Multi-user dungeon

In computer gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain or Dimension) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games and social chat rooms. Typical MUDs are text-driven, where players read descriptions of rooms, objects, events, other characters, and computer-controlled creatures or non-player characters (NPCs) in a virtual world. Players interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language. It has been argued that modern game-like MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, and social virtual worlds such as Second Life can have their origins traced back to the original MUDs.^[1]

Traditional MUDs implement a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players being able to choose from a number of classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The object of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.

Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others are set in a science fiction–based universe or themed on popular books, movies, animations, history, and so on. Not all MUDs are games; some, more typically those referred to as MOOs, are used in distance education or for virtual conferences. MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, including communications, sociology, law, and synthetic economies.

Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to players; some may accept donations or allow players to "purchase" in-game items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee.

MUDs can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients which are designed to improve the user experience. Numerous games are listed at various web portals (see external links).

History

File:MUDscreen.jpg

You haven't lived until you've died in MUD. -- The MUD1 Slogan.

Adventure, created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely used adventure game. The game was significantly expanded in 1976 by Don Woods. Adventure contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlled dungeon master.^[2]^[3]

Inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT, wrote a game called Zork in the summer of 1977 for the PDP-10 minicomputer which became quite popular on the ARPANET. Zork was ported under the name Dungeon to FORTRAN by a programmer working at DEC in 1978.^[4]

In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.^[5]^[6] Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980. ^[7]

MUD, also known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987.^[8] It was reportedly closed down when Richard Bartle licenced MUD1 to CompuServe, and was getting pressure from them to close Essex MUD. This left MIST, a derivative of MUD, as the only remaining MUD running on the Essex University network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity. MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.^[9]

The popularity of MUDs of the Essex University tradition escalated in the USA during the 1980s when affordable personal computers with 300 to 2400 bit/s modems enabled role-players to log into multi-line Bulletin Board Systems and online service providers such as CompuServe. During this time it was sometimes said that MUD stands for "Multi Undergraduate Destroyer" due to their popularity among college students and the amount of time devoted to them.^[10]

PLATO

Oubliette, written by Jim Schwaiger, and published on the PLATO system predated MUD1 by about a year. It was so difficult that one could not play it alone: in order for players to survive, they had to run in groups. While Oubliette was a multi-player game, there was no persistence to the game world. Following it, also on PLATO, was a game called Moria written in 1977, copyright 1978. Again, players could run in parties but in this game it was also possible to effectively play while only running one character. They were graphical in nature and very advanced for their time, but were proprietary programs that were unable to spread beyond PLATO. Textual worlds, which typically ran on Unix, VMS, or DOS, were now far more accessible to the public. ^[11]

Another early PLATO game was Avatar, begun around 1977 and opened in 1979, written by Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, and Dave Sides, all high school students using the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. This 2.5-D game was running on 512x512 plasma panels of the PLATO system, and groups of up to 15 players could enter the dungeon simultaneously and fight monsters as a team. Avatar, with by far the most hours played of any PLATO game, is still running, playable by anyone, on the emulated mainframe at www.cyber1.org and via the NovaNET NPT service.

In the late 1970s there were numerous other PLATO games which were MUD-like, in various stages of development, some open, some never opened. Some were essentially single-player games but had some multi-player interaction such as communication and shared halls of fame. These games influenced the development of more well-known PLATO MUDs such as Avatar and Oubliette. At the time, these games were referred to as 'dungeon games'. Around this time, at least 10 and possibly as many as 100 people were actively working on MUD games on PLATO. It was common to see two to five people sitting side by side and working on different MUD games in room 165 or the author room of University of Illinois's CERL building. Many non-MUD games also came from this environment, such as empire and airfight. ^{[citation needed]}

Commercialization

In 1978, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game called Milieu using Multi-Pascal on a CDC Cyber 6600 series mainframe which was operated by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. High school students from around the state were given access to the machine for educational purposes.^[12] Klietz ported Milieu to an IBM XT in 1983, naming the new port Scepter of Goth. Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. It was one of the first commercial MUDs; franchises were sold to a number of locations. Scepter (and an unfinished advanced MUD by Klietz called ScreenPlay) was first owned and run by GamBit (of Minneapolis, Minnesota), founded by Bob Alberti. GamBit's assets, including Scepter and ScreenPlay, were later sold to InterPlay (of Fairfax, Virginia). InterPlay eventually went bankrupt, making Scepter no longer available.^[13] In 1984, Mark Peterson wrote The Realm of Angmar, beginning as a clone of Scepter of Goth.

