# MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) - Genre: Digital genre - Date: 1978, University of Essex - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mud/ > A text adventure that many people could inhabit at once: typed commands, prose rooms, strangers typing back. The MUD was the first online world and the direct ancestor of every MMORPG. **Why it matters:** MUDs invented the persistent shared virtual world and most of its social furniture, from guilds and player killing to admins and player-built content. A generation of MMORPG designers learned their trade in them. ## Quick answers **What is MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)?** A text adventure that many people could inhabit at once: typed commands, prose rooms, strangers typing back. The MUD was the first online world and the direct ancestor of every MMORPG. **What are the hallmarks of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)?** A shared, persistent world rendered in text and navigated with typed commands; Many players online at once, meeting, chatting, fighting and cooperating in real time; Rooms, exits and objects described in prose, inherited from the text adventure; Levels, experience and classes borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons; Mostly hobbyist and free to play, run by volunteer admins called wizards or immortals; Open codebases (AberMUD, LPMud, DikuMUD, TinyMUD) that spawned thousands of variants. **When did MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) emerge?** 1978, University of Essex. **Where does the name “MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)” come from?** Named by Roy Trubshaw in 1978 for his game MUD, short for Multi-User Dungeon. **What are the key works of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)?** MUD1, Zork, Avatar, EverQuest and RuneScape. ## What it is A MUD, or multi-user dungeon, is a real-time virtual world that many people share at once, usually rendered entirely in text. You type `north`, and the game prints a paragraph describing a torchlit hall; you type `kill goblin`, and the fight scrolls past line by line. What makes it a MUD rather than a solitary [text adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/) is everyone else. Another adventurer walks into the room and says hello. A rival steals the treasure you were stalking. The world keeps running when you log off, and the people in it remember you. Most classic MUDs are fantasy role-playing games in the image of [*Dungeons & Dragons*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/): players choose a [class](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/character-class/), kill monsters for [experience](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/experience-points/), gain levels and loot, and often band into a [The party](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/party/) or guild. But the form was always broader than hack-and-slash. Some MUDs are pure social spaces, some are elaborate collaborative fiction, and some were built for teaching or research. The shared thread is the architecture: a server holding one persistent world, and many players connected to it by plain terminals. ## Origins The genre begins in autumn 1978 at the University of Essex, where student [Roy Trubshaw](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roy-trubshaw/) started writing a multi-player adventure on the university's DECsystem-10. He called it *MUD*, for Multi-User Dungeon, in tribute to DUNGEN, the Fortran port of [*Zork*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/zork/) he had enjoyed. Fellow student [Richard Bartle](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-bartle/) soon joined him, building much of the world, and took over development when Trubshaw graduated in 1980. Players scored points by killing things and dropping treasure in a swamp until they reached the rank of Wizard, which made them immortal and gave them power over mortal players. Essex opened a guest account to outside callers in the small hours, and [*MUD*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/), later called MUD1, gathered players across Britain and beyond. It was not alone. On the [PLATO network](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/plato-system/) in Illinois, multiplayer dungeon crawls such as [*Avatar*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/avatar-plato/) let parties explore together with graphics, and in Minnesota Alan Klietz began a multi-user game at around the same time as Trubshaw, later sold commercially as *Scepter of Goth*. In 1985 Kesmai launched *Island of Kesmai* on CompuServe, a paid online dungeon drawn in roguelike ASCII. The home-computer world had its own cousins in [BBS door games](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/bbs-door-games/) such as [*Legend of the Red Dragon*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/legend-of-the-red-dragon/), though those were turn-rationed rather than live. ## Evolution What turned a few games into a genre was portable code. In 1987 Alan Cox, who had played Essex *MUD*, wrote AberMUD at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; once ported to C it spread across university Unix machines on the early internet. Three families followed. TinyMUD (1989), by James Aspnes, let players build the world themselves and leaned toward conversation, spawning the social MUSHes and MOOs. LPMud (1989), by Lars Pensjö, gave builders a full programming language. DikuMUD, written in 1990–91 by five students at the University of Copenhagen, hard-coded a D&D-like combat game and became the template for countless hack-and-slash worlds. Through the early 1990s MUDs were a campus obsession, run for free by