[MUD-Dev] Re: Influential muds

[Jay Carlson]

Dr. Cat wrote:

> Amongst the text-only muds that only us MUD developers would notice the
> innovations in, like I said before, I would list two.  LambdaMOO, for
> getting far more mainstream press coverage than any other MUD.  And also
> for getting far more non-programmers to make programs than ever before,
> back when Object Oriented was such a hyped thing that anything containing
> it was automatically good.  And you could tell a non-programmer "It's
> easy now, all you have to do is inherit everything from some other object
> and change one thing, and voila, you made something new!"  Which led to
> their other innovation, whereby novice builders didn't realize they were
> taking something that inherited 37 levels deep already, adding three
> feeps, and passing it along to the next guy who wouldn't realize it was
> inheriting stuff 38 levels deep...  Leading to the innovation of "more
> lag than you could shake a stick at".
>
> Well I kid them, but the media coverage and the big well-known corporate
> sponsor and having a lot of people from outside the normal mudding and
> gaming communities made it significant and influential.

It was very nice of PARC to dedicate a 256M 4proc sparc 1000 for LambdaMOO
those many years ago.  Of course, it's *still* running on that ancient
machine....

The media coverage, in particular the first WiReD article, is widely viewed
by LambdaMOO dinos as the demarcation point between "the good old days" and
"eternal september".  Does anyone from other muds have any good stories
along the lines of "media coverage swamped us  with newbies but some were
cool" or "we got listed on the What's Cool page and it changed our life"?

Jay



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