This month, in honor of MU* History, I asked admins and longtime players to share a bit of history from their favorite game: an origin story, a little-known fact, a tradition, a disaster the game survived, or anything else worth remembering.
I thought this would be a fun way to celebrate, rather than me just rehashing some dry facet of MUD history that you can already read about on Wikipedia!
It was a delight getting to read the submissions – I hope you enjoy them, too!
Stories from the players
Erion’s annual permadeath tradition
Why Erion’s veterans intentionally put their permadeath characters on the line every anniversary.
“For the past couple of years, during Erion’s anniversary, some of the veteran players (and newer ones) will do something as a community to give a bonus experience and gold multiplier to the entire MUD for 24 hours.
In Erion, there is a mode called “Permadeath” that is risky and, as the name suggests, when you die, that character is gone (unless you spend a lot of resources to revive them). When a Permadeath character gets to level 150 or Hero, a MUD-wide experience bonus occurs for 2 hours that can stack!
The veteran players will level a character, or in some cases a few, to level 149/149. On the agreed upon day during the Anniversary week, they will all get to level 150 on both classes until there is at least 24 hours of bonus.
The first time I saw these occur it made me feel like a real part of a community, so I HAD to partake the following year. It was a very special moment for me and my memories with Erion.”
Submitted by: Kaeldrys
Play Erion MUDAetolia’s War of Night 2
What happened when some of Aetolia’s players sacked a village where, unbeknownst to them, a hidden darkness was being kept at bay.
“The War of Night 2 began completely as a player-initiated event, where the members of the Duiran Heartwood, tired of the Shadow corruption that affected Dendara (their Plane of Life), decided to sack a village of Minotaurs who were seen as the defenders of the plane of Shadow (Czjetija).
However, unbeknown to Duiran, and disbelieving of claims from the leaders of this village, what they were tasked to do was to safeguard and seal a portal from the Prime plane to Czjetija. This kickstarted a war between Duiran and Spinesreach, another player-run city allied with Sterion, which involved players marching soldiers and defending or attacking objectives, but ended with the defeat of Spinesreach and Sterion.
The Minotaurs themselves were a proud race, and did not capitulate or offer to surrender, so the Duirani sacked the entire village of Minotaurs… along with their knowledge of how to maintain the seals on the portal… which meant now that a primordial evil (an entity who controls Czjetija) was free to seep into the prime plane… and kickstart an entire YEAR’S worth of events that resulted in this evil entity actually taking over everyone in the realm.
This was all 100% a player-initiated event, with decision points along the way that players initiated and the admin supported. I’ve been a player in Aetolia on/off for about 20 years, and this is easily some of the best storytelling I’ve seen, both from the admin as well as the players.”
Submitted by: Virelen, a young survivor of Sterion who was absent at the time of its sacking
Play AetoliaStories from the admins
Insomnia MUD’s many hiding places
Why Insomnia MUD had to hide its game server on university systems, and how it managed to survive that way for years.
“Insomnia MUD began in the early nineties, created by a couple of university friends. Back then, finding a reliable place to host your game with a stable internet connection and enough power was a real puzzle, and even paying for it wasn’t an option. The cloud was still a dream!
Insomnia spent many years switching between different university systems designed for undergraduate studies. A common trick was to hide the game’s binary on the host, making it run as different executables, including the largest and busiest emacs instance the system team had ever seen, as well as a bash shell with over a hundred persistent outbound network connections.
Since universities often banned students from using their expensive but underpowered servers to run games, the admin’s job was half-preparing to switch systems, finding the next host and constantly begging and scraping for resources to keep the game running.
With over a hundred players online daily in the mid-nineties, Insomnia was hosted in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Germany, back in the UK in someone’s private lab, as part of a brand new business called an Internet Service Provider’s production billing server, and even in a student dorm on the back of a 56K modem just to keep it going while we desperately searched for another server.
This story is a reflection of many muds from the pre-cloud era, I think.”
Submitted by: Mork
Play Insomnia MUDDragonBall Infinity’s brush with disaster
The story of the infamous Broomicane incident and how Dragonball Infinity came back from the brink.
“I’ve hosted DragonBall Infinity, or DBI, exclusively off my personal computer for over 20 years. At one point, the server was just the motherboard case panel sitting on top of my monitor. No case, no protection.
