
Tell HN: 17 years on the same game - duzchip
January 19 2001 - at 07:53:56 in the morning - i first logged in to Discworld MUD. This was about ten years after it first launched. Since this date I have spent roughly 20000 hours actively playing this game and I&#x27;m not even close to &quot;winning&quot; or &quot;finishing&quot; the game.<p>No matter when you login there&#x27;s roughly at least 100 people logged in playing. It&#x27;s social people from all around the world.<p>I just felt like writing a sentence about this game to spread the word a bit. Games evolve so quickly these days. New games are released daily making all other games obsolete. Discworld MUD however has a quality I still haven&#x27;t found in any other game - be it World of Warcraft, Elder scroll online, TERA or whatever. Discworld MUD is a game with so many small variations that you can never finish - and even now, 27 years after it was first launched, you can still create a new char that is possibly unique compared to any other that ever played.<p>Have a nice day!<p>( Link: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;discworld.starturtle.net&#x2F; )
======
Falkon1313
In the mid-90s, I took my bored then-girlfriend to the local University
library computer lab and introduced her to MUDs. When they shut off the
building lights late that night I had to pry her away from the computer
terminal. (Neither of us were students, so getting caught there after closing
might not have been good.)

A few years later, I would play up to 16 hours straight with a lady who lived
1000 miles away (and our band of MUD/IRC friends). We were in-game when she
got the news that her best friend had died. But she didn't want to just sit in
silence alone at home, so she stayed on the game and the group gathered round
to comfort her and let her talk through her grief and her memories. MUDs can
be intense! Some years later, we met in person and she became my wife. Years
later we discovered Discworld and became fans. Sometimes we miss the MUDs.
I'll have to tell her that there's a Discworld one, although it may suck us
back in for countless hours.

~~~
nsb1
I, too, met my now-wife on a MUD back in the mid 90s. It's a great story to
tell, especially now in the age of Match.com and the like.

"How did you know she wasn't some 300lb neck-beard named Jerry?"

"I didn't. But Jerry would have had to be one hell of an actor."

We clocked in a lot of hours in that place before I packed my life up and
drove 2500 miles to be together.

~~~
chias
My old guild leader on The Purple Dragon MUD did the same :)

My own story is similar, though it wasn't a MUD. I think it's pretty beautiful
to fall in love with someone via a text-based view of their personality. In
the world of Match and OKCupid I love to just tell people "we met online",
mainly because it annoys my fiancee.

~~~
c22
I've dated a couple people I met in MUDs, but the person I ended up marrying I
met through an IRL friend. I get where you're coming from, but I always felt
that the text medium was a limitation that resulted in those relationships
failing.

------
Fezzik
I’ve lurked here (HN) a long time waiting for a MUD related post! I remember
making great friendships and developing my communication skills and
personality through MUDs (pHANTASM and then Rifts) in the mid-nineties.
Neither game ever developed a huge player base, but man was it fun! The
imagination that was unlocked through text-based games, at least for me, was
immensely fun. I got great book recommendations from the older players, and
felt accepted being a gamer/MtG player/general nerd at a time when it was
emphatically NOT considered cool. Times have sure changed.

I remember staying up until all hours of the morning, reconnecting repeatedly
over my dial-up connection, just to goof-off on Rifts. Even though I never met
him, the first friend I knew that died who I felt close to was from that game
- we were in a clan together and spent countless hours gaming and chatting
about being teens. I had forgotten about that until just now. Life moves
quickly.

~~~
Steel_Phoenix
I also played pHANTAZM quite a lot, and Rifts for a while. I think of them
often. It's strange how sometimes progress leaves a bit of a hole in the soul.
I've lost track of my old friends from there, but they seem more real than any
I've met in modern games. They're like characters in a book that I couldn't
put down, so involved that I forgot where reality ended.

------
ramblerman
MUDs are why I am a programmer today. I had tried some programming in BASIC
and I just didn't know what to write, or the things I did write seemed trivial
and pointless.

I was trying to become a max level on Medievia at about the same time, and the
grinding (killing 1000 bunnies) was getting very boring. When I found out my
ZMUD client offered some basic scripting and trigger capabilities, I set out
to create my first leveling bot. It was blood sweat and tears, lots of
learning through trial and error, and the bot would still do dumb things and
crash half the time, but the spark had been ignited.

I never looked back.

~~~
fouc
My first encounter with Forth was through the TinyMUCK codebase, the language
was called MUF, and it blew my mind at the time that it was possible to code
within the MUD game itself and use it right away.

