[MUD-Dev] Re: Introduction

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 10:45 PM 4/24/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
>Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 08:44:19 +0000 (PST8PDT)
>From: Jamie Norrish <jamie at sans.vuw.ac.nz>
>
>>Hi all,
>
>Hi Jamie.  :)
>
>>              I'm also a long-time devotee of Interactive Fiction
>>(games such as Zork and Colossal Cave) - I see MUDs as almost being a
>>cross between RPGs and IF, but of course a medium in its own right.
>
>Actually, the Interactive Fiction games that you mentioned were spinoffs
of the
>original MUD1 from Essex.  

Um, no.

Zork I, II and part of III were all originally one mainframe game called
"DUNGEON". And I did indeed play it, a number of years before the first
Zork was released.  It was sinle player and originally written in MUDL,
which was an experimental language and had nothing to do with MUDs.  The
version I played it on was a por to Fortarn running ona  dec system 10.  My
understanding was that they basicly built a MUDL environment in Fortran and
then ran it under that.

Im also fairly sure, though not absolutely positive, that DUNGEON came
orginally from MIT.  It was not multi-player at all. It was a single player
game.  Multipel peopel coudl use it at once becasue oif a wonderful thing
called "timesharing" which allowed many peopel to share a computer. However
it was no more multi-player then running Zork in 2 different windows on
your Win95 machine makes that multi-player.

The proper sequence of development was 
  Single Player Mainframe text parsed games (adventure, then dungeon)
  Microcomputer ports of those fames (adventure, and the zork series)
  Extension and further development of the cocnept on micros (later
infocomgames)
  A few experiments in multi-player on micros (IBM software put out one
       an employee had written, it split the screen in half and each user
       got half a keyboard to enter his commands in. needless to say it
       wasnt a full-parser, but a command driven game.)
  Internet and Online Service text muds (Im not sure which came first.)
  Graphical multiplayer online environments


Having never played MUD1 or very much of Zork I
>don't know how similar they are, but my understanding is that most of the
>original MUDS were only multiplayer in that multiple ppl could be logged
in at
>once, but each one played a seperate adventure...  kind of a Zork server or 
>something.  If anyone played MUD1 (or still plays? I hear Essex U. leaves a 
>copy of the code up for posterity's sake) please feel free to enlighten
those 
>of us who didn't/don't.
>
>-Greg
>
>