[MUD-Dev] Where were we then?

[Richard A. Bartle]

I promised to get in touch with Roy Trubshaw and nail this "how did
the D in MUD come to be there?" question once and for all.  I've now
done so, and having exchanged a few emails and jogged each other's
memories, here's the Authorised Version:


The D came first. 

As Roy says, "We wanted to call it something and DUNGEN was the best
adventure game that we had played up until then. (I was never really
very keen on Haunt!)". The D has always stood for "Dungeon" and the
fact that the acronym was also a word was a secondary (though not
unimportant) consideration. He didn't start with an acronym and work
backwards; he wanted to write something that was like a multi-user
DUNGEoN.

It wasn't the case that Roy thought Adventure games would be called
"Dungeons", because even then they were being referred to in the
context of ADVENTure. He might have named it after that program if it
had been better than DUNGEoN, but it wasn't.

The "MUDD" title in the listing I have from 1979 was because someone
else (Keith Rautenbach, an undergraduate in the year above Roy) went
through commenting the code and put in two Ds, probably because he
thought it was a reference to Dungeons & Dragons. It never was, and
the file that refers to "MUDD" is itself called MUD.MAC (.MAC for the
MACRO-10 assembly language).

My recollection of a gathering in Roy's flat where we discussed the
name was false. We did have such a meeting, but we were talking about
the map for the BCPL version of the game. Roy wasn't staying on campus
in his second year, and another person at the meeting (Brian Mallett)
didn't come to Essex University until Roy was in his 3rd year and I
was in my second.

Roy also mentioned that he'd recently written something on this
subject to Jerry Pournelle, who in a small part of a longer report on
2001's AAAS meeting (http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20010228S0009) had
put "multi-user 'dungeons'" as an expansion of MUDs. Here's what Roy
wrote to him:

  "A totally minor quibble in a very interesting and succinct report
  on the AAAS meeting: MUD does stand for Multi-User Dungeon. There is
  no need to stick quotes around Dungeon.

I might have named it MUA after ADVENT(ure) [a text adventure popular
on DEC-10s around the world] but a game called Dungeon appeared and
saved me from trying to find a way to say MUA without sounding
silly. There was also some slight influence from TSR's Dungeons and
Dragons."

Dr Pournelle replied:

  "Well, clearly you have a right to say it, but I used the quote
  marks because the guys at the conference clearly implied them after
  I asked. For some odd reason science people looking for grants
  aren't interested in being associated with dungeons with or without
  quote marks!"

Some things never change (sigh).

Richard
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