~~~
Arubis
Wow, memories! MUF taught me stack architecture. I remember printing out reams
of its documentation (diagrams in ASCII art, IIRC) on paper and reading
through it for fun, just trying to wrap my head around how this crazy thing
was supposed to work.

------
jwfxpr
There's another, non-MUD text-based game inspired by Discworld (specifically,
inspired by _Small Gods_ ) called Godville. Running since 2010 on the web and
with apps available on major devices, it's essentially entirely player-built
and full of Pratchettesque humour.

It's a ZPG — Zero Player Game. You aren't the player. You're a marginally
potent God, with a single devoted follower, your hero. Your hero actually
plays the game, you just follow along and encourage (or discourage) your hero.
It's a mechanic that's surprisingly fun as a super casual, check in a couple
times a day kind of interactive fiction.

[https://godvillegame.com](https://godvillegame.com)

~~~
ytjohn
Oh wow. Back in the 90s, I "played" a game called Progress Quest. Basically
you downloaded the game, spun the dice a few times and then your character
would go out on quests. Your game was saved in a small file, which you could
move about machines, and you could have your stats uploaded to a web-based
leader board. Now they have a web-based version, accounts and forums.

Godville seems like a much more advanced concept of this. Whereas PQ has an
automatic hero that's supposed to be you, Godville has a character that
worships you and may or may not follow your commands, if you choose to send
them at all. I like it.

[http://progressquest.com](http://progressquest.com)

------
scbrg
For what it's worth, a MUD is where I learned to code. In my case, it was an
LP MUD (LP, short for LPC, short for Lars Pensjö C (if you're reading this,
Lars, _Thanks!_ )- the language in which it was written). MUDs were an
_excellent_ place to learn programming. Getting tangible results from just a
few lines of code was a great motivator.

"I want to code an orc!" Sure, inherit the right class (monster), set a name,
a description, and a few other attributes, and clone (instantiate) the guy.
There's now an orc standing in front of you!

"I want my orc to wield an axe!" Sure, inherit the right class (weapon), set a
name, a description, a few other attributes, and clone the axe. Give it to the
orc, and have him wield it, by calling the wield() function with the online
debug tool that was part of the game world.

All the while, being surrounded by dozens of helpful people who would answer
my silly newbie questions and review my code. And there was _plenty_ of
example code to look at. Granted, most of it was perhaps examples of _bad_
ways to solve problems - because it was written by other beginners, but
examples to learn from none the less.

My participation in the MUD directly lead to my first programming job, and
taught me _tonnes_ about programming in general, and - heh - debugging other
people's code in particular.

MUDs really changed my life, and I have several friends with a story similar
to mine. You can't overstate how important they've been to many.

~~~
stormcode
MUDs are also one of the places I learned (and continue to learn) to code!

------
aldanor
I used to play Solace (a Dragonlance-based MUD) a lot from when I was 13 and
for many years after. Looking back now, it helped me immensely with learning
English as a foreign language and taught me to type very fast, so it was quite
useful in a way. My parents didn’t think so, of course, since I often skipped
classes in school, and then in college, to play. We didn’t have Internet at
home, so I had to play with friends in an ancient Soviet computer class with
CRT screen-only black-white terminals and ancient keyboards; this is how I had
to leave the basics of Unix, too.

Fast forward a few years, I became a lead dev/immortal for this MUD (first
signed up with another friend as volunteers to fix bugs in the code by sending
patches to the lead imm who couldn’t program well, but we added an obfuscated
loophole allowing us to stream the codebase through mud client itself, at
which point the mud’s management had to enlist us fully and then they gave it
up to us) and this is how I learned programming on a large scale
(dozens/hundred lines of code, iirc), C/C++, socket programming, version
control - more importantly, I learned what a big codebase should not look
like. Good times...

------
rgbrgb
I like this outsider HN post style. Rare treasure. But, I am concerned with
you being in Discworld by Terry Pratchett for 17 years... it's a long time to
spend in someone else's brain. Though when you _really_ think about it, I
guess we're all kind of in Discworld.

[http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/decafmud/web_client.html](http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/decafmud/web_client.html)

------
d357r0y3r
Hey, I still play MUDs too! It's an underappreciated kind of game, but I
understand why it's not accessible to most. I play over at Dead of Night
(deadofnight.org) - pop in, the multiclassing system is ridiculous and
awesome.

