[...] Tags: TorilMUD trackback This past Monday was the 30th birthday of the original MUD, rightly noted and celebrated on a number of [...]

I played religiously throughout college and, thinking back, it’s somewhat amazing to me that I remember so many of the details. For example, the Bane Sidhe’s nickname was Barney. If you really didn’t like another player you could lure them into Death Traps which not only killed them but made all their gear go poof, etc. Swapping in and out of spirit gear to be able to root or make poultices. Chant vina agni mrti ex.

After college, my available time diminished, some of the folks I’d played with either semi-retired or left the game entirely, and I slowly lost interest. But I remember my time there fondly.

Happy Birthday, MUD.

[...] Happy Birthday, MUD [...]

Ah MUDs. Happy 30th birthday.

During my times of MUDDING I’ve killed thousands of enemies, smack-talked hundreds of players, wrote thousands of lines of code, hosted many versions of codebases, attended many MUD conventions, and made many many friends. This text based drug was the hobby they kept me off the streets and out of trouble from the law. It was one of the best things in my life that kept me focused on my future and I give praise for that.

So here is my 12 years to a genre truly ahead of it’s time. Happy Birthday!

It may well do, but today’s MMOs are descended directly from MUD, not from any of the PLATO games. PLATO was way ahead of its time, but its strength – the fact that everyone had a standard, graphical terminal – was also its weakness: no-one could play those games unless they had the standard graphical terminal. MUDs were easier to write, more portable, more accessible, and there were thousands of people who worked on them. Thus, when the time game for graphical worlds to appear, most of the people hired to work on them had a MUD background, not a PLATO background. PLATO may well have influenced the graphics, but it didn’t influence the “virtual worldliness” of them.

This is the problem with timelines: there’s a temptation to believe that just because something appeared first, it must be that what followed was influenced by it. In the case of today’s MMOs, the ultimate progenitor was MUD, not any of the more graphically advanced games that predated it on PLATO.

The example I usually give here is that of the game golf, which at various times was invented in China, Greece, Egypt, England, Holland, Ireland and probably dozens of other places. Hitting a ball into a hole with a stick is a pretty obvious idea, though, so it’s not surprising that it was invented many times over. Today’s game of golf, however, does not descend from the game played in China, Greece, Egypt, England, Holland or Ireland: it descends from the version played in Scotland. China can point to concrete evidence that golf was played there before it was played in Scotland, but if you track back from the US Masters you’ll end up in Scotland, not China.

Likewise, track back from World of Warcraft and you reach MUD, not PLATO. That’s where the audit trail ends. Besides, from what I know of the PLATO RPGs (which admitedly isn’t a lot), it would seem you’d have to stretch your definition of what a virtual world is quite a bit if you want to include PLATO’s pre-1979 games among them.

Richard

PLATO ended up sort of being like the Neanderthal case — a viable strand that didn’t turn out to be dominant.

Did you know that Neandertals and early humans lived at the same time? And that they never met?

I apologize in advance for my rudeness, but when I remember playing 3D multiplayer real-time flight simulators, MMRTS games like Empire (4 team Star Trek with dozens of players on a team) and yes, real multi-user dungeons WITH FULL GRAPHICS on PLATO in 1975-1976, the 30th anniversary of MUDs seems to pale in comparison – or perhaps muddy the waters – as a step backwards.

Ah, but the most notable child of PLATO is probably Wizardry, which didn’t circle back into influencing online worlds for quite some time. Or maybe NetTrek.

And MUDs brought much to the table that was more important, in the long run, than graphics:

- “massively multiplayer” from the get-go. PLATO games tended to be what we would call just “multiplayer” today, despite the exceptions.

- an emphasis on what today would be called “user generated content” — players graduating to wizardhood, etc. The ripple effects of this are still being felt today and are arguably only beginning to really pay off in the wider web today. PLATO certainly had plenty of coders making stuff, but it wasn’t the same.

PLATO was incredibly important — hence all those PLATO things in my timeline — but for better or worse, MUDs have proven to be more influential on how virtual worlds have developed. PLATO ended up sort of being like the Neanderthal case — a viable strand that didn’t turn out to be dominant.

But of course, folks like Gordon Walton, Andy Zaffron, and Dr Cat may disagree, since PLATO was part of the formative stuff that led to them into online gaming.