Sometime in late 2007, I said or did something that angered my wife (who knows what it was anymore!) and she swung a broom in frustration, hitting the top of the giant CRT monitor that was serving as Atlas, holding up the server, our world. The broom bent and ended up snapping off the northbridge heatsink, frying the server.
I’d never been the greatest at keeping or maintaining backups, so the oldest backup we had was months prior, and we lost a lot of development that was in progress. There was a period in time where the playerbase wasn’t sure if the MUD was going to be gone forever or not.
After 2 months, I finally got a replacement server, we brought the MUD back up using the older backup, did a playerwipe, and the event has been commemorated with a helpfile and the moniker ‘The Broomicane.’
I also am much more diligent with keeping backups!”
Submitted by: Rendo
Play DragonBall InfinityConnecting to The Last Outpost in 1992
What it was like to play and write The Last Outpost in the early ’90s, when text arrived at 2400 baud.
“It is hard to believe now just how slow those early connections to The Last Outpost were [in the 1990s]. On a typical 2400 baud modem, an 80×24 screen of text would take about five seconds to download.
It’s no wonder then that we put so much time into writing good text descriptions in the game. Most people can read faster than 2400 baud, and that meant every word was going to be read!
While it was usually an exciting adventure, sometimes having to read all of that text could be painful. For many of us with dial-up connections, the in-game combat was an exercise in typing the attack, heal, and cast commands blind, and only finding out if we won the fight after the full text of the combat session had downloaded!”
Submitted by: RahjIII
Play The Last OutpostFun fact: Rahj has documented every machine LO has run on since 1992, from an Apollo DN3500 at the University of Minnesota to a quad-CPU SPARC10 built from parts rescued from a recycling bin. The submission above is just an excerpt – you can read the full history on his site.
Modus Operandi’s goodboy incident
What happened when a command meant to give players privacy got mistyped.
“The game had a policy of putting a script on players by default to catch abusive language. I was a dev but I didn’t like this policy.
We had a command to suspend the script for a bit. It was /goodboy. We (devs) were in a meeting and two players decided to share a very… intimate scene, and we started getting alerts with what they were typing.
Someone went to /goodboy but only typed /g. /g was not /goodboy. It was /giftbox.
So these two players are practicing for their honeymoon and suddenly an NPC walks in and gives them a gift box.
It was hilarious but also one of many reasons I opposed these kinds of policies.”
Submitted by: Trevor Rage
Note: Modus Operandi, a Simutronics game, was retired in 2015.
Preserving the history of Erion’s Hillock Hills
How a builder made sure Hillock Hills, Erion’s tropical starting village, will never forget its wintry origins.
“When I first played Erion in, I believe, 2016, Hillock Hills, the starting game area, was very different. Rather than a beautiful flooded tropical village, it was a frozen town. Shops made of ice, a frozen garden, guilds for each class and even a frozen phoenix, not to mention the rather extensive mud university with its climbable clocktower.
When I came back to the game a few years later, I was astounded to find many new missions and quicker progression, but also a huge change of temperature and latitude.
When I started writing for the game myself, I couldn’t resist a nod to this change as part of the area’s lore. So if you look at the information for the area Hillock Hills, you’ll learn of its past as a frozen wintry village, and there’s even a picture depicting that village to be found in the game’s Palgrove art gallery.
Since yes, temperatures may change, oceans may rise, and new player areas may be rewritten, but the mud remembers!”
Submitted by: darkbuilder, building, writing and game lore guy
Play Erion MUDIberia’s evolution from “SUD” to MUD
How Iberia started as a single-player experiment and eventually became a historical MUD that runs on its own custom engine.
“Iberia did not begin as a MUD. It began as a private, single-player RPG experiment. I was already a MUD player, and I wanted somewhere where I could reproduce mechanics I had seen in an existing game, experiment with them, break things, and learn how they worked without affecting other players or creating PvP problems.
At some point, that experiment stopped being merely a programming exercise, and I decided to turn it into a real multiplayer world. And so in 2006, Iberia was born.
The game’s engine was written from scratch in Java rather than being derived from one of the traditional MUD codebases, and over the years I have essentially rewritten it twice.
When the experiment became a MUD, I wanted a theme that was original, but more importantly one that I knew I would still care about many years later. Tolkien was an obvious choice. My first MUD was Tolkien-based, and I still play it today. But there were already several Tolkien MUDs.
Instead, I chose the Iberian Peninsula around 150 BC, during Rome’s expansion and the Lusitanian Wars. That decision created what I still consider to be Iberia’s strongest distinguishing feature: it is intended to be a historical MUD, rather than historical fantasy. There is no conventional magic system, no spellcasting, no fireballs, and no magical equipment hidden behind another name.”
Submitted by: Viriato, developer, builder and player
Play Iberia MUDIcesus MUD’s international journey
How a group of Finnish teenagers built a MUD in their school’s computer lab, and the hoops they had to jump through to keep the game online.
“We started building Icesus in 1995, in a school computer club in Jyväskylä, Finland.
The club was supposed to meet on Saturdays. That is what it said on paper. In practice we were in that computer classroom every day after school, and eventually the staff stopped fighting it and gave us the keys. The one rule was that we had to be out by eight in the evening, because that was when the building alarm went on. So the first year of Icesus got written in a room we let ourselves into, against a hard 8pm deadline that nobody could argue with.
The club was run by the principal’s son. He was at the University of Jyväskylä at the time, working on his doctorate, and that is how a school hobby ended up with a university hostname. The game ran at icesus.cc.jyu.fi. In 1995 Finland, a network connection like that was not something you bought, it was something somebody let you have. We were given the line and the machine time. For a couple of years that was enough.
What we were making was a valley. The idea was that the whole planet had frozen over and the last warm place left was a valley sealed under a forcefield, like a greenhouse. We wanted an ice name to go with that and went through a lot of bad ones before Icesus stuck. The association later got its name the same way, by translation. Jää is Finnish for ice.
We ran a beta for about a year before opening the doors to everyone. None of us knew what we were doing, which I think was the point.
Something I only noticed recently, going through the old files: every changelog entry is stamped with the machine it was typed on. Thirty years of changelog is also a map of where everybody was sitting. After the game’s own server, the two most common hosts in the whole mudlib are a pair of machines called voimax and velho, 335 entries between them. Those sat on the school’s network. Velho is Finnish for wizard, and somebody named that machine long before any of us had any business naming machines.
After that it moves to the universities, because that is where the people writing the game were. Helsinki University of Technology shows up as sokeri, basilika, oregano and kirveli, since whoever ran that place had named the servers after herbs. Then myntti and kruuna in Helsinki, paju and stekt52 in Oulu. And then it stops being Finnish at all: Adelaide, Victoria, Missouri, a boarding school in Indiana, a German dial-up line at 1997 German dial-up prices.
The network was free (for us). Hardware was not. The university gave us somewhere to plug a machine in, but the machine had to be ours, and by 1997 we needed to buy one. Buying a server means somebody has to legally own it, and a group of teenagers cannot own a server. So we registered an association.
Finnish associations need a stated purpose, and “we would like to buy a computer” is not one. What we wrote down was that Jää ry exists to maintain and develop its members’ English language skills, by running an open and free English-language forum. That sentence was written to get a registration through. I want to be honest about that.
It also happens to be true. I did not learn my English in a classroom. I learned it building this game, writing room descriptions badly and getting corrected for them by people who knew better. A lot of us did. We described the thing accurately by accident.
Those hostnames are the other half of it. It was never only Finns. Wizards turned up from Australia and the United States and Germany, some of them native speakers, and they were often the ones doing the correcting. We were all writing the same world in the same language, and most of us had never met. That felt like magic at the time. It still does.
Jää (the registered organization) still exists and still owns the servers. The people writing new areas still come from all over the world. Some of the supporting members whose fees keep it running have been paying them for over twenty years, and we still get everyone together once a year at a mudcon. That is a strange and good thing to be able to say about something that started as an excuse to stay inside a school building until eight in the evening.”
Submitted by: Idles, founder
Play Icesus MUDA big thank you to Kaeldrys, Virelen, Mork, Rendo, Rahj, Trevor, darkbuilder, Viriato, and Idles for sending in their stories – and to everyone who helped spread the word!
For me, these tales served as a reminder of the sometimes massive effort required to start and keep a MUD going. Everything from policy concerns to original content, from community engagement to hardware.
While some things have gotten easier over the years (and others have gotten harder!), it remains no simple feat to run a persistent, multi-user virtual world.
Kudos to all the admins and players out there who continue to participate in this niche, despite all its ups and downs!
For context around the event that inspired this post, and one redditor’s DartMUD story, check out the original announcement on r/MUD.
What do you think? Should I do this again next year?
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