I used to play Aardwolf almost 27 years ago when its address was wolf.mudservices.com 4000.
It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.
I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.
My first MUD I ran was there on mudservices! I learned C and become a programmer because of MUDs. MUDs and my obsession with building them in high school took me on a very long and statistically improbable journey of success in my career and life.
This reminds me that back in high school, I would multibox on the MUD I played regularly by logging in, pulling the plug on my dial-up modem, dialing back in and then logging back in to my initial character and a new one. Dialing in would give me a fresh IP address, but the initially logged-in character would retain the one it logged in with (also, you had to do this fast enough that the character didn't get disconnected).
I also had some scumbag moments. Namely, I helped someone else on the MUD code on his other MUD, and I saw that he never installed libcrypt or whatever, so I could view players' passwords in plaintext. Since I new him from the main MUD we played, there were a bunch of people I knew playing in both, at least to check out this guy's project. So I'd use the same IP trick to log in as them and kill their friends, as them. Fun stuff.
I once ran multiple bots on Ancient Anguish that would do simple quests for cash and follow other player to steal their gear if they dropped anything. The bots would then find my main and hand everything over.
The mods teleported my chars into a dungeon and virtually tortured them while trying to get me to admit one person was behind the lot.
I was raised on the internet and spent so much time playing MUDs which then got me to want to create my own and learn to code. I played Abandoned Reality http://abandoned.org/ and it was such an amazing experience learning to write and play pretend. My wife and I met playing Abandoned Reality and turned out only lived 45 minutes away from each other.
I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.
I got my hands on the source code of a MUD. It was incredibly flat. Most of the code was if/else and output text. The data was in flat text files as well (1 line = one unit of data, an integer, range or an element of a list, similar to a .env file). The game dumps all the data at every save. It surprised me because I tried to be clever while making my own MUD engine but the result was exactly that, an engine, not a MUD.
Very interesting. Do you remember which source you got your hands on? I dabbled in CircleMud as someone else posted, but mostly Envy 2.0 or 2.2. I can't find those codebases quickly these days, but this is a link to a mud based on Envy 2.2 https://github.com/DikuMUDOmnibus/Ultra-Envy
It's from 10 years ago, a French MUD called Multimud. It's closed source because the code contains too much information about the game. It's surprisingly simple, a Perl socket-select single-thread process with no dependencies.
Some indie games that got open sourced after sales dropped off are the same way. Everyone who looked at Terraria's or VVVVVV's code knows it's terrible, and yet, those games exist and are fun, while clearly coded games are less common.
Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP
Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.
When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.
These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
----
[0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
Some of the coolest MUDs I played in had effectively only two useful rooms, and no mobs or items to really speak of. They were barely more than a couple of IRC chat rooms, but with the ANSI colors support and complex script languages a MUD Engine directly over telnet could provide to a good MUD client.
There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.
But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)
I’ll admit YMMV and my comment should’ve been better scoped — but it sounds like you’re not disagreeing that for those, LLMs are useful in the way I suggested.
I got into programming through MUDs, have the fondest memories of those times and deeply appreciate their role in my life. I ran up a giant AOL bill playing Dragon's Gate that I had to work off by doing data entry that helped me understand the basics of computing, and then using that knowledge to create so many scripts and highlights in Rapscallion MUD client. After that, I realized I could make more things and never stopped. What a great time. I remember being online when the MUD I played reached their maximum number of concurrent players - 340 - and thinking that the world was so big. Crazy to think about online gaming today.
Those AOL prices were insane. It has admittedly been so long that I'm not sure I trust my memory, but I seem to recall per-minute pricing that could rack up over $20 per hour just from playing any of their text based games. I begged and begged my parents to let me just try one for a few minutes and they very wisely said absolutely not.
A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.
My dad worked for a studio that sold a game to WorldPlay. WorldPlay games charged by the hour, but the developers received AOL accounts that bypassed this charge. Theoretically I could play any WorldPlay game for free, but mostly I played my dad's game, which was free anyway as some kind of "check out our new game" introductory promotion.
There was a small regular community which got wiped out when WorldPlay started charging for it. The studio got more free accounts and gave them to regular players so that the game didn't just evaporate immediately, which meant everyone suddenly had a minor name change. After that, the game evaporated.
Yeah, so many of us with stories of angry parents over too large an AOL bill. If I recall correctly, my month where I did that was in Modus Operandi, the detective themed text game. I don't remember exactly how I spent all that time in MO one month, but I know part of how I spent that many hours was logging into my AOL account from my grandparents' place and a friend's place, in addition to what I was doing at home, which contributed to why my parents hadn't tracked that much "screen time" in that era. Amazing to consider how many things changed since then, but also how many of those concerns are the same even if the reasons for the concerns are different.