In 1984, Mark Jacobs created and deployed a commercial gaming site, Gamers World. The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD called Aradath (which was later renamed, upgraded and ported to GEnie as Dragon's Gate) and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was also ported to GEnie. At its peak, the site had about 100 monthly subscribers to both Aradath and Galaxy. GEnie was shut down in the late 1980s, although Dragon's Gate was later brought to America Online before it was finally released on its own. Dragon's Gate was officially closed on February 10th, 2007 until further notice.^[14]

Another early commercial multi-player game was Islands of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. This roguelike game featuring a Dungeons and Dragons-like turn-based play became available to consumers in 1984 for $12.00 per hour via the CompuServe online service.^[15]

These text-adventure games (both single and multi-player) drew inspiration from the paper-and-pencil based role-playing games (RPGs) that were approaching their peak popularity at this time, especially with the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1977.

This strong bond between RPGs and MUDs continued through the years with the release of dozens of AD&D modules and related books and stories (e.g., Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance). Influences also came from the gamebooks such as Fighting Fantasy, Choose Your Own Adventure, and Lone Wolf.

Other MUDs that appeared around 1985 included Mirrorworld, run by Pip Cordrey and developed and written by Tim Rogers, Lorenzo Wood and Nathaniel Billington. Mirrorworld was the first MUD to feature rolling resets. SHADES by Neil Newell was a commercial MUD accessible in the UK via British Telecom's Prestel and Micronet networks. A scandal on SHADES led to the closure of Micronet, as described in Indra Sinha's net-memoir, The Cybergypsies.^[16]

Spread

The first popular MUD codebase was AberMUD, written in 1987 by Alan Cox (also known as Anarchy), named after the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. AberMUD was initially written in B for a Honeywell L66 mainframe under GCOS3/TSS and later ported to C, which enabled it to rapidly spread to many Unix platforms when it was released in 1989.^[17]

Monster was a multi-user adventure game created by Richard Skrenta for the VAX and written in VMS Pascal. It was publicly released in November 1988.^[18] Monster was disk-based and modifications to the game were immediate. Monster pioneered the approach of allowing players to build the game world, setting new puzzles or creating dungeons for other players to explore.^[19] Monster, having about 60.000 lines of code, had a lot of features which appeared to be designed to allow Colossal Cave Adventure to work in it. Though there never were any network-accessible Monster servers, it inspired James Aspnes to create a stripped down version of Monster which he called TinyMUD.^[20]

TinyMUD and diversification

In 1989, TinyMUD began to allow players to easily participate in creating the online environment, as well as playing in it. The TinyMUD code spawned a number of descendants, including TinyMUCK and TinyMUSH, which added more sophisticated programmability. (TinyMUCK versions 2 and higher contain a full programming language named MUF, or Multi-User Forth, while MUSH greatly expanded the variety of commands and functions available and allowed them to apply to all objects.) Some use the term MU* to refer to TinyMUD, MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, MUX, and their kin; others simply allow the term MUD to apply universally. MUVE is a recent coinage, intended to stand for Multi-User Virtual Environment. UberMUD, UnterMUD, and MOO are some other MUD servers that were at least partially inspired by TinyMUD but are not direct descendants.

Also in 1989, and inspired by TinyMUD and AberMUD, LPMud was developed as a more game-oriented MUD built around a C-like programming language, LPC. 1989 also saw the development of Avalon, using its own code base run through the Hourglass compiler. Developed in complete isolation from all other MUDs, Avalon adopted an object-oriented approach using the powerful British Acorn Archimedes computer technology. In Europe it was very popular for MUD writers to write in isolation. The three largest commercial examples would be Avalon, Shades and the Terris/Cosrin Engine. ^{[citation needed]}

In 1991, the release of DikuMUD, which was inspired by AberMUD, led to a virtual explosion of hack-n-slash MUDs based upon its code. DikuMUD inspired several derivative codebases too, including CircleMUD, Merc, ROM and SMAUG. Meanwhile, Avalon had become a commercial game operating in the UK on up to 16 simultaneous modem connections. ^{[citation needed]}

In 1994, Mark Peterson rewrote The Realm of Angmar, adapting it to MS-DOS (the basis for many dial-in BBS systems), and renamed it Swords of Chaos. For a few years this was a very popular form of MUD, hosted on a number of BBS systems, until widespread Internet access eliminated most BBSes. ^{[citation needed]}

At this time, AOL US already ran several highly successful games, including Dragons Gate and Darkness Falls (by Mythic Entertainment, which later launched Dark Age of Camelot), Federation (game) (a space trading game) and Gem Stone III (Simutronics, which later launched A Hero's Journey). ^{[citation needed]}

Next phase?

