FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Nathan F.Yospe wrote:

> Matt Mihaly <the_logos at www.achaea.com> said:
 
>> I'll hire you if you don't mind being deferring payment for a few
>> years.
 
> Cute.  But... honestly, how *do* you start a commercial venture when
> you haven't got the capitol?  The only defered paycheck programmers
> left are the ones worth what they are being payed, after the dot-com
> shakedown, I suspect.  I certainly wouldn't work for stock unless I
> was the principal of the company... or one of the principals, and
> *really* trusted all the others.  And the business plan.  And the
> product space.  And...

Well, that depends on what scale you're after. If you want to start a
big graphical MUD, one starts by raising a few million dollars (which
requires business plan, probably a track record of some sort, etc).

If you want to start a commercial venture on the scale of Achaea, it's
a lot easier, particularly as the fact that you're on this list almost
assuredly means you know a lot more than I did when I started. I had
no systematic idea of what I was doing. I just happened to be living
with the main creator of the text MUD Avalon and decided I wanted to
do a commercial MUD too. Didn't know how to program, never wrote up
anything that even resembled a central design document. I bought the
language/network engine that Avalon used (a total piece of crap, as
I'm sure even they would admit. Used a primitive interpreted language
that didn't even give you local variables or an 'or' statement. We
don't use it anymore) and taught myself to program. God I sucked
too. Reading a book or taking a class on programming would have been
ideal, as it would have saved us the time of going back later and
re-coding everything I originally wrote.

>From there, I just got people to help me by giving them equity. As
soon as was feasible, I put Achaea on the net (it wasn't even into
Alpha stage, but it's less boring working on a product that has people
playing it). Once I had some players, I was able to recruit some
volunteer help and we went from there. I also managed to get about 40k
investment from various players to help me live while Achaea was
developed to the level that we could reasonably charge money for it.

I'd say if you want to make a smaller commercial product, start
working on it in your spare time and go from there. I firmly believe
that most text MUDs are so awful and mainly so similar to each other,
that there is plenty of opportunity for commercial text products that
don't aim too high.

--matt

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