Yes, it was crazy. $2/hour in 1997 dollars! Agreed… I think only Pubg has come close to replicating the intensity of emotion in PvP (which was my main interest in playing)
And be sure to check out MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth) as well! It has a graphical map that shows your location while you navigate the world of Middle Earth and join the epic battle (PK) between the free peoples of Arda and Sauron's minions.
Still logging in on occasion in Midnight Sun, I am on the younger side (breaching my thirties soon) and my mother played introduced me at a very young age to play alongside her and to help guide and teach the game (and spelling, and critical thinking, and the digital world) that she had played years before I was born. Many of her longest friends that she still talks with daily she met through MS2 and the various other MUDs such as Aardwolf.
MUDs are truly wonderful, and I hope they have a resurgence in some form soon.
For the longest time MUDs were my standard "learn a new language" project. There's enough meat to expose strengths of the language but overall they're pretty simple.
I love how concise that Haskell code is! I've also started building a new MUD engine, but in Rust (previously I've written a partially complete one in Go), and this time around I'm working on implementing a MUD using an ECS (entity component system).
I'm also planning on an ECS system as well! Very cool. Are you publishing the code somewhere? There's also a Slack for MUD developers if you're interested in chilling with like-minded people: https://mudcoders.com/join-the-mud-coders-guild-6770301ddcbd...
I have 'Create a MUD server' on my side project todo list. I Want to do it with golang too. I have some experience with C and SMAUG codebase; just tinkering around. What were your biggest challenges and wins with a Go based MUD server?
When I wrote the Go one, the biggest challenge I had was synchronizing global state, since it was massively concurrent (there was a server goroutine to handle the main game tick, and two goroutines per connected client, one to read and the other to write).
I ran into a fair amount of deadlock situations during development of different features, and in retrospect I think I would have benefited a lot from the architectural/paradigm shift to an ECS or an actor model like https://github.com/anthdm/hollywood
As for the wins, Go always makes it very easy dealing with concurrency primitives, I really loved using channels, and pretty much everything I needed was in the standard library.
> I think Achaea and some of the other big ones do though.
Achaea's had a premium shop for a long, long time, yes. It seems they've recently added ways for players to accumulate "credits" (the premium currency) just by playing the game normally -- it's called the "renown" system. (And there have always been other programs that involve volunteering behind the scenes -- the most obvious and in-the-open one is being an official newbie guide.)
I haven't felt any strong desire to put money into Achaea, personally. There are a lot of nice-to-haves, and yes, a good number of premium artefacts that give real advantages in gameplay; but the selling point for me has always been the RP-focused world and community, and mechanically speaking you don't need artefacts for PvE. Probably the most common premium items I've seen are non-decaying vials (which are, IIRC, extremely cheap and very accessible via accumulated renown) and the Atavian wings that let you travel to a lot of different locations very quickly.
I did make a small cash purchase once, to ensure that my character would never get deleted from inactivity, but these days it seems a sufficient amount of total game time is enough to avoid that fate.
I'd definitely recommend Achaea if you're interested in a heavily character-driven world with a community that's passionate about roleplay. The cash shop is by no means a necessity (unless you're getting very deep into PvP, where my expertise runs out, so it could go either way). The volunteer staff (the "Garden of the Gods", as it were) are super active with both large and small RP events, so there's a lot of both official and "unofficial" goings-on in the world. It's really fantastic.
(If anybody here remembers Soludra, hi, that was me!)
Aardwolf does not have, and has never had, any content gated on payment. You can "donate" (legally purchase) money for in-game currency but it doesn't really affect game balance (you still have to grind for a billion hours to reach endgame).
I had such a magical experience with the Realms of Despair MUD from the age of 16 up to around 24. That's where I learned most of my programming, and made friends I talk to every day even now, twenty years later. MUDs take some getting into, but they really are fantastic.
Good memories! Played this back in the early 00's on a 12" iBook often far too late into the college nights. This was before their custom client, so everyone used something different. I remember using TinyFugue, it worked well on Mac OS X at least. MUDs are just text, and tinyfugue must have had something which made allowed for easy capture and scripting because I did a TON of that. Sure, had to learn "regular expressions", but that was fun too!
There was some random phoenix which used to spawn somewhere. You couldn't teleport to it, but you could teleport near it, and I somehow scripted up a seek and destroy phoenix button. Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful, so mostly it was just the fun of watching the rooms zoom by (textually) and the joy of seeing a code creation work, insignificant as it was.
