Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

A MUDdy Beginning

After compiling the list for the previous post last night, I started thinking about my history in multiplayer online gaming before coming to MMORPGs.

Now I want to preface this by saying that as I kid I never had a chance to experience tabletop gaming like Dungeons and Dragons. It was not a matter of not being interested but more of a matter of growing up in northern Idaho and living in small towns (often with a population of less than a thousand people). I never had any exposure to people playing D&D or other table top games.

I think this might have been one of the main reasons I turned to online gaming. I have talked about before how much I thrive on player interaction and online gaming was a great outlet when living on a farm in a small town. My younger brother, on the other hand, just invented imaginary friends.

We got our first computer around 1996. I was nine years old. We did not get internet until around 1998. Around this time, one of my mother's friends got deep into computer gaming and started playing The Realm. At the time, I did not know anything about it and it seemed like it was "too adult" for me. My first online multiplayer game came in the form of Castle Infinity.

Castle Infinity was a game aimed at a younger generation. There were no stats or currency. You would simply explore, collect weapons like "missile toe" or "Gorgonzola Cheese" to defeat enemies, or hang out and chat with people. There were various instances you could do with people in order to collect new body parts for your character. Leaderboards were in the games for such things as "miles traveled" or "monsters killed". It was a very social experience and opened me up to online gaming.

I played there for a very long time and eventually one of my friends there introduced me to a game called "Aardwolf". It was my first time playing a MUD. Unfortunately, I hit MUDs while they were on the decline but I still got quite a few years of enjoyment from them. The DIKU style of the game only held my interest for so long before I searched for greener pastures (which is surprising seeing how the DIKU MMOs of today are what I mostly play).

Another friend of mine from Castle Infinity introduced me to a game called CoreMUD. The community here was a much smaller, tighter community, but the game blew my mind. Where Aardwolf was very much a stock DIKU game in most areas, Core was handcrafted from the ground up. Whereas Aardwolf often had 300+ players on at any given time, Core had 20-30 at most times. Set on a mining colony in the future, you could go labor in the mines, do unique epic storyline quests, work at the player-run stores, or just socialize and roleplay. Core was my first introduction to deep roleplaying. There would often be GM-run events with epic things such as alien invasions or simple things such as games of laser tag. This was just about the year 2000 and I was 13 at the time. No matter what games I went on to play, I would always return to Core.

Other MUDs I tried included Realms of the Dragon and Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands. Both games had very unique features that I really enjoyed.

Achaea had almost a turn based combat system. In most games, you would simply type "kill rat" to attack the rat. In Achaea, if I recall correctly, you actually had to enter the command "hit" for each swing. While it seems cumbersome it was actually quite fun. Achaea was also a game of political intrigue. When I played there were three main factions. These factions were not hard-coded but instead something players had split up into. Each faction had a capitol city as well as a player-run government. Players would be elected to positions and engage in war/peace talks with other factions as well as set the "social rules" for the society. The "imms" (immortals or GMs) of the game were all very active and played as the role of the world's gods. The world evolved and felt alive. When the GM playing the god Gaea quit the staff, it was roleplayed that the god died and from there the forest shriveled and attacked players for a few weeks.

Realms of the Dragon was not quite as complex as Achaea but was very fun as well. The game had many different classes and very rigid social structures. You would start out as just a member of your race and venture forth to join a guild (class). You had loyalties to your class and your race. I often played a Drow Shadowthief. It was amusing because Drow were not newbie-friendly. Drow were hostile to even those within their own race and thus newbies often would become discouraged by the hard lifestyle. Shadowthieves would hide in the shadows to backstab and steal from other players. You could steal anything you wanted from another player though certain things would almost always get you caught.

There were many other MUDs/MUSHes I played through the years though I can only remember a handful of them (as many I did not play for more than a few weeks or a month). There was a Lord of the Rings MUSH where I roleplayed a Rider of Rohan, a Final Fantasy 8 MUSH where I was a restaurant owner in Deling City, and countless more.

I occasionally stop by CoreMUD to see if anyone is active and rarely find more than one or two people online and they are mostly idling admin. For the past five or six years, Core has pretty much de-evolved from a game to a chatroom to an empty chatroom. This is sad because the community there used to be fantastic.

All this MUD nostalgia makes me long for years long past. Games today are too busy. I will take a good MUD over any of today's games any day of the week.