13 Facts About MUD

MUD is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded.

MUD named the game MUD, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.

Original MUD game was closed down in late 1987, reportedly under pressure from CompuServe, to whom Richard Bartle had licensed the game.

The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD called Aradath and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was ported to GEnie.

TinyMUD, written in C and released in late 1989, spawned a number of descendants, including TinyMUCK and TinyMUSH.

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DikuMUD inspired numerous derivative codebases, including CircleMUD, Merc, ROM, SMAUG, and GodWars.

DikuMUD had a key influence on the early evolution of the MMORPG genre, with EverQuest displaying such Diku-like gameplay that Verant developers were made to issue a sworn statement that no actual DikuMUD code was incorporated.

Typical MUD will describe to the player the room or area they are standing in, listing the objects, players and non-player characters in the area, as well as all of the exits.

Less-known MUD variant is the talker, a variety of online chat environment typically based on server software like ew-too or NUTS.

The MUD medium lends itself naturally to constructionist learning pedagogical approaches.

Graphical MUD is a MUD that uses computer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors.

However, with the increase in computing power and Internet connectivity during the late 1990s, and the shift of online gaming to the mass market, the term "graphical MUD" fell out of favor, being replaced by MMORPG, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, a term coined by Richard Garriott in 1997.

MUD history has been preserved primarