remember MUDS?

July 3, 2004 1:11 PM

Rising Force Mud Remember back a couple of years, when the rage was "Multi User Dungeons "? You know graphical role playing. Well, its still around, And loads more interesting than the new online rpgs than the playstation has going. So check it out and play awhile if you want.
posted by edmcbride (15 comments total)

That ain't graphical. Needs graphics for that.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 1:23 PM on July 3, 2004

You can also add these really cools sites to check out too:

Mudmagic,

and

Mud Connecter
posted by edmcbride at 1:23 PM on July 3, 2004

d'oh, I read it over twice and still missed it!


I ment its text only gaming!!

damn!
posted by edmcbride at 1:26 PM on July 3, 2004

MUDs weren't graphical.

I spent too much time on Medievia and End of the Line.

You know, back in the day.
posted by xmutex at 1:47 PM on July 3, 2004

I'm a MUD enthusiast. Due to the lack of graphics, the MUD format has a less strict coordinate-based idea of physical space, and you more just occupy a certain area like in DND. I think that method of gaming is cool, text-based or not. I've got a programming project called ARGH (Avatarless RPG, Graphical, Handy) that's the same idea as a MUD, but with some modest graphics to pull the MUD format kicking and screaming into the 1980's - buttons, drop-down boxes etc. If the underlying game concept stays the same, but the interface is changed to GUI (as is already happening with some web-based games), the MUD format will live a verrrry long time.
posted by abcde at 2:23 PM on July 3, 2004

I always liked the idea of MUDs but never like the ones I found. Are there any that aren't set in fantasy-a-go-go? Any real-world ones?

I loved the idea of Poddington-on-slossip but it had closed by the time I got there. Anything like it?
posted by bonaldi at 3:05 PM on July 3, 2004

Many of the MU*s out there are making things a bit more graphical/gui based. Back in about 2000 or so, the Pueblo client started adding support for graphics, text formatting, and some basic html-type stuff. Both the Zmud and Portal clients support the same things as Pueblo as well as atmospheric and action-triggered sounds and let you right-click on the descriptions of objects, players, and creatures to manipulate them. So yeah, the interface is already changing. Thankfully, the concept doesn't seem to be, other than the rise in Pokemon-themed games.
posted by chickygrrl at 3:13 PM on July 3, 2004

I wasted far too much time on Threshold, still one of the most beautiful online experiences I've ever been a part of. Fortunately, I managed to quit it before my grades suffered beyond repair, and before I dropped any money on it—I had friends who were shedding hundreds of dollars for it in grade eleven.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 4:56 PM on July 3, 2004

I spent a lot of time on LambdaMOO in the mid-1990s. Even met my wife there. These days, I only go rarely, and I can't imagine myself ever again spending that much of my time, and focusing my social life so intensely, on it. Still, it was magical in many ways, and I miss it.
posted by Rebis at 9:04 PM on July 3, 2004

I love the idea of MUDs, but AetherMUX was the only one to ever catch my imagination; I spent far too much time there, then moved and had no Internet access in 2000; by the time I had a reliable connection again, the place was dead. It probably says something about my adolescence that at 14 I I spent time hanging out with my [real-life, met her in person] girlfriend on Aether.

Somewhere on the hard drive of one of the 486s littering my apartment are the PennMUSH data files for the MUSH I was planning to start; I spent hours coding custom +commands in MUSHcode, which remains to this day my favorite of the programming languages I've worked with. In the last days of the old-school Internet, I remember having an issue with my PennMUSH installation and logging on to M*U*S*H and msging Javelin, then (and perhaps now) the PennMUSH maintainer. I gave him the root password to my Slackware installation and he logged in and patched the source of the PennMUSH code on my machine so I could run it. Try getting that kind of support from Microsoft (or Red Hat, for that matter).
posted by IshmaelGraves at 11:44 PM on July 3, 2004

aaaaaaaaah! It's like I'm sixteen all over again!
posted by Katemonkey at 1:58 AM on July 4, 2004

+who/all
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:21 AM on July 4, 2004

There was this great MUD called Budapest (?), which was hosted on one of the NeXT boxes at Macalester College. I might have graduated with honors if it hadn't been for that game.
posted by subgenius at 12:41 PM on July 4, 2004

I spent a couple of jags playing Shattered World, which has among other things a functional player-run democratic legal system -- I first found it while searching for info on Nomic games. Neat MUD.
posted by cortex at 2:13 PM on July 4, 2004

The most democratic MUD is of course LambdaMOO, though.
posted by abcde at 9:12 PM on July 4, 2004