Thanks, Lasher, for keeping it alive all these years. I still remember Aardwolf fondly. And I still love regex.
my MUD history goes: in '98 i got into realms of despair, played for years. another mud phase is awarded to trenton for his dbzfe/ff1 muds, both having tilesets if you preferred the pueblo mud client. dbzfe was unique in its real time combat, dodging left a right punch, or parrying it high, or ducking. all timing-based, high adrenaline moments for me
but, the past ~7 years or so, i just log into discworld. i made a very ugly site for it, not mobile friendly. https://badteeth.neocities.org/ not even eyeball friendly
Same, this was my first MUD by chance as some friends and I discovered it as a means to play games in a school computer lab that banned games. Good times. Taught me the definition of 'quaff' too.
same here! I eventually quit because I can't control myself enough to not grind for 8 hours a day instead of working but this game got me interested in writing code (to make text based games)
There was a MUD I read a printout of the textile manual for when I was a kid (didn’t have a computer). It explained how to create mobs and zones, and one of the example characters they used repeatedly was a knight or paladin called Geoffrey. I think it also introduced me to kobolds.
I’d love to find it again and reread it.
I thought it was called Legends but that hasn’t turned up the same thing.
I played a Legends MUD game on a BBS, could that be it? I’ve looked for it for years on and off and finally found it recently. With text files, and Even the executables and database to run it.
I used to play Aardwolf too, great memories. I think I got to 6x remort before going on hiatus. I'd be tempted to return, except I decided a couple of decades ago that no more games that don't have an end.
My first MUD was Phoenix. At some point they did a big update that forced all players to restart from level 1, and subsequently lost their player base and died. I'm sure I learned something from that debacle.
I love MUDs, they got me real experience coding and typing when I was 12 years old and I never stopped. I actually maintain the MUD I played as a kid now (up since 1992!) though we have very few players these days.
I have been (extremely slowly) migrating the Diku codebase to Swift, I hope to complete that and ship it this way someday (I've been too scared to ship these changes, though they work locally just fine). Maybe when I retire!
I used to play MUDs in my youth - first PaderMUD/Xyllomer, then GEAS. I could already feel that the genre was declining past 2000. With less time on my hand there was a point I'd have to retire anyway, but horrible code changes made by random hobbyists put in charge of both MUDs also contributed to the feeling I had to quit sooner rather than later. Both MUDs also tampered (aka nerfed/ruined/changed) the way how 'who' works (find out who else was currently playing; GEAS specifically first took away the ability to find out who was playing at all whatsoever at the same time, thanks to PO Allalltar becoming the new surrogate admin after the original admin-team was mostly gone, and then did a partial restoration after players complained but not a full restoration - but in fairness, if it would not have been that nerf it would have been any other game-breaking zero-discussed code change by whoever was suddenly the new head admin in town).
Nonetheless I encourage people to keep the genre alive. MUDs probably peaked in the 1990s.
I played WoTMUD for years. It is a Wheel-of-Time themed PVP-focused MUD. To this day, I check it out every Christmas because the holiday events were a special moment of my childhood.
I learned Perl scripting client for one MUD back in 2000, and that led me to web development.
Just a month ago, I remembered one MUD I've been trying out since 2003. And found that it is still online, and my password still works. Very weird feeling to log in to something 22 years later.
It was pretty advanced at the time, with 256 color support, IPv6, advanced encoding support, etc.
https://cryosphere.org/
I had a crappy computer with crappy internet back in the day. I didn't play Aardwolf, but I played another mud called Alter Aeon. I still have fond memory of it and check back in every few years.
MUDs are what got me into serious programming (my first ~100k lines of C code), dropping from college (turned out great for me) and making friends for life.
Owe so much to them.
I played Aardwolf briefly but I mostly stuck to a nightmare/LP MUD that is still around but essentially empty. I learned to code (which ended up being a gateway to C/C++), grief, and be compassionate to new players.
I spent many fun hours there! It blew my mind to discover a game world that was so deeply player-driven and offered so many possibilities - my main character became a professional author...
I earned my first money in-world by writing poetry. At first I hand-wrote it and sold it on the street to other players (probably because they had compassion on a poor first-level wizard who didn't know anything about the game). Later on I had a book of my poems printed and sold in the local bookshops, and went on to write for one of the player-run newspapers. Good fun :-)
I loved the collaborative stories that unfolded on the boards. There were literature majors, authors, and all sorts of creative people who contributed. We also experimented with DSLs so those people could help build the world.
Depends on the name. Imagine people would use insult-names in a roleplay MUD.
10 minutes sounds excessive though. Was the prompt not informing you that the name xyz can not be used and you'd have to pick another one? It also depends on the MUD of course - how many names did you try?
