Before World of Warcraft (certainly the most successful MMORPG ever), there was the MUD: Multi-User Dungeon.

I remember discovering MUD’s back in undergrad. Had a great time playing them, met some good people, and frankly if not for them I wouldn’t be a computer programmer today. The natural progression was starting as a player, but then wanting to get into the creation side of MUD’s. Certainly you can create worlds without knowing how to code, but I wanted to run a MUD and shape the world… so I had to learn how to program. I picked myself up a book on the C programming language, bought a development environment (THINK C), and got to work. I also recall that at my undergrad institution, the mainframe everyone used for email and such was a VAX-VMS system… no way to run a MUD there. But over in the CS department? They had 486’s running some flavor of Unix (SCO, I think), and I managed to finagle myself an account even though I wasn’t a CS student. 🙂 Good times.

Of course, pure MUD’s were text-based. We dreamed about making graphical MUDs, even thinking of ways to combat the limits of the age. For instance, if all you had was a 2400 baud modem, you can’t be pushing massive amounts of graphics over that slow connection (you kids today think a web page taking 3 seconds to load is slow? back in my day….). Besides, we lacked the time and resources to develop such things, but it was always on my mind.

I guess that’s why modern MMORPG’s don’t appeal to me — been there, done that, got over the addiction.

However, Daughter keeps seeing commercials for various MMORPG’s and they’ve perked her interest. Heck, with LEGO Universe about to come out, Oldest is curious too. However, they all hit the same snag: monthly subscription fees, and Dad isn’t going to pay for it. If they want to spend their own money on that they can, but so far they’re unwilling. 🙂

Nevertheless, Daughter keeps inquiring and it hit me: why not try a MUD? Sure it’s low-tech, but it’s no different from reading a book vs. seeing the 3-D IMAX movie adaptation (i.e. it’s text, you get to use your imagination instead of perceiving someone else’s).

Of course, the geek in me won’t let it be just any MUD! No… my dreams of running my own MUD may have faded but they’ve never left me. I went searching for codebases and found tbaMUD which seems to be a good foundation (I won’t bore you with the lineage). Back in the day, I did things to get MUD servers running on Classic Macs, but it never really worked like people wanted. With Mac OS X being Unix-based and most MUD codebases being biased towards Unix well.. download and see! So I obtained the tbaMUD source, fiddled with it a bit to get it working in Xcode, and ta da… I’ve got a MUD server running here at home. 🙂  It’s not connected to the world at-large but hey… I got to get my geek on, and we’ll see what Daughter thinks of it.

So with that… she should be awake soon. We’ll start up a telnet session later this morning and see what she thinks.