Online graphics-based games (MMORPGs), such as EverQuest, Lineage II, World of Warcraft, and Eve Online, as well as graphics-based virtual worlds like Second Life, are arguably analogous to MUDs, and are sometimes referred to as "graphical MUDs" (see next section) or "next-generation MUDs".^{[citation needed]}

Similarities include the basic goals and objectives of the games and the society of the environments. One difference is that the majority of MMORPGs and social avatar worlds are commercial ventures. The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds

Variants

Graphical MUDs

A graphical MUD is a MUD that uses computer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors. A prominent early graphical MUD was Habitat, written by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar for Lucasfilm in 1985. Graphical MUDs require players to download a special client and the game's artwork. They range from simply enhancing the user interface to simulating 3D worlds with visual spatial relationships and customized avatar appearances.

After the increase in computing power and Internet connectivity during the late nineties, graphical MUDs became better known as MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.

Talkers and spods

A less-known MUD variant is the talker, typically based on ew-too or NUTS, with plenty of derived codebases. The early talkers were essentially MUDs with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication commands -- hence the name "talker". Talkers use simple protocols and create very little network traffic, making them ideal for setting up quietly at work.

People who use these tend to be called spods, and have earned a place in the Jargon File.

Player versus player MUDs

A player versus player, or player killing, MUD is one which encourages player versus player combat. Some MUDs have registered player killing, meaning a player must register as a player killer and can only fight other registered player killers.

Roleplay Intensive MUDs (RPIs)

A Roleplay intensive MUD is a MUD that is heavily roleplay-enforced. The RPIMUD Network describes a RPI MUD as a MUD that "center themselves around suspension of disbelief and playing out specific character roles as if the role were real and you were your character. In general, the objective of the game is not to complete computer-generated quests or tally the most kills in order to gain levels and equipment, but to collaborate with fellow players to create complex and multi-layered storylines in a cohesive gaming environment. RPIMUDs are very different from other MUDs because of the emphasis on character interaction over hack-and-slash gaming."

Psychology

Dr. Sherry Turkle, Ph.D. of Sociology of Science at MIT, developed a theory in her book "Life on the Screen" that the constant use (and in many cases, overuse) of MUDs allows users to develop different personalities in their environments. She uses examples, which date back to the text-based MUDs of the mid-1990s, showing college students who simultaneously live different lives through characters in separate MUDs, up to three at a time, all while doing schoolwork. The students claimed that it was a way to "shut off" their own lives for a while and become part of another reality. Turkle claims that this could present a psychological problem of identity for today's youths.

Turkle also explores the ideas of the use of bots in MUDs. She references the Turing Test, put forth by Alan Turing, proposing that an automaton could be considered truly intelligent if they were able to convince a human conversing with it that it was human. Turkle presents the troubling ideas of sexual deviancy involved with this: that someone posing as a bot could "trick" someone into believing that they were a bot and allowing them to engage in sexual activity online. Turkle wonders aloud if this could be considered, at the worst, rape and at the very least, an invasion of privacy.

References

^ Keith Stuart (2007). "MUD, PLATO and the dawn of MMORPGs". 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.
^ Nick Montfort (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT Press. ISBN 354063293X.
^ Bill Stewart. "Summary MUD History". 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.
^ Tim Anderson. "The History of Zork". 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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold (1993). "The Dragon Ate My Homework". Wired. 1 (3). 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. {{cite journal}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. The "D" in MUD stands for "Dungeon" [...] because the version of ZORK Roy played was a Fortran port called DUNGEN.
^ "Early MUD History". 1990. 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.
^ Richard Bartle. "Incarnations of MUD". 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.
^ Michael Lawrie (2003). "Escape from the Dungeon". 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.
^ "A Study of MUDs as a Society". 1998. 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!
^ Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. Jim Schwaiger's 1977 game Oubliette (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Chuck Miller's earlier multiplayer game, Mines of Moria) had a first-person point of view and used line graphics to render the scene ahead. It had persistent characters, but was not a persistent world. Also, the interaction it allowed between characters was very limited; it was almost there, but not quite.
^ Bill Wisner (1990). "A brief (and very incomplete) history of MUDs". 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. {{cite web}}: line feed character in |quote= at position 287 (help)
^ Alan Klietz (1992). "Scepter - the first 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. {{cite web}}: line feed character in |quote= at position 44 (help)
^ Darrin Hyrup. "The Future of Dragon's Gate". 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.
^ Raph Koster (2002). "Online World Timeline". "Island of Kesmai was written in 1980 and 1981, the goal being to soak up every bit of performance in the the CS department's new VAX. We succeeded." - Kelton Flinn
^ Indra Sinha (1999). The Cybergypsies: a True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier. Viking Press. ISBN 0-67088-630-0.
^ Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.
^ Richard Skrenta (1988). "monster - multiuser adventure game for VMS". Usenet. Monster was written in VMS Pascal under VMS 4.6.
^ Richard Skrenta (1988). "An Introduction to Monster". 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.
^ James Aspnes (1990). "Monster". 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.)

