code used by other people in 1992. That
code is still running, 28 years later!

------
Brendinooo
I got into a MUD around 2003. Lensmoor. Our high school laptops didn't block
Telnet, so it was something to do.

I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players
were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.

------
Rochus
The article is an impressive historical treatment of the topic. More than 40
pages, almost a diploma thesis. I personally would have been more interested
in the technical aspects, but that would probably multiply the text length.

------
aldanor
I used to maintain Solace MUD in early 00s, what a time. Still have the source
code for it, I think, and the forum is still somewhat active despite the fact
that the server's been down for a long time now.

------
Vaslo
Running home from school in the 90’s to get on and play my turns on DikuMUD...

------
maxbaines
Great read.

------
aspenmayer
I used to play on anguish.org in the 90s. What a wild time that was.

