The First Age: 1978–1985

Virtual worlds are often called MUDs because MUD was the name of the first one to prosper. Although earlier games had been written that might today be described as virtual worlds, they were seeds that fell on stony ground. MUD, by contrast, grew to produce seeds of its own.

MUD was programmed in MACRO-10 assembler on a DecSystem-10 mainframe at Essex University, England, in the fall of 1978. Its author was a talented Computer Science undergraduate, Roy Trubshaw. Version I was a simple test program to establish the basic principles by which a shared world could be maintained. When it worked, Roy immediately started on version II, a text-based virtual world that would be instantly recognizable as such even today. It was also written in MACRO-10, a decision that led to its becoming increasingly unwieldy as more and more features were added. Because of this, in the fall of 1979 Roy made the decision to begin work on version III of the game. He split it in two: The game engine was written in BCPL (the fore-runner of C); the game world was written in a language of his own devising, MUDDL (Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language). The idea was that multiple worlds could be constructed in MUDDL but would run on the same, unmodified engine (which was effectively an interpreter).

Roy had a basic working program by Easter 1980, but it only amounted to a fraction of what he envisaged. This being the final year of his degree, he realized that he did not have time to complete the project. Someone else would have to do it.

From the beginning, Roy had been open to suggestions from his friends as to how MUD could be extended and improved. Most of these ideas came from fellow undergraduates Richard Bartle (that’s me) and Nigel Roberts. Unlike Nigel, I was younger than Roy and did not have to leave the university for another year (in fact, I was to stay until 1989; first as a postgraduate and then as a lecturer). Luckily, I was also a first-class programmer and had a strong background in gaming. Roy therefore passed MUD on to me, and I subsequently wrote the remainder of the engine and nearly all the world to produce what became the paradigm for the entire genre. That’s enough blowing my own trumpet, you’ll be relieved to know.

Roy had two motivations to write MUD. First, he had enjoyed single-player adventure games (Crowther and Woods’ ADVENT; Anderson, Blank, Daniels, and Lebling’s ZORK; Laird’s HAUNT) and liked the idea of creating a multiplayer game along those lines. Secondly, he had a strong academic interest in writing programming language parsers and interpreters. The two came together when he discovered a means of sharing write-enabled areas of memory on the DEC-10 mainframe and mused on its potential uses.

The “D” in MUD stands for “Dungeon.” Contrary to what many people assume, this has nothing to do with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and does not mean that the game world had a dungeon setting ¹. Instead, it is due to the fact that the version of ZORK Roy played was a Fortran port called DUNGEN ². Roy wanted something that was like a multi-user DUNGE (o) N, and the acronym MUD immediately presented itself.

Essex University is a mere 45 minutes by road from the main (what was then the Post Office, but is now) British Telecom research facility, located at Martlesham Heath near Ipswich. This caused the university to be selected to pilot a new, experimental packet-switching service called EPSS. Among other things, EPSS allowed contact to and from the ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) net in the United States. Roy could therefore tell people in the U.S. about MUD, and some of them came to try it out ³. The ARPA net eventually evolved to become what is known today as the Internet.

Nevertheless, MUD remained a mainly Essex University phenomenon in its formative years, existing primarily because of the largesse of the Computer Services team and their manager, Charles Bowman. In the teeth of complaints about wasted resources, members of the university’s Computer Society were allowed to spend off-peak time doing anything non-academic they liked. Many of them chose to play MUD.

Some, however, were inspired to write their own games in MUDDL for use with the MUD engine. There were a number of these, of which the pre-eminent were ROCK (based on TV’s Fraggle Rock Muppet show), MIST (original and anarchic), BLUD (original and bloody), and UNI (the Computer Science Department as a sword-and-sorcery virtual world).

Besides its EPSS connections, Essex University also had a number of modems for dial-up use. News of MUD reached the UK’s small community of BBS (bulletin board system) users, and they obtained permission to play the game by direct dial—just as long as they did so at times when any sane person would have been in bed for two hours. This they did, and demand grew so much that that they clubbed together and bought the university some extra modems so it could cope!

Network uptake increased, and eventually all UK universities were connected to a system called JANet (Joint Academic Network). EPSS ceased to be experimental and became PSS, which enabled people with access to either company PSS accounts or substantial amounts of money to connect to the university’s computer systems in yet greater numbers. In 1984–85, there were articles on MUD in practically all the specialist computer games magazines in the UK. The floodgates opened.

The MUD engine had its limits. It could hold a maximum of 36 players at once ⁴, and if more wanted to play, a second game would have to be cranked up to supersede the first. Furthermore, it only ran on a DEC-10, and although copies were sent to other institutions in the UK, Sweden, and Norway, only two of these allowed outsiders access (Dundee Technical College and Oslo University).

While Roy was still working on version II of MUD, another student at Essex University, Stephen Murrell, had written from scratch his own virtual world using a different means of handling inter-player communication (that of assigning devices). His game, PIGG, was also written in MACRO-10 and eventually ran into the same maintainability problems as MUD. Nevertheless, the precedent was set. A number of external players of MUD became inspired, or frustrated enough by it, to set about writing their own games.