External links

MUD history, analysis

Some history and reviews from Richard Bartle's "Interactive Multi-User Computer Games" report
The MUDline: A timeline of MUD history up to 1995.
A Classification of MUDs by Martin Keegan, Grandmaster Data Services Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Early MUD history
Online World Timeline - Raph Koster's timeline of significant events for the development of virtual worlds.
Living Internet A comprehensive history of the internet, including MUDs.
Bartle MUD Personality Analyzer Long-running test to classify MUD/MMORPG personality, based on Bartle's research.
[1] Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities.
Journal of Virtual Environments: Formerly the Journal of Mud Research. A currently inactive peer-reviewed academic journal.

MUD source code repositories

Erwin S. Andreasen: Home of the 16k MUD competition, and other resources.
ftpgame.org: Hierarchal archive of MUD source code
MudBytes.net: MUD code repository and discussion.
MudMagic.com: MUD software downloads, discussion, game listings, and documentations.
Mindcloud.com: MUD code repository and discussion. Specifically dealing with the GodWars Derivative line.

MUD resources

The MUD Connector: Large portal site containing 1300+ searchable listings of text-based MUDs, discussions, a social network devoted to mudding, resources, etc
Jargon File: The Jargon File's entry on MUDs.
Mapping MUDs: 3-Dimensional modelling of a MUD
Mud Domain: The Social Network for Mudders
MU*Wiki: A community site for discussion and promotion of MUDs.
The MudLists Resource Center: A comprehensive list of over 600 MUDS including numerous player references and other MUD related statistics.
Top Mud Sites: MUD portal and voting site containing 1700+ MUDS, MUD forums, reviews, resources, MUD articles.
MUDseek: Google custom search engine indexing MUD and MUD-related web sites.
RPIMUD Network: Site devoted to Role-Play Intensive MUDs.
NoGFX (No Graphics): MUD logs and resource archive.
FindMUD: MUD listings and codebase downloads.
MUD Stats: MUD statistics.
MUD Pages: MUD Portal site containing highly detailed and customizable listing and MUD reviews, along with complete forums. MUD Resources and Social Network coming soon.

[1] Keith Stuart (2007). "MUD, PLATO and the dawn of MMORPGs". 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.

[2] Nick Montfort (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT Press. ISBN 354063293X.

[3] Bill Stewart. "Summary MUD History". 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.

[4] Tim Anderson. "The History of Zork". 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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

[wired-article-5] Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold (1993). "The Dragon Ate My Homework". Wired. 1 (3). 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. {{cite journal}}: |author= has generic name (help)

[6] Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. The "D" in MUD stands for "Dungeon" [...] because the version of ZORK Roy played was a Fortran port called DUNGEN.

[bartle-history-email-7] "Early MUD History". 1990. 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.

[8] Richard Bartle. "Incarnations of MUD". 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.

[escape-from-the-dungeon-9] Michael Lawrie (2003). "Escape from the Dungeon". 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.

[10] "A Study of MUDs as a Society". 1998. 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!

[oubliette-11] Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. Jim Schwaiger's 1977 game Oubliette (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Chuck Miller's earlier multiplayer game, Mines of Moria) had a first-person point of view and used line graphics to render the scene ahead. It had persistent characters, but was not a persistent world. Also, the interaction it allowed between characters was very limited; it was almost there, but not quite.

[12] Bill Wisner (1990). "A brief (and very incomplete) history of MUDs". 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. {{cite web}}: line feed character in |quote= at position 287 (help)

[13] Alan Klietz (1992). "Scepter - the first 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. {{cite web}}: line feed character in |quote= at position 44 (help)

[Dragon's_Gate_Closure-14] Darrin Hyrup. "The Future of Dragon's Gate". 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.

[15] Raph Koster (2002). "Online World Timeline". "Island of Kesmai was written in 1980 and 1981, the goal being to soak up every bit of performance in the the CS department's new VAX. We succeeded." - Kelton Flinn

[16] Indra Sinha (1999). The Cybergypsies: a True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier. Viking Press. ISBN 0-67088-630-0.

[AberMUD-17] Richard Bartle (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0131018167. AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.

[monster-release-18] Richard Skrenta (1988). "monster - multiuser adventure game for VMS". Usenet. Monster was written in VMS Pascal under VMS 4.6.

[monster-introduction-19] Richard Skrenta (1988). "An Introduction to Monster". 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.

[mud-info-20] James Aspnes (1990). "Monster". 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.)

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