Massively Multiplayer Online Games Turn 30 - Kinda
According to Richard Bartle in a somewhat grumpy post, today is the 30th birthday of MUD - the original Multi User Dungeon.

Yes, do the math... that's October 20th, 1978. I think I might have played Handball and Tennis on a Coleco Telstar home gaming system. I'd never heard of Dungeons & Dragons, and people were still buzzing about the hit movie of the previous year, Star Wars. Computers, in my mind, were huge devices with reel-to-reel tapes in air-conditioned rooms. Many of the esteemed readers of this blog weren't even alive then. And yet people were, on this day thirty years ago, playing the early prototype that would one day be World of Warcraft.

Mind-blowing, ain't it?

Well, at least it is to me.

Of course, as Bartle points out, MMOs have a pretty wide family tree, so it's hard to put a stake in the ground and say, "This is where it all started." after all, MUD apparently derived from Dungeon, the progenitor of Zork.

My own first experience was on a for-pay service that apparently ran off an IBM XT with sixteen modem ports, called (initially) Gambit Kri. It was a MUD-inspired game that charged by the minute. My low-charisma character, DangerMouse, was apparently so ugly that he immediately inspired attacks by commoners and laborers wherever he went in town.

Later, I played on several other MUDs and MUSHes, and even ran my own (briefly) with some friends, but that's as close as I got to the original.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:17 PM (Permalink)