All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
When I first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was.
Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
Is this some kind of session leaking or does it automatically generate a user for you?
out of the all the MUDs from that era I think the most noteworthy was Assault, which was a Merc derivative mod with a top down map for real time strategy base defense, active around 2006 then disappeared into obscurity, and very wild in a pre-Dwarf Fortress era
As for the JavaScript client, it appears to be proprietary.
[1] https://t2tmud.org/boards/news/1402345353.php
Heavily modified. Language is C like.
Source code has been leaked in the past.
The granddaddy was 3025, followed. T 3056 - these were attenpting to portray the entire BT universe. So you’d sign up, join a faction, be assigned to a unit, train with your peers, and eventually go off to fight (though I don’t think either ever reached that point).
World level scenario based spinoffs started to appear. Planet level battles between multiple factions. Same deal as above except you would leave base with your unit to a shared hex map and could encounter other opponents.
All in all a much truer experience to TT than the MW games, but less so than Megamek
I wonder what it would be like to write one from scratch in 2025. Maybe I have a new project.
Still play now and then. Got a friend into it too.
Great way to game in a terminal window at work.
Check out KBtin MUD client!
Bonus points if you pass the class or get paid/don't get fired!
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
Any other clients I should be looking at, for this particular MUD but also others? Are they generic enough to be used with multiple games?
Then I clicked into the MUD, just to have a look, and the intro page said "celebrating 31 years online!"
It's cool to come across software that's both historical and current!
If you're interested and want to get game updates, or just to share LotR related memes, we have a Discord, Facebook group, and newsletter that goes out at least once a year.
Newsletter signup is on the website. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/t2tmud The link to the Discord can be found in the game by typing "help social media", after you complete the tutorial of course!
I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds
https://www.mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD2
I played the original MUD1 over the ARPANET at 300 baud via a (very slow, very expensive, taxpayer funded) US/UK trans-Atlantic gateway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677438
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"
The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzby
====> [Fast forward to 2025...] ====>
Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):
https://lloooomm.com/memory-lane-recording-session.html
[...] The MOO Connection
Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:
TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects
LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality
Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams
LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects
As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"
https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...
https://lloooomm.com/the-ground-truth-issue-1.html
Pattern Recognition Convergence
From: The Recursive Owl (Henry's Spirit Animal)
I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!
Did you see this, a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403639
There was a MUD hosted at Essex in the '90s, but I can't for the life of me remember.... Archipelago!
I used to spend hours on telnet playing this game with my friend. What a fun blast to the past!
Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
- Balzhur: https://balzhur.org/ is have been running from january 2000
- Medina: medinamud.top sometimes was offline but it have been running from 1995
Ended up befriending a blind guy from Venezuela and wondering if most people still playing MUDs might be blind.
I logged on a few weeks ago and noticed he still plays, but I forgot the commands to do anything so I never left him a message.
There's also:
- rlmud.org 23 https://www.reinosdeleyenda.es/ -- Still relatively popular for a MUD in Spanish
- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it
- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.
Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
This was discussed in the recently posted Everquest article: https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/everquest/
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest#History):
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
"No, sir. I’m from Westfold."