I think MUDs vs. Visual Games is analogous to Books vs. Movies. Yes, movies
will always be able to achieve a level of graphical impressiveness that a book
can't.

What a movie _can 't_ do is give a viewer the ability to construct a world in
their own imagination. MUDs are the same way - every MUD player creates visual
imagery in their minds, including what a given room or item looks like.

~~~
fergie
One thing I really dont like about Witcher 3 is that you hear the voice of
"yourself", and that voice sounds like a WWE wrestler.

I never thought about it before, but I now realise how important it is for
immersion to let the player imagine their own voice in the game (as in GTA,
Skyrim, and Red Dead Redemption).

Allowing players to use their imagination is so important.

~~~
alphaalpha101
In the Witcher 3 you are playing a specific character created by the
developers. It's a bit like a JRPG in that sense. Most western RPGs have you
play as your own character.

------
Rampoina
I played the Discworld MUD a few years ago, and I actually found it
underwhelming in some aspects.

I came from having played a few IF (interactive fiction) games where the
puzzling element is important. I was expecting to find the same kind of
elements in Discworld and was disappointed.

For example there is a quest where you have to make the rat king go away from
a house(or something like that); being a mage I found out there was a spell to
kill vermin, so I leveled it up a lot and cast it on the rat king, it did kill
it and it exploded into tiny bugs, but it didn't complete the quest.

The magic system seemed very cool and like it could have been used as a
mechanic to solve quests and puzzles, instead that gave me the impression it
was only meant for combat. (or making stuff for other players)

Another issue is how stupid the NPC's were (compared to IF games), I recall
that a street urchin or other npc's couldn't even give you directions to
streets. (directly asking like 'where is street').

Having said that I liked how huge the game felt, and the events that could
happen with the interaction of the other players. For example dying in a
river, being resurrected, and having them dive to get my stuff. Or following
around a weird mage only to enter a portal he created and get eaten by
crocodiles (oops)

It seems there's so much underdeveloped potential with these kind of games, if
someone knows of a MUD that has more IF inspired mechanics with more emphasis
on the puzzling I'd be happy to know.

------
c22
In 1997 I saw "For a good time telnet://moongate.net:4000" scribbled on a
bathroom wall and it changed my life.

~~~
kaybe
I got laughed at once people realized I was using telnet in the windows
console to talk to them.

~~~
lucb1e
My dad still laughs at me for using that old MS DOS window. "Are you a
computer expert or what?"

I use Linux.

------
VolatileVoid
It's funny to see this. I have a similar story about a MMORPG I've been
playing for the better part of 20 years. It's got more in common with MUDs
than typical MMORPGs and is an enforced roleplaying environment.

I've personally been volunteering my time to help add new features on the
client and server for the past few years. The game is entirely free to play --
no adware junk or anything like that -- but sadly the community is tiny.

If it's something you might be interested in head to:
[http://underlight.com](http://underlight.com) or find us on Discord,
[https://discord.gg/vamWXCk](https://discord.gg/vamWXCk)

------
DonHopkins
I was lucky enough to play the original MUD1 at Essex over the ARPANET! I was
on the old INFO-MUD@MC ARPA mailing list, and somebody from Essex University
(probably Richard Bartle) posted instructions and an invitation to log into
the original MUD1 running on a PDP-10 at the University of Essex via the
ARPA/UK gateway at ARPA host address # 42 (NCP host addresses only had 8 bits
in those days).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1)

In 1980, Roy Trubshaw created MUD version 3 in BCPL (the predecessor of C), to
conserve memory and make the program easier to maintain. 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. That same year, MUD1 became the
first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game as Essex University
connected its internal network to the ARPANET.

Here's a scan of the notes I took (back in the 80's, not sure which year
exactly), scribbled on one of the coffee-stained pages of a Zork map.

[https://i.imgur.com/ZL7Bl24.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ZL7Bl24.jpg)

    
    
        @O 42
        %CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300
        LOG 1776,1776
        Password BUZBY
        TY GUID.TXT -Intro
        RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653]
        K/P or K/B Logs off
    

I shared that scan with Richard Bartle recently, and he commented: "Blimey!
That's a find! The password was BUZBY because that was the name of the bird
being used by BT (or was it still the Post Office?) in their advertising."

The source code to MUD1 has been recovered and released, and possibly there's
still a version running (but it seems to be down, now).