volunteer administrators on borrowed servers. They pioneered almost everything later online games would inherit: [player killing](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/player-killer/) and the fierce arguments over it, guilds, player economies, [Grinding](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/grinding/) for levels, and the problem of governing strangers. In 1996 Bartle published his taxonomy of MUD players, achievers, explorers, socializers and killers, still the most cited model of why people play online games. The graphical successors were built by MUD veterans. [Raph Koster](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/raph-koster/) came from LegendMUD to design [*Ultima Online*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-online/); [Brad McQuaid](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/brad-mcquaid/), a DikuMUD devotee, co-designed [*EverQuest*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/everquest/), whose resemblance to Diku was so close that its developers swore no Diku code was used. [*RuneScape*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/runescape/) was first conceived as a text MUD before its creator added graphics. By the 2000s, the text MUD had become a niche beside its graphical children, but many hobby worlds kept running for decades. ## How to tell it apart **MUD vs [MMORPG](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mmorpg/).** The MMORPG is the MUD's graphical, commercial, mass-market heir; before that term existed, games like *EverQuest* were simply called "graphical MUDs." The differences are of kind as well as scale. A MUD is text; an MMORPG is rendered in 2D or 3D. A busy MUD might host dozens or a few hundred players; an MMORPG shards hundreds of thousands across servers. MUDs were overwhelmingly hobbyist, free and small-team, their admins often players who rose through the ranks; MMORPGs are corporate products sustained by subscriptions or microtransactions. **MUD vs [interactive fiction](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/).** Both parse typed commands and describe rooms in prose, and the MUD was born from *Zork* and [*Colossal Cave Adventure*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/colossal-cave-adventure/). But a text adventure is single-player, authored and finite, built around puzzles; a MUD is multiplayer, persistent and open-ended, built around other people. **MUD vs single-player [CRPG](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/computer-rpg/).** A CRPG pauses when you do and exists only for you. A MUD's world has other inhabitants whose choices change it, which is why its hardest design problems are social rather than mechanical. **MUD vs [Roguelikes](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/roguelike/).** Both often use ASCII and grew up on the same university machines, but a roguelike is a solitary, procedurally generated descent with [Permadeath](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/permadeath/); a MUD is a fixed, shared, hand-built world. ## Where to start - [*MUD1*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/) (1978): the original; its design, Wizard rank and all, is the root of the family tree. - [*Avatar*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/avatar-plato/) on PLATO (1979): the American, graphical, party-based counterpart, for context. - *Discworld MUD* (founded 1991, public from 1992): an LPMud set in [Terry Pratchett's Discworld](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/discworld/), a showcase of how literary a text world can be. - *Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands* (1997): a commercial text MUD of the late 1990s, proof that the form could sustain a business. - The Mud Connector directory: the long-running listing of active MUDs, the easiest way to find a world still open. - Richard Bartle, *Designing Virtual Worlds* (2003): the definitive account of MUD design from one of its inventors. ## Hallmarks - A shared, persistent world rendered in text and navigated with typed commands - Many players online at once, meeting, chatting, fighting and cooperating in real time - Rooms, exits and objects described in prose, inherited from the text adventure - Levels, experience and classes borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons - Mostly hobbyist and free to play, run by volunteer admins called wizards or immortals - Open codebases (AberMUD, LPMud, DikuMUD, TinyMUD) that spawned thousands of variants ## Facts - The 'D' in MUD honors DUNGEN, the Fortran port of [Zork](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/zork/) that [Roy Trubshaw](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roy-trubshaw/) had loved playing. - Outside players could reach Essex's [MUD](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/) only on weekends and in the small hours of weekdays, when the university's DECsystem-10 was otherwise idle. - Because students lost so much time to them, MUDs were jokingly said to stand for 'Multi Undergraduate Destroyer.' - TinyMUD (1989) reinterpreted the D as 'Domain' or 'Dimension' to distance social worlds from combat-heavy dungeons. - EverQuest's resemblance to DikuMUD was so strong that its developers issued a sworn statement that no DikuMUD code was used. - [Richard Bartle](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-bartle/)'s 1996 paper sorting MUD players into achievers, explorers, socializers and killers mapped them onto the four suits of a deck of cards. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon) - [Richard Bartle's MUD pages](https://mud.co.uk/richard/) - [The Mud Connector](https://www.mudconnect.com/) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.