What is the ancestor of online games and still popular game 'MUD'?



Online game that can play and cooperative play of the game with a stranger while at home, which has become the norm of existence by the evolution of the spread and the game machines and technology of the Internet, online game itself is 'in the 1970s

multi It has already appeared in the form of ' User Dungeon (MUD)'. Fred Williamson, a writer who writes horror novels and fantasy novels, explains such MUD.

Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? And How to Play | by Fred Williamson | Medium
https://medium.com/@williamson.f93/multi-user-dungeons-muds-what-are-they-and-how-to-play-af3ec0f29f4a


MUD is a text-based game that connects and plays through a Telnet client. In the fantasy-based world view, it is the same as the table talk RPG in that it advances the scenario by impersonating the character created by the user. Unlike a typical RPG, the computer only manages the rules, and all characters and scenarios must be prepared by the player.

The basis of MUD was ' Colossal Cave Adventure ', which was born in 1976, and was developed by William Krauser , who was also involved in the development of ARPANET , the pioneer of the Internet. Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure where you use simple text commands to determine your character's behavior and explore caves.



Starting with Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure that can be played on a computer is born. In particular, many text adventures were created based

on the computer assisted instruction system 'PLATO ' built at the University of Illinois in 1960. In particular, Zork, created by a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the summer of 1977, became a popular dungeon exploration text adventure strongly influenced by the Colossal Cave Adventure.

Then, in 1978, Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, developed a multiplayer text adventure that runs in assembly language called MACRO-10. Since Trubshaw was a big fan of Zork, he set the content to dungeon exploration and named this text adventure 'Multi-User Dungeon (commonly known as MUD1)'. This MUD1 is called the first MUD.



MUD1 was played on the University of Essex network, but when the University of Essex network connected to the ARPANET in 1980, it became the first

MORPG in the world to play over the Internet. And a lot of systems that imitated MUD1 were released.

Among them, 'AberMUD ' is a base system that was strongly influenced by MUD1 and was developed as open source in 1987. With the popularity of this AberMUD, the genre 'MUD' was established, and many players began to enjoy online play in real time. One of the members who developed AberMUD is Alan Cox, who was a student at the University of Wales at the time and later participated in the Linux kernel development project.

MUD is considered to be a type of 'MORPG', but unlike modern MORPG, it is text-based, so role-playing is emphasized. MUD players are expected to always act as characters except for certain communication channels, and some games require textual explanations of the character's clothing and even the residence.

If you lose the battle, the character will die. In order to play the game again, you have to create a new character from the beginning like a tabletop RPG such as 'Dungeons & Dragons'.


by

Marco Hazard

These MUDs are still very popular in some areas. Williamson argues why MUD continues to be popular: 'It's the community that keeps MUD popular.'

No matter how systematic your MUD is, you will have time to communicate with other players via text chat. Most of the scenarios and rules allow you to clear the dungeon without cooperating with other players, and even in a player-versus-player game, you need to communicate with your opponents and allies. 'The relationships formed while exploring the fictional world of MUD are often permanent,' Williamson argued.



Also, unlike games that require the latest high-spec PCs, MUD can be played on low-spec PCs without any problems, and most of them can be played for free. In addition, Williamson speculates that the high accessibility that even visually impaired players can play with screen readers and voice tools has led to new users.

in Game, Posted by log1i_yk