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/02/mud1_open_source_re...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/02/mud1_open_source_release/)

[http://british-legends.com/CMS/](http://british-legends.com/CMS/)

[http://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php/play-the-
game](http://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php/play-the-game)

~~~
osullivj
I was on the Essex MUD via JANET (Joint Academic Network) as an undergrad at
Cambridge in late 87. IIRC there was a "shout" feature that broadcast a
message to all users. I used to troll by shouting "VMS is way better than
Unix"! Quite a few Essex MUDers would rise to the bait :)

Bonus JANET trivia: IIRC the email addrs were back to front, so my email addr
was something like uk.ac.cam.chu@jos.

~~~
grumblepeet
Aha! Found you troll! I work for Jisc, who run Janet (note lower case now).
We’ve sorted out the email addresses now ;).

When I was at UWE there was a major MUD which ran on a server under some guys
desk, don’t know the name of it, but the guy spent a LOT of time on it.

------
atsushin
Hey! I love MUDs, been playing since probably 2007 when I was in middle
school. I've usually stuck around IRE's games (Achaea, Aetolia etc.) but also
have enjoyed others such as Armageddon.

They've always been a reliable escape for me and only recently have I actually
pulled myself away from them, but I thoroughly enjoyed building up my own
character and a life of their own through roleplaying. It's sad to not have
experienced MUDs in their heyday but I'm happy that a decent amount of people
still play enough for some of these games to still be considered 'active'.
Long nights and days have been spent totally immersed in their settings, and
their influence on me _as a person_ is something I have to acknowledge.

~~~
Whitestrake
Likewise.

I'd go so far even as to say that IRE's MUDs made me who I am today. A
commitment to integrity of role-playing my characters helped shape my identity
while I was growing up, particularly as a social exercise. And my first
exposure to scripting in the form of simple aliases and triggers led to the
pursuit of programming skills. Without MUDs, I'd be a different person
entirely, I have no doubt.

------
JKCalhoun
Awesome.

Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics?

I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like
everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have
skipped the 2D.

~~~
matthewwiese
That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have
always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my
attention long enough.

Even tiled ASCII characters would be a huge boon; I think it's the fact that I
can't easily imagine the entire game area through text. If I was able to at
least "see" the squares around my character, I could better spatially orient
myself. Almost every time I've quit a MUD has been because I got bored trying
to pour through the docs/guides to figure out how I ended up somewhere.

I imagine an ASCII multiplayer game is more complex when it comes to netcode
though. Perhaps the reason so many MUDs have survived is because they don't
require nearly as much server infrastructure to support?

~~~
tlarkworthy
I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were
fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very
difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.

~~~
versteegen
There have been a bunch of MMO roguelikes. Some of the major ones are Mangband
and ToMENet (the latter is a fork of the former, made to closely resemble
ToME3). There have been a few different attempts to solve the MMO turn-based
problem. The most interesting IMO is interhack [1] (not to be confused with
the interhack tool for nethack) which originally used "surreal time":
depending on whether players were near it other it would switch between them
taking turns within the same turn-based game, and running the game logic
separately for each player so they didn't wait for each other. There's was a
long writeup about it. It's a very complicated system. Never had an active
playerbase. nhdaniels told me years later that he considered Surreal Time a
failed experiment, and switched to something simpler, which still prevents
players from having to wait for each other, but I don't know how it works.

[1]
[http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=I...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Interhack)

Unfortunately the download for Interhack is gone, as is its original website.

------
fouc
It's amazing how much can be done through plain old text over a simple telnet
protocol.

Not all MUDs are limited to descriptive rooms. The BattleTech MUD switched
modes when you got into a mecha. You could see what was around you for miles
unless blocked by buildings, buildings had different altitudes and you could
jet pack jump from building to building, while firing homing missiles at the
enemy and flanking with your teammates.

Another really cool telnet-based game that I really enjoyed was mTrek. You
controlled a space ship, flew around at warp speed, you could see multiple
objects in space near you, and their relative speed and angle. Fighting in 3
dimensional space in plain text is just mind boggling. It's like you're flying
in a submarine when there's no graphics. It was adrenaline packed.

EDIT:

You can see battletech mud screen here:
[http://i.imgur.com/Mk2zg.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Mk2zg.jpg) (ignore the GUI
part on the right, that's probably a custom client)

You can see mtrek tactical screen here:
[http://randsinrepose.com/archives/hacking-on-
mtrek/](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/hacking-on-mtrek/)

------
Diederich
I've been playing MUME [http://mume.org](http://mume.org) off and on since
1992.

Playing this game feels like playing inside of Tolkien's books. Amazing
detail, and they are still expanding.

------
stormcode
I've been playing a cyberpunk MUD called Sindome (Link:
Https://www.sindome.org/ ) for 15 years so I completely relate. I love MUDs
for the freedom, the built in accessibility and their inherent cross platform
nature. Play from your browser. Play from telnet. Play from your phone.

------
billysielu
I've played a multiplayer asteroids game called Subspace Continuum (now on
Steam) since 2001 (17 years). I probably have about 20k hours in that too. It
is community run and has about 100 people playing at any time. It's a free
game, so try it if this sounds like your thing.

~~~
banderman
What a great game! It worked so smoothly over dial up. I put a lot of hours
into this back in the day. The balance in the ship types and the teamwork
required is brilliant. And then all of the mods for different game types and
maps... just so much fun.

------
GlennS
I played the Discworld MUD about the same time you started, or maybe a little
before.

One Summer holiday night, having played pretty constantly for every day of the
previous week, I dreamed in highlighted terminal text of being beaten up by
three old ladies with frying pans.

I stopped playing the day after, and haven't played a MUD or MMORPG since.

------
blueknight
I recommend anyone interested in this to come and try midnightsun2.org with
the amazing MUD client from mudlet.org.

Funny, I made my char on the 30th of March, 2001. I've put in 40700 hours
since then :-)

------
dlhavema
a question on maintenance and all that. what kind of machines are required to
maintain these? the client talks about flash and or websockets, so some sort
of servers have to be maintained... I know servers are fairly cheap now.. that
would be a cool story too..

If its been running for 30 years, how much memory/storage does the world take?

I had a Java programming examples book and it had a simple MUD implemented in
a RMI, it was kinda neat and i always wanted to build a game out of it...

~~~
exikyut
You can literally run a MUD server on a toaster. More specifically, a 486 or
Pentium would _not_ be a good fit, but literally anything else would work. :D

The only thing you need is good internet. If your internet connection doesn't
tend to completely fail (a small bit of latency and the rare crash shouldn't
be the end of the world) then you're honestly good to go.

If you want to run this on a server, you're looking at around $10/mo for
something decent, and if you scout around hard you may be able to get
something for less. Google Compute Engine quietly let you have 600MB of RAM
and 1GB of bandwidth per month for free, for example. :P

\--

Your profile mentions PHP and Node.JS. Of the two, Node.JS is probably the
better choice to build something like this with - PHP's network/socket
handling has a few sharp edges that make it occasionally fall over, and for a
social project like a MUD, you'll get death-by-a-thousand-papercuts in the
form of "...PHP?!" all the time, so there's that as well.

Obviously Java would work fine too; Node's advantages over Java in a context
like this are lower grammatical verbosity and zero compile time.

\--

The first thing I'd recommend is poking around to understand how to do both
telnet and websocket based networking.

Websockets will handle modern browser clients and cover 99% of a fledgling
MUD's connections. Telnet will handle the die-hards who, if they come back,
might stay for a while :P

Start with telnet first: you need to decide how you want the text UI to work.
You can leave telnet out until you have everything else doing interesting
things, but I strongly advise having at least a basic understanding of how
VT100 emulation works from the start (while you're still in the design stage),
or whatever you build may be extremely difficult to get working inside telnet.

Some web MUD clients just wrap a VT100 session hosted on the server with some
websocket trickery and do things that way. That's a good way to do things,
because it means people who want to stick with telnet don't really lose
anything.

Websockets is just a networking system and is mostly fun to work with; to get
started just find a library you like and tinker with it.

\--

As for gamedev, I recommend studying existing MUD systems, not with the
intention of drowning yourself in how they all work (which will be
disasterous), but to get an idea of how they structure their world info -
what's where, how navigation works, etc etc.

Ultimately there are (AFAIK) few gotchas and MUD development is quite simple -
rooms are connected to other rooms, and things happen - but it's a good idea
to think through how you want to architect how rooms connect together so you
can eg easily get at the bigger picture, and think about how you want
interactions and cause/effect state to be maintained and associated with
players.

