In the early days of the internet, a genre of RPG soared in popularity due to its simplicity, lack of bandwidth requirements, and overall interactivity. A MUD, or multi-user dungeon, is a text-based role playing game style that uses words to describe areas and options other than images and graphics.

There were several baseline coding styles that fell into the MUD realm such as Diku, Mush, Moo, among others. Creating worlds in using these tools was often rather simple in that everything was somewhat modular and could be created on one server and ported into the live one with relative ease. Your creative writing talents were often put to the test as you built room after room, all the while having to maintain a sense of immersion among players.

As a player, you could interact with often well over one hundred people as you played games based around Dungeons and Dragons, Cyberpunk, Vampire the Masquerade, and other dice and paper games. Commands were given such as “west” “north” “east” “look” “loot corpse” “put potion bag”. These simple commands controlled your character’s actions in movement, response, battle, and exploration of the text environment.

MUDs are still around today, and in some cases quite popular. I recently visited an older MUD called Arctic and discovered over ninety people still typing away as they did well over ten years ago. There are several MUD clients out there such as Zmud and the open source Mud Magic. If you’re stuck traveling on a weak laptop, or own an Asus Eee and are looking for something to do while on the road, check out MUDs.

Matt Ryan

Tags: muds, mush, moo, diku, matt ryan, frugal geek