The Second Age: 1985–1989

The first such virtual worlds to appear were Neil Newell’s Shades, Ben Laurie’s Gods, and AMP ¹. They were followed shortly by Pip Cordrey, et al’s very active MirrorWorld. As these games were all derived from MUD, they became collectively referred to as “MUDs” or, occasionally, “MUGs” (Multi-User Games). The original MUD was dubbed MUD1 (even though it was in its third version) to disambiguate it from the class of MUDs. This marked the beginning of the second age of virtual worlds.

The possibility of making money from these games arose, so MUD1 went live both on the dominant U.S. online service of the time, CompuServe, and a UK look-alike, CompuNet. A programmer at CompuNet, Alan Lenton, was moved to write his own virtual world, Federation II, which has the distinction of being the first MUD to have a non-Fantasy setting (it was Science Fiction).

MUD1, Federation II, Shades (on the Prestel Micronet teletext system), and Gods (in a German translation) went on to achieve commercial success. Scores of other MUDs were created in the UK, written mainly by players of the Big Four. It was a time of great experimentation in both game world and game engine design, with much original work coming from the MirrorWorld group on their IOWA (Input/Output World of Adventure) system ².

Around this time, the decision was made to rewrite MUD1 from scratch as MUD2 (although it was actually version IV). The original architecture and its DEC-10 platform had proved too limiting, and MUDDL (which owed much to the database definition scheme employed by ADVENT) was not sufficiently powerful to handle advanced concepts. A new language, MUDDLE (Multi-User Dungeon Definition LanguagE), was developed from first principles specifically for writing MUDs. It turned out to be expressive enough to stand the test of time, and this was therefore the last occasion on which the game MUD was to be rewritten in its entirety.

Virtually all the key issues of virtual world design were identified in the first and second ages. By 1987, for example, all the protocols and in-game tools for dealing with player problems were in place and reasonably well codified, thanks to the pioneering efforts of people like Mark Longley (MUD1), Michael Lawrie (MIST), and Pip Cordrey (MirrorWorld). Sadly, however, this kind of knowledge was not passed on in its entirety. Developers of descendant games usually knew what they ought to have, but not necessarily why they ought to have it, with the result that after several generations a number of important concepts had been forgotten.

Games that were launched 10 years later, therefore, had to rediscover some of the fundamentals the hard way.

Most of the MUDs that were written in the second age were programmed by enthusiasts at home ³. At this time (but not for much longer), single-player text adventures were a very important part of the computer game market, so there were plenty of people who understood the principles. Because few academic institutions in the UK were as liberal with their computer resources as Essex University, those MUDs that were written at such places tended to achieve only local success.

The exception was AberMUD, so called because it was written at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Its programmer, Alan Cox, wrote it in B (another fore-runner of C) for a Honeywell L66 mainframe under GCOS3/TSS in 1987. A year later, it was ported to C. This was a turning point in virtual world history. The game wasn’t particularly advanced either technologically or in terms of content (it was very combat-oriented), but it was great fun. More importantly, in C it was positioned to make a huge advance: It could run under Unix.