\--

~~~
stormcode
Open source websocket based MOO/MUD client:
[https://github.com/JavaChilly/dome-
client.js/](https://github.com/JavaChilly/dome-client.js/)

------
kbenson
That's averaging over 3 hours per day, 365 days a year, for 17 years.
_Daaaamn_.

------
dimman
Some 20+ years later we still play QuakeWorld :)

[https://quakeworld.nu](https://quakeworld.nu)

[https://quake.world](https://quake.world) (discord)

~~~
lgl
Still one of the best FPS ever made! The first time I switched from good old
regular "netquake" to the quakeworld client I was completely mindblown with
the lack of latency and huge playability improvement. Also, seeing glquake at
640x480 for the first time was surreal. Thanks @JohnCarmack

------
kotrunga
This is the first time I've heard of 'MUDs'. I've played Nethack, Zork, etc
but the idea of playing games like that with people is amazing. I actually was
wondering the other day how I could make something like that, and of course,
it exists already! Sweet!

2 Questions:

1) What's the best 'MUD' game to play?

2) Any resources on how to make one?

Thanks! Seems really interesting.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
> 1) What's the best 'MUD' game to play?

"Best" isn't a valid descriptor for anything, but there are a few websites
were MUDs are listed, reviewed, and voted on, like
[http://www.topmudsites.com/](http://www.topmudsites.com/) and
[http://www.mudconnect.com/top20.html](http://www.mudconnect.com/top20.html)

------
cyberferret
Cool. I used to play "3 Kingdoms" MUD back in the day (early 90's) - became a
medium ranked necromancer on there, but remember the lag was quite horrendous
at times (dial up). I hear that 3K is still around in some form or another
these days?

~~~
eric-hu
I recently picked up 3k again after a 10-15 year hiatus. It's still going on,
with a ton of changes from the last time I played. I came back to it after a
nasty breakup, and it's the one thing consistently keeping my mind occupied
from day to day. Totally glad I came back to it.

------
movedx
What MUD client do you use? I use /u/blueknight suggested Mudlet, but it
doesn't have a profile for Discworld.

~~~
Zolomon
MUSHclint is the best IMHO:
[http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/mushclient.htm](http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/mushclient.htm)

It exists on GitHub as well:
[https://github.com/nickgammon/mushclient](https://github.com/nickgammon/mushclient)

~~~
robocaptain
Hah. So many great memories of MUSHclient. For a long time it was the first
thing I installed on any new machine. Eventually moved to tinyfugue on a
remote shell (so I could be "always online").

------
tunesmith
Nice! My favorite were always the LPMuds... I'm not sure what variants are
related to those these days. I used to play FrontierMud a lot back in the day.
Still remember the admins shouting about the upcoming lag trains. My favorite
memory was when a buddy figured out how to make Jason from Friday the 13th.
He'd put on a hockey mask, wield a chainsaw, somehow cut off my arms, and then
start hitting me with my own arms while telling me to stop hitting myself.

------
mbielski
I played Mirkwood for several years before I moved on to other thing, but I
still think of it now and then. Apparently it is still going strong:
[http://www.mudconnect.com/mud-
bin/adv_search.cgi?Mode=MUD&mu...](http://www.mudconnect.com/mud-
bin/adv_search.cgi?Mode=MUD&mud=Mirkwood). Long live the Vampires clan and
OneEye!

~~~
cjbos
Hah I had an Immortal character on that MUD named Spactula. That was a fun
group of people.

------
StavrosK
Oh man, MUDs were magical. I annoyed my parent to no end by tying up the phone
line. Most of my best friends today are people I met on the MUD in the 90s,
and we still keep in touch every day. It was amazing to be logging in and
basically be living another life in a vibrant world.

I frequented one called Realms of Despair, unfortunately it's only got a few
tens of people logged on at any time now.

------
blunte
If this is the one I think it is, I played it periodically when my primary MUD
was offline in the mid 90s.

It's kind of like how people who have read original books say that a movie
version is rarely better, and people who only watch movies cannot believe that
"just words" can be better.

But really, especially for (massively, by those standards) multi-player, words
and text descriptions were wonderful.

------
robocaptain
Thanks for posting this - some great memories and great links here. I'll jump
on the bandwagon since I don't see any MUSHes mentioned here yet.

MUSH was MUD-based, but built around roleplaying (planned and improvised) and
community-driven building. PennMUSH also had a great underlying program
language that was (in retrospect, quite amazingly) flexible and powerful. Many
MUSHes had very advanced combat, economy, and other systems. I developed a
love of programming thanks to the PennMUSH codebase.

