# Roy Trubshaw - Maker: Programmer - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roy-trubshaw/ > The University of Essex student who, in the autumn of 1978, wrote the first multi-user dungeon on a DEC-10, naming it MUD in tribute to the Dungeon version of Zork and opening the road to every online world. **Why it matters:** Trubshaw's MUD was the first multiplayer virtual world of its kind; with Richard Bartle he created the game that named the MUD genre and led directly to the MMORPG. ## Quick answers **Who is Roy Trubshaw?** The University of Essex student who, in the autumn of 1978, wrote the first multi-user dungeon on a DEC-10, naming it MUD in tribute to the Dungeon version of Zork and opening the road to every online world. **What is Roy Trubshaw known for?** Roy Trubshaw is best known for MUD1. **Why does Roy Trubshaw matter to fantasy and games?** Trubshaw's MUD was the first multiplayer virtual world of its kind; with Richard Bartle he created the game that named the MUD genre and led directly to the MMORPG. ## Life Roy Trubshaw was an undergraduate at the University of Essex, in Colchester, England, in the late 1970s. The university ran a DEC PDP-10 (DECsystem-10), and like many students on such machines Trubshaw had played the text adventures then circulating among mainframe sites: [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/colossal-cave-adventure/) and especially *Dungeon*, the version of MIT's [Zork](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/zork/) that had spread across the ARPANET. Unlike most players, he wondered what would happen if several people could explore the same world at once. Details of his life outside MUD are sparsely documented, and his birth date is not reliably recorded, so this entry keeps to the history he helped make. ## Work In the autumn of 1978 Trubshaw wrote the first version of what became [MUD](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/) in MACRO-10, the DEC-10's assembly language. According to his collaborator [Richard Bartle](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-bartle/), who has written the most detailed history, Trubshaw had two goals: to make a multi-player adventure game, and to write an interpreter for a database definition language, so that the world could be described separately from the engine that ran it. His first version was simply a set of interconnected locations where players could move and chat. He immediately rewrote it as a second, much more sophisticated MACRO-10 version, and that one was definitely called MUD: *Multi-User Dungeon*, a tribute to *Dungeon*. Bartle, a fellow Essex student, soon joined in, contributing much of the world's content: its locations, puzzles and characters. As the program grew, the DEC-10's limits pressed hard; Essex allowed a maximum of 50K of memory, and assembly code was becoming unmanageable. So from late 1979 to around Easter 1980 Trubshaw rewrote everything in BCPL, the language that preceded C. This third version, with its world defined in the Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language (MUDDL), is the one many people later assumed was the original. In spring 1980 the first external players logged in, via the experimental EPSS packet-switching link that connected Essex to the ARPANET, making MUD one of the first multiplayer games reachable across international networks. That year Trubshaw left Essex, handing the game to Bartle, who by his own estimate inherited about 25 percent of what became the final program and wrote most of the rest, including the points system and the goal of reaching the rank of Wizard, which grew out of what had been Trubshaw's debug mode. Bartle is careful about credit: the formula he and Trubshaw expect to see is that MUD "was created and written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle." ## Legacy MUD was the seed of the [MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mud/) genre. Essex opened the machine to outside callers overnight in the early 1980s, players around the world found their way in, and MUD was licensed to the UK network CompuNet and later to CompuServe, which ran it as *British Legends* until 1999. Trubshaw and Bartle, with Simon Dally, went on to form Multi-User Entertainment Limited to develop the successor, *MUD2*. Players inspired by MUD went on to write their own, and the text worlds they built on university networks, and the designers they trained, fed directly into graphical online worlds such as [Ultima Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-online/) and [EverQuest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/everquest/) and so into the [MMORPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mmorpg/). In 2014 a C++ reimplementation of MUD1 was deposited in the Stanford University archives, and in 2020 the full PDP-10 source code was released publicly with the authors' permission. Trubshaw's insight, that an adventure game could be a shared place rather than a solitary puzzle, is the idea on which every online world since has been built. ## Facts - He began MUD in autumn 1978 in MACRO-10 assembly language on the University of Essex's DEC-10. - Its name honored *Dungeon*, the mainframe version of Zork that Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed. - His aims were twofold: a multi-player adventure game, and an interpreter for a database definition language (later MUDDL). - He rewrote MUD in BCPL between late 1979 and about Easter 1980 to fit Essex's 50K memory limit. - By Bartle's estimate, about a quarter of the final MUD1 program came from Trubshaw before he left Essex. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia: MUD1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1) - [Richard Bartle: Early MUD History](https://mud.co.uk/richard/mudhist.htm) - [MUD1 source code (GitHub)](https://github.com/PDP-10/MUD1) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.