I never had a problem picking a proper name for one of my characters, but indeed I hated it when MUDs would want to make me wait for name-approval manually. Most MUDs allowed instant-creation and resume gameplay on the spot though. Weird that the name-choice barrier took you 10 minutes. What was the MUD?
I’m reminded of the time, probably 20 years ago, when some viral game was making the rounds. It was designed such that the controls, even the goals, weren’t obvious, but as it turned out, it didn’t respond to my Mac’s trackpad because I used tap to click and the game didn’t recognize my taps.
So, as far as I could tell, the game was utterly pointless. The developer replied to me apologetically on Twitter but I never went back to give it another shot.
Chiming in with another "bad input ruins a game" story: Alpha Protocol (2010), PC port.
There was a "hacking" minigame, and it was mandatory to solve it as part of the introductory tutorial levels. I think the original console version used left+right thumbsticks, and on PC that meant a half-keyboard half-mouse setup. There were some serious sensitivity/dead-zone issues, but that wasn't the main blocker.
IIRC the problem was that if you had remapped any keys in the options (as I had before starting) the new choices didn't apply during the minigame... except they still influenced the on-screen instructions! So I was stuck constantly failing this minigame because it was waiting for me to press some arbitrary (stock) key to progress, while telling me I needed to press a different (remapped) key that kept having no effect.
Anywho, I think I realized it some other week/month after wiping/reinstalling in frustration. Thereafter I prioritized tools/upgrades that let me skip the badly ported minigame.
My friends and I all cut our teeth on https://last-outpost.com 30 years ago now. It’s crazy how reliable such an old game is. I was an absolute slacker in school, but had an inexplicably high reading level which I attribute to “LO” and Magic: the Gathering. My 7-year old son really got a kick out of playing it, and it’s a great way to teach reading comprehension to young ones.
I used to play Aardwolf almost 27 years ago when its address was wolf.mudservices.com 4000.
It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.
I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.
My first MUD I ran was there on mudservices! I learned C and become a programmer because of MUDs. MUDs and my obsession with building them in high school took me on a very long and statistically improbable journey of success in my career and life.
I fondly remember getting banned from some MUD around that time, for talking back to an admin. It was a formative experience.
Good practice for IRC, Discord, or HN.
This reminds me that back in high school, I would multibox on the MUD I played regularly by logging in, pulling the plug on my dial-up modem, dialing back in and then logging back in to my initial character and a new one. Dialing in would give me a fresh IP address, but the initially logged-in character would retain the one it logged in with (also, you had to do this fast enough that the character didn't get disconnected).
I also had some scumbag moments. Namely, I helped someone else on the MUD code on his other MUD, and I saw that he never installed libcrypt or whatever, so I could view players' passwords in plaintext. Since I new him from the main MUD we played, there were a bunch of people I knew playing in both, at least to check out this guy's project. So I'd use the same IP trick to log in as them and kill their friends, as them. Fun stuff.
I once ran multiple bots on Ancient Anguish that would do simple quests for cash and follow other player to steal their gear if they dropped anything. The bots would then find my main and hand everything over.
The mods teleported my chars into a dungeon and virtually tortured them while trying to get me to admit one person was behind the lot.
Was that before ekşi?
what is that, other than a common turkish word?
A website ekşi sözlük. He is founder
Yes.
I was raised on the internet and spent so much time playing MUDs which then got me to want to create my own and learn to code. I played Abandoned Reality http://abandoned.org/ and it was such an amazing experience learning to write and play pretend. My wife and I met playing Abandoned Reality and turned out only lived 45 minutes away from each other.
I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.
Meeting the misses on a MUD is a true OG internet love story. That's awesome.
I met my wife on IRC in the late 90s, but meeting on a MUD is a level above that and I bow to grandparent.
I got my hands on the source code of a MUD. It was incredibly flat. Most of the code was if/else and output text. The data was in flat text files as well (1 line = one unit of data, an integer, range or an element of a list, similar to a .env file). The game dumps all the data at every save. It surprised me because I tried to be clever while making my own MUD engine but the result was exactly that, an engine, not a MUD.
Very interesting. Do you remember which source you got your hands on? I dabbled in CircleMud as someone else posted, but mostly Envy 2.0 or 2.2. I can't find those codebases quickly these days, but this is a link to a mud based on Envy 2.2 https://github.com/DikuMUDOmnibus/Ultra-Envy
It's from 10 years ago, a French MUD called Multimud. It's closed source because the code contains too much information about the game. It's surprisingly simple, a Perl socket-select single-thread process with no dependencies.
Some indie games that got open sourced after sales dropped off are the same way. Everyone who looked at Terraria's or VVVVVV's code knows it's terrible, and yet, those games exist and are fun, while clearly coded games are less common.