My personal favorite was (still is) TF2k5 (Transformers: 2005) - oddly enough,
a MUSH based on the 1986 Transformers movie. :) Last I checked it was still
going.

I bookmarked an old feature Kieron Gillen did on RPS about MUSHes (and
TF2k5)[0] a long time ago - still a very dead-on description in my opinion.

[0] [https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/08/gaming-made-
me-3...](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/08/gaming-made-me-3-kieron-
gillengthily-played)

------
crusso
I played a MUD called "DUM" back around 1990. My GPA would have been a heck of
a lot better without it... and Nethack.

~~~
kotrunga
+1 for nethack

------
forkLding
:') Played Discworld MUD as a kid, was sad to see Terry Pratchett go, but
loved this game, appreciate the shout out on HN, MUD games are a general world
of wordy creativity and imagination, wish they were more in style again.

Although for modern kids, they are a lot harder to play because they dont try
to shy away from difficulty.

------
twostorytower
You say you're not close to "winning" or "finishing" \- is there a way to do
so at all?

~~~
tjic
The only winning move is not to play.

------
mornaner
Random lurking on IRC, overheard a conversation about this cool MUD based on
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I was maybe 10, and man did it take a long time
to figure out at first. 20 some odd years later and I still find myself drawn
back here and there. Being able to pop in via SSH or a command line client
made it great for staying inconspicuous in places where I probably shouldn't
have been playing a game.

I still have many good friends from it, and it connected me with great people
from countries completely across the globe.

If you're into Tolkien and want to give it a go, check out
[http://t2tmud.org](http://t2tmud.org). Or just SSH towers@t2tmud.org.

------
rmnoon
I spent _so_ many hours as a kid on RetroMUD. Nothing else will improve your
typing and console scanning skills like being a healer during a massive boss
fight.

[http://www.retromud.org/](http://www.retromud.org/)

~~~
elsherbini
Retromud is the only MUD I've ever played as well. Started in 2001 or 2002 and
every once in a while will go through phases where I play again.

If you aren't that into Role Playing, and you prefer team based PvE combat, I
think Retromud is the one to check out. 20 primary guilds (classes) and 80+
races, as well as branching paths from each of the primary guilds makes for
huge number of possibilities for your character. Though to start out I'd
suggest a Dragonian Fallen.

------
swiftausterity
Hey, mud talk!

We're running a MUD gamejam starting in 2 weeks actually :)

[https://mudcoders.com/enter-the-multi-user-
dungeon-74d8e2fd1...](https://mudcoders.com/enter-the-multi-user-
dungeon-74d8e2fd119e)

------
Brendinooo
I played [http://lensmoor.org/](http://lensmoor.org/) a lot in high school
because a friend did and because the filters didn't catch it. It was a fun
time.

I made it to level 30 of 99 (well, 198, as you could "remort" and start over
as a more advanced species. I loved it, but had an epiphany that I would
either have to accept that I'd never be a top-tier character, or I'd have to
significantly increase my investment in the game, which I wasn't willing to
do.

But I loved the immersion and creativity that came with the game, and the
roleplaying was a blast.

------
Kevin_S
I played Runescape for over 10 years.

For the first 7~ or so I was a bad player that progressed slowly.

Maxed my combat, and eventually became a force in the duel arena. Made bils,
got bored, left the game.

Nothing hit my beliefs in the face like realizing infinite money in a game
like that ruins the experience.

It actually ruined me for video games to be honest. I played LoL for a year or
so before getting bored, and spent a small amount of time with CoD on the
Xbox, but no other game has ever captured me like RS.

I still follow a few content creators, and get the itch to start a new account
once a month or so, but I won't let myself get into a game like that ever
again.

------
automathematics
Bummer, the link on their page to download clients from a list is broken :(

[https://dotthis.com/homesite/mud_clients.html](https://dotthis.com/homesite/mud_clients.html)

~~~
ryan-allen
There's a discussion on Reddit from Feb 2017 about current MUD clients, though
it focuses on Windows [0], however the first recommended client is cross
platform.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/5uzx3z/list_of_current...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/5uzx3z/list_of_current_windows_mud_clients/)

------
duwease
Used to play a MUD called 'After Hours' from 95-97. It was not 'adult-
oriented', as the name would imply, although that may be why my teenaged self
chose it in the first place. Good times back in those days when I could still
stay up late and function during the day! Met cool folks, learned to code in a
fashion, sometimes I'd get sent cool indie movies on VHS that I would never
ever had heard about in my small town otherwise.

------
kwijibob
In my first year of university I had my unix account suspended because I was
playing MUDs.

The stated policy of the computer science department was that MUDs were a
waste of bandwidth.

This was in 1992.

------
2snakes
Always sad to see games become less popular over time. I used to play a MUD
called Shattered Kingdoms. Glad to hear Discworld is still around.

------
bovermyer
I lost a lot of time to MU*s back in the 90s.

My final project in AP Computer Science in high school was a single-player
text adventure that mimicked some of the mechanics of MUDs. Sadly, we had to
turn in the source code rather than demo it, and it refused to compile on the
teacher's computer. He still gave me an A, though, based on the source alone.

I really, really wish I still had that source code...

------
vkjv
The Return of the Shadow MUD has been around since the 90s. Not only is the
player base still active, the game is still actively being developed! Just in
the last year the maintainers have added new skills, specializations, quests,
and soon Beornings.

[https://returnoftheshadow.github.io](https://returnoftheshadow.github.io)

------
egypturnash
Every now and then I am reminded that there are still new people coming to
Tapestries (a furry muck, est. 1991) and it kind of amazes me.

Me, I decided to take the creative energy that was going into all-night scenes
and put it into drawing comics instead. But the mu*s just keep going along.
It’s not like they take much in the way of computational resources nowadays.

------
somedog
I started playing Discworld MUD in 1998 and kept going for almost as long as
you. It was glorious

------
JauntTrooper
I share a similar fondness to my childhood MUD, WoTMUD (Wheel of Time):
www.wotmud.org

I played daily from 1996-2006, and still occasionally log on to check in on
the community, which is still quite active.

No other game ever came close to being as fun or immersive.

Haha I used to have text based dreams....

~~~
stormcode
Oh man, I'm glad I'm not the only who has had text based dreams.

------
titojankowski
Quest for Faerun / Questwars was my crack. Incredible MUD:
[http://www.mudconnect.com/SMF/index.php?topic=75470.0](http://www.mudconnect.com/SMF/index.php?topic=75470.0)

------
gabept
>Discworld MUD however has a quality I still haven't found in any other game -
be it World of Warcraft, Elder scroll online, TERA or whatever.

As someone who wasn't even born at the release of this game, I couldn't agree
more!

------
0x445442
Not a MUD per se but back in the late 90's my friends and I had an awesome
time playing
[http://explorer.sourceforge.net/](http://explorer.sourceforge.net/)

------
muzani
I didn't like Discworld, but I love MUDs. It's a dream to recreate a virtual
world of the same complexity and flexibility. I think the only thing going
against them is that they're a bit hard to read.

------
cjbprime
Neat. I played a SMAUG MUD called Realms in the late 90s.

(These days I play StarCraft 2..)

~~~
karn09
I spent many many hours logged into Realms. A few years ago I had a sudden
attack of nostalgic and created a new character, but just wasn't able to get
back into it.

------
qume
Used to play NannyMUD in 1993 and I just logged in!

Via telnet, it's still online 25 years later!

My username since then (inc here) is named after the brand of terminal I used
to log into that MUD a quarter century ago.

------
kenbolton
LambdaMOO and its children got me into college and a career. Another example
of technology out of PARC that they failed to monetize. The so-called social
web has been a pale imitation.

~~~
stormcode
You and me both. Lotta love for LambdaMOO.

------
andyjohnson0
Reminds me of James Carse's idea of _Finite and Infinite Games_ \- where the
objective of a finite game is to win and the objective of an infinite game is
to continue to play.

------
entropie
I played eve online over 10 years. If i would have started at the beginning it
would be 15 years now.

Dont play anymore, but still a cool game with very crazy and active people.

------
mapcars
I can say the same about Dota 2 and Path of Exile :)

------
gwbas1c
That's approximately 3.2 hours a day. (20000 / 17 / 52 / 7)

Yikes! I wish I had 3.2 hours a day to spend on hobbies.

~~~
jmnicolas
Nobody on his death bed says "I wish I had spent more time working".

Work less and enjoy your life.

------
Zolomon
Aiur from Discworld says Hi, Duzchip! :)

------
wazoox
I've been playing the same multiplayer PHP game, MountyHall (remember these?)
since 2004

------
2snakes
I used to play a MUD called Shattered Kingdoms!

------
omg_ketchup
Still playing Ultima Online, ~20 years later.

------
lanbanger
telnet jumper.mcc.ac.uk:3214

