[MUD-Dev] MUD timeline

[Jon Leonard]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2000 at 07:19:54PM -0700, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA wrote:
[snip]
> In 1988, Rich Skrenta at Northwestern University released the game
> "Monster". It's a multiplayer adventure-type game written in Pascal.
> I have a paper listing. The comment at the top of the listing:
> 
>     This is Monster, a multiuser adventure game system
>     where the players create the universe.
> 
> I believe that means that it had online creation. A vague memory says that
> it was for VAX VMS, and did its interprocess communication through files.

I played and coded some changes to Monster back when I was in school.  It did
indeed have online creation, and did IPC through files.

The contrast to LPMud (which I started playing later that year) was striking:

LPMud used a single game process, untrusted clients, nonpersistent world,
networked communication, flexible (but privileged) building, while Monster
used the reverse of all these decisions.

I didn't miss Monster much, mostly because having a fixed format for data
in the world files really limited what you could do in it.  That, and
corrupted databases were no fun.

Jon Leonard



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