Reading the various comments in the CircleMUD source is a bit of a treat: https://github.com/Yuffster/CircleMUD
Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP
Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.
When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.
These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.
Elendor is up? telnet mush.elendor.net 1893
https://discord.gg/H8Xr3UF - is a discord server people migrated to.
Thanks for pointing that out. I saw reports that the telnet endpoint was down and didn't think to check.
I spent far far too much time on Elendor in the 90's and early 00's.
Wow, I'd visit play.net from time to time to get that nastalgic dopamine hit. Sad to see that's gone.
LLMs could really make this genre incredible. Too bad they probably don't have the funding to do something with it.
No, they could not actually.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
---- [0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
How would they? LLM can generate content, sure, but do MUDs need more content?
Yes.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
Some of the coolest MUDs I played in had effectively only two useful rooms, and no mobs or items to really speak of. They were barely more than a couple of IRC chat rooms, but with the ANSI colors support and complex script languages a MUD Engine directly over telnet could provide to a good MUD client.
There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.
But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)
I mostly played “Everquest-like” ones.
I’ll admit YMMV and my comment should’ve been better scoped — but it sounds like you’re not disagreeing that for those, LLMs are useful in the way I suggested.
Keep your AI slop out of my human-crafted adventures, please.
If you want an LLM-created text adventure, by all means, go and enjoy that yourself. I want no part of it.
I got into programming through MUDs, have the fondest memories of those times and deeply appreciate their role in my life. I ran up a giant AOL bill playing Dragon's Gate that I had to work off by doing data entry that helped me understand the basics of computing, and then using that knowledge to create so many scripts and highlights in Rapscallion MUD client. After that, I realized I could make more things and never stopped. What a great time. I remember being online when the MUD I played reached their maximum number of concurrent players - 340 - and thinking that the world was so big. Crazy to think about online gaming today.
Those AOL prices were insane. It has admittedly been so long that I'm not sure I trust my memory, but I seem to recall per-minute pricing that could rack up over $20 per hour just from playing any of their text based games. I begged and begged my parents to let me just try one for a few minutes and they very wisely said absolutely not.
A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.
My dad worked for a studio that sold a game to WorldPlay. WorldPlay games charged by the hour, but the developers received AOL accounts that bypassed this charge. Theoretically I could play any WorldPlay game for free, but mostly I played my dad's game, which was free anyway as some kind of "check out our new game" introductory promotion.
There was a small regular community which got wiped out when WorldPlay started charging for it. The studio got more free accounts and gave them to regular players so that the game didn't just evaporate immediately, which meant everyone suddenly had a minor name change. After that, the game evaporated.
Yeah, so many of us with stories of angry parents over too large an AOL bill. If I recall correctly, my month where I did that was in Modus Operandi, the detective themed text game. I don't remember exactly how I spent all that time in MO one month, but I know part of how I spent that many hours was logging into my AOL account from my grandparents' place and a friend's place, in addition to what I was doing at home, which contributed to why my parents hadn't tracked that much "screen time" in that era. Amazing to consider how many things changed since then, but also how many of those concerns are the same even if the reasons for the concerns are different.
Yes, it was crazy. $2/hour in 1997 dollars! Agreed… I think only Pubg has come close to replicating the intensity of emotion in PvP (which was my main interest in playing)
And be sure to check out MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth) as well! It has a graphical map that shows your location while you navigate the world of Middle Earth and join the epic battle (PK) between the free peoples of Arda and Sauron's minions.
https://mume.org/
Here's a (dramatized) YouTube video of a few epic battles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Ax1MZlDoE
And here's a stream of us fighting one of the bigger bosses in the game (a huge spider in Mirkwood):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHnqKQdLzoc
Still logging in on occasion in Midnight Sun, I am on the younger side (breaching my thirties soon) and my mother played introduced me at a very young age to play alongside her and to help guide and teach the game (and spelling, and critical thinking, and the digital world) that she had played years before I was born. Many of her longest friends that she still talks with daily she met through MS2 and the various other MUDs such as Aardwolf.
MUDs are truly wonderful, and I hope they have a resurgence in some form soon.
https://midnightsun2.org/
MS2 has a great Mudlet UI too, one of the best early ones!
Just wanted to remind everyone of the wonderful world of MUDs
Funnily enough I took up trying to develop a new MUD engine from scratch in Haskell, with an embedded Lua interpreter for scripting as well.
https://github.com/agentultra/bakamud
And I often stream working on it at https://twitch.tv/agentultra
MUDs are great! Achea is another great one.
Happy gaming folks.
