Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of any others?

MUDs were transformational for my life. I was an often lonely kid growing up with ADHD and a love of video games. I got into MUDs in 94 when we got our first PC right around my freshmen year of high school. I loved AD&D and this was the closest you could get on a computer. I became obsessed and learned Linux because they had the C compilers and Unix was how you hosted MUDs. I taught myself C with “C for dummies” vol 1, and 2, K&R C book, and Beej’s guides to networking, just released around that time. As well as learning every in and out of the CircleMUD code base, a Diku mud derivative. I spent a good chunk of my high school life building a MUD that got pretty popular (50+ users on the weekends). Coding new systems, learning creative writing. This led to me getting real jobs in web app dev in 98. The rest is history. I learned how to fix gnarly memory leaks with my own memory allocator and tools like libefence. Taming memory leaks meant my server could stay up longer, etc. I learned about graph theory, other algorithms, multi user networking. I never considered how hard or easy any of this was. It was just what I was obsessed with, so the difficulty had no real bearing on my mindset. MUDs gave me so much and for that I am grateful.

I've posted this before, but I figure I'll share the story again.

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Some were even at my wedding!

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.

The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.

Towards the end of 2005, one of the MUDs I had played on quite a bit from the mid 90s on decided it was time to call it a game. I had been with the game through multiple server moves over the years, but the player base just wasn't there anymore.

So on the last night, a handful of us gathered one last time. I thought it was going to be a bit like a funeral, but it ended up being a whole lot of fun. We spent hours that night reminiscing about old plots, talking about old characters, remembering all the good times we had spent together, and swapping contact information. Some of us had been playing together for years; it almost felt like we were saying goodbye to a dear friend in the best way we knew how.

Most of us were there until the final minutes. We all raised our [virtual] glasses in a toast. Then, the lights went out, the server shut down and the game was no more. In retrospect, it reminded me of the final minutes of Babylon 5 [1].

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In the intervening years, Warcraft, Second Life and other MMORPGs sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text and freeform world that MUDs provided.

Games like these are by definition social constructs. They take on a life of their own. And like all things, the end will eventually come. But rather than mourn its passing, I prefer to remember all the good times and treasure all the friendships that I made (many of whom I still keep up with to this day). The game may be gone, but the memories will always be with us.

Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY

There is a cool sort-of PbP-mud hybrid server called AresMush. You would have to code the Pathfinder rules yourself most likely, though it's possible someone has done so. I think Ares is written in Ruby fwiw.

For sure! There even is an everything-old-is-new-again iteration of that called Grapevine.haus