Some years ago I wrote Haskell bindings to libtelnet ( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/libtelnet ) and a reflex wrapper around them ( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/reflex-libtelnet ).
Perhaps they are useful to you. If you need dependency bounds relaxed or revised to work on modern GHCs, let me know and I'll take a look.
For the longest time MUDs were my standard "learn a new language" project. There's enough meat to expose strengths of the language but overall they're pretty simple.
I love how concise that Haskell code is! I've also started building a new MUD engine, but in Rust (previously I've written a partially complete one in Go), and this time around I'm working on implementing a MUD using an ECS (entity component system).
I'm also planning on an ECS system as well! Very cool. Are you publishing the code somewhere? There's also a Slack for MUD developers if you're interested in chilling with like-minded people: https://mudcoders.com/join-the-mud-coders-guild-6770301ddcbd...
> There's also a Slack for MUD developers if you're interested in chilling with like-minded people
I am very much the target person for this but also am oddly sad that this isn't like ... a MOO? Or something!
Right? This is ripe territory for a talker
I have 'Create a MUD server' on my side project todo list. I Want to do it with golang too. I have some experience with C and SMAUG codebase; just tinkering around. What were your biggest challenges and wins with a Go based MUD server?
When I wrote the Go one, the biggest challenge I had was synchronizing global state, since it was massively concurrent (there was a server goroutine to handle the main game tick, and two goroutines per connected client, one to read and the other to write).
I ran into a fair amount of deadlock situations during development of different features, and in retrospect I think I would have benefited a lot from the architectural/paradigm shift to an ECS or an actor model like https://github.com/anthdm/hollywood
As for the wins, Go always makes it very easy dealing with concurrency primitives, I really loved using channels, and pretty much everything I needed was in the standard library.
absolutely agreed.
warning to those just trying them out now though : a lot of MUDs have gone the unfortunate route of having premium shops and other MMO pitfalls.
I don't think Aardwolf does -- not positive. I think Achaea and some of the other big ones do though.
I recommend Discworld. https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
> I think Achaea and some of the other big ones do though.
Achaea's had a premium shop for a long, long time, yes. It seems they've recently added ways for players to accumulate "credits" (the premium currency) just by playing the game normally -- it's called the "renown" system. (And there have always been other programs that involve volunteering behind the scenes -- the most obvious and in-the-open one is being an official newbie guide.)
I haven't felt any strong desire to put money into Achaea, personally. There are a lot of nice-to-haves, and yes, a good number of premium artefacts that give real advantages in gameplay; but the selling point for me has always been the RP-focused world and community, and mechanically speaking you don't need artefacts for PvE. Probably the most common premium items I've seen are non-decaying vials (which are, IIRC, extremely cheap and very accessible via accumulated renown) and the Atavian wings that let you travel to a lot of different locations very quickly.
I did make a small cash purchase once, to ensure that my character would never get deleted from inactivity, but these days it seems a sufficient amount of total game time is enough to avoid that fate.
I'd definitely recommend Achaea if you're interested in a heavily character-driven world with a community that's passionate about roleplay. The cash shop is by no means a necessity (unless you're getting very deep into PvP, where my expertise runs out, so it could go either way). The volunteer staff (the "Garden of the Gods", as it were) are super active with both large and small RP events, so there's a lot of both official and "unofficial" goings-on in the world. It's really fantastic.
(If anybody here remembers Soludra, hi, that was me!)
Aardwolf does not have, and has never had, any content gated on payment. You can "donate" (legally purchase) money for in-game currency but it doesn't really affect game balance (you still have to grind for a billion hours to reach endgame).
I had such a magical experience with the Realms of Despair MUD from the age of 16 up to around 24. That's where I learned most of my programming, and made friends I talk to every day even now, twenty years later. MUDs take some getting into, but they really are fantastic.
Good memories! Played this back in the early 00's on a 12" iBook often far too late into the college nights. This was before their custom client, so everyone used something different. I remember using TinyFugue, it worked well on Mac OS X at least. MUDs are just text, and tinyfugue must have had something which made allowed for easy capture and scripting because I did a TON of that. Sure, had to learn "regular expressions", but that was fun too!
There was some random phoenix which used to spawn somewhere. You couldn't teleport to it, but you could teleport near it, and I somehow scripted up a seek and destroy phoenix button. Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful, so mostly it was just the fun of watching the rooms zoom by (textually) and the joy of seeing a code creation work, insignificant as it was.
Thanks, Lasher, for keeping it alive all these years. I still remember Aardwolf fondly. And I still love regex.
The FireStorm Phoenix!
> Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful
The flaming sun gem got a new use pretty recently, sometime in 2020 +/- 2 years.
i was gonna post this 15 hours ago but was sure someone would
warning, this ranking will put the horny muds up top: https://mudstats.com/Browse
---
my MUD history goes: in '98 i got into realms of despair, played for years. another mud phase is awarded to trenton for his dbzfe/ff1 muds, both having tilesets if you preferred the pueblo mud client. dbzfe was unique in its real time combat, dodging left a right punch, or parrying it high, or ducking. all timing-based, high adrenaline moments for me
but, the past ~7 years or so, i just log into discworld. i made a very ugly site for it, not mobile friendly. https://badteeth.neocities.org/ not even eyeball friendly
seems i like throwing up pages for _things_. i briefly played a finnish mud: https://icesus.neocities.org/
if you're into MUD history, I ported the latest source I could find from SillyMUD to work on modern systems: https://github.com/jerrysievert/sillymud
it was quite a bit of fun, and the 3rd or 4th MUD I worked on.
I grew up on Aardwolf. It basically taught me to touch type. Thank you for reminding me of its existence <3
Same, this was my first MUD by chance as some friends and I discovered it as a means to play games in a school computer lab that banned games. Good times. Taught me the definition of 'quaff' too.
same here! I eventually quit because I can't control myself enough to not grind for 8 hours a day instead of working but this game got me interested in writing code (to make text based games)
There was a MUD I read a printout of the textile manual for when I was a kid (didn’t have a computer). It explained how to create mobs and zones, and one of the example characters they used repeatedly was a knight or paladin called Geoffrey. I think it also introduced me to kobolds.
I’d love to find it again and reread it.
I thought it was called Legends but that hasn’t turned up the same thing.
I played a Legends MUD game on a BBS, could that be it? I’ve looked for it for years on and off and finally found it recently. With text files, and Even the executables and database to run it.
Could that be it? I’ll dig it up if so..
It’s certainly possible, but you don’t need to go to any trouble - I’d hate to have misremembered the name and waste your time.
I found references to GeoffreyPhoenix in DEMIGOD.TXT and HANDBOOK.TXT. You can send me an email to my email in bio if you wish.
I used to play Aardwolf too, great memories. I think I got to 6x remort before going on hiatus. I'd be tempted to return, except I decided a couple of decades ago that no more games that don't have an end.
My first MUD was Phoenix. At some point they did a big update that forced all players to restart from level 1, and subsequently lost their player base and died. I'm sure I learned something from that debacle.
I love MUDs, they got me real experience coding and typing when I was 12 years old and I never stopped. I actually maintain the MUD I played as a kid now (up since 1992!) though we have very few players these days.
I have been (extremely slowly) migrating the Diku codebase to Swift, I hope to complete that and ship it this way someday (I've been too scared to ship these changes, though they work locally just fine). Maybe when I retire!
I used to play MUDs in my youth - first PaderMUD/Xyllomer, then GEAS. I could already feel that the genre was declining past 2000. With less time on my hand there was a point I'd have to retire anyway, but horrible code changes made by random hobbyists put in charge of both MUDs also contributed to the feeling I had to quit sooner rather than later. Both MUDs also tampered (aka nerfed/ruined/changed) the way how 'who' works (find out who else was currently playing; GEAS specifically first took away the ability to find out who was playing at all whatsoever at the same time, thanks to PO Allalltar becoming the new surrogate admin after the original admin-team was mostly gone, and then did a partial restoration after players complained but not a full restoration - but in fairness, if it would not have been that nerf it would have been any other game-breaking zero-discussed code change by whoever was suddenly the new head admin in town).
Nonetheless I encourage people to keep the genre alive. MUDs probably peaked in the 1990s.
I can't speak for other MUDs, but discworld peaked in 2002-2003, 200 players and a queue of about 20 people waiting to get in wasn't unusual.
these days it's more in the 40-70 people range.
Old Aardwolfers gang, rise up. Loved that game.
I played WoTMUD for years. It is a Wheel-of-Time themed PVP-focused MUD. To this day, I check it out every Christmas because the holiday events were a special moment of my childhood.
I learned Perl scripting client for one MUD back in 2000, and that led me to web development.
Just a month ago, I remembered one MUD I've been trying out since 2003. And found that it is still online, and my password still works. Very weird feeling to log in to something 22 years later. It was pretty advanced at the time, with 256 color support, IPv6, advanced encoding support, etc. https://cryosphere.org/
I had a crappy computer with crappy internet back in the day. I didn't play Aardwolf, but I played another mud called Alter Aeon. I still have fond memory of it and check back in every few years.
How long before we see nostalgic posts about WoW and Everquest?
This looks like an app? Are there web-based MUDs (clients)?
EDIT: Thanks, I see the Web Client link now (derp).
Check this page: https://www.aardwolf.com/play/index.htm
MUDs are what got me into serious programming (my first ~100k lines of C code), dropping from college (turned out great for me) and making friends for life. Owe so much to them.
You might like my project https://timbran.org/moor.html
I played Aardwolf briefly but I mostly stuck to a nightmare/LP MUD that is still around but essentially empty. I learned to code (which ended up being a gateway to C/C++), grief, and be compassionate to new players.
I remember trying to use Nightmare and MudOS as a base. It’s where I really cut my teeth with the in-game ed line editor. Good times.
ed was the hardest thing for 12 year old me to understand.
See also http://discworld.starturtle.net/
I spent many fun hours there! It blew my mind to discover a game world that was so deeply player-driven and offered so many possibilities - my main character became a professional author...
I earned my first money in-world by writing poetry. At first I hand-wrote it and sold it on the street to other players (probably because they had compassion on a poor first-level wizard who didn't know anything about the game). Later on I had a book of my poems printed and sold in the local bookshops, and went on to write for one of the player-run newspapers. Good fun :-)
I loved the collaborative stories that unfolded on the boards. There were literature majors, authors, and all sorts of creative people who contributed. We also experimented with DSLs so those people could help build the world.
MUDs were the fentanyl of university students :D
Still waiting on a new release of TinyFugue…
I've had a ton of fun playing Aardwolf!
I got back to briefly [1] playing Aardwolf this (2025) summer. It's still VERY good!
[1] ~50 lvls on my paladin char.
Ah, MUD, so many memories. In university I’ve spend unhealthy amount of time on the local MUD server.
check out Forsaken Lands: https://wiki.theforsakenlands.com/
What happens if I start the game and say WOLFENSTEIN?
Lasher is here too.
From somewhere in my memory, I'm vaguely remembering the names "Lasher, Fury, and Khan". (I might have the spelling wrong.)
Was this an Aardwolf thing, or am I thinking of something else?
I don't know or don't remember. The last time I played was more than 20 years :)
I remember Fufa though.
For those who are not / were not aardwolf players, lasher is the coder, owner, and main imm for aardwolf.
precisely enthralled LLM would help with such MUDs a lot, providing it wouldn't go off the script...
Epic training for reading output tokens.
Anyone from Solace MUD here?
I just spent 10 minutes being told that the name I chose was not usable. Am I being pranked, is this the whole game?
Depends on the name. Imagine people would use insult-names in a roleplay MUD.
10 minutes sounds excessive though. Was the prompt not informing you that the name xyz can not be used and you'd have to pick another one? It also depends on the MUD of course - how many names did you try?
I never had a problem picking a proper name for one of my characters, but indeed I hated it when MUDs would want to make me wait for name-approval manually. Most MUDs allowed instant-creation and resume gameplay on the spot though. Weird that the name-choice barrier took you 10 minutes. What was the MUD?
I’m reminded of the time, probably 20 years ago, when some viral game was making the rounds. It was designed such that the controls, even the goals, weren’t obvious, but as it turned out, it didn’t respond to my Mac’s trackpad because I used tap to click and the game didn’t recognize my taps.
So, as far as I could tell, the game was utterly pointless. The developer replied to me apologetically on Twitter but I never went back to give it another shot.
Chiming in with another "bad input ruins a game" story: Alpha Protocol (2010), PC port.
There was a "hacking" minigame, and it was mandatory to solve it as part of the introductory tutorial levels. I think the original console version used left+right thumbsticks, and on PC that meant a half-keyboard half-mouse setup. There were some serious sensitivity/dead-zone issues, but that wasn't the main blocker.
IIRC the problem was that if you had remapped any keys in the options (as I had before starting) the new choices didn't apply during the minigame... except they still influenced the on-screen instructions! So I was stuck constantly failing this minigame because it was waiting for me to press some arbitrary (stock) key to progress, while telling me I needed to press a different (remapped) key that kept having no effect.
Anywho, I think I realized it some other week/month after wiping/reinstalling in frustration. Thereafter I prioritized tools/upgrades that let me skip the badly ported minigame.
what was the name? and how did you possibly spend ten minutes on it
I tried many names, including just gibberish keyboard smashing, there is no way they were all already taken.
My friends and I all cut our teeth on https://last-outpost.com 30 years ago now. It’s crazy how reliable such an old game is. I was an absolute slacker in school, but had an inexplicably high reading level which I attribute to “LO” and Magic: the Gathering. My 7-year old son really got a kick out of playing it, and it’s a great way to teach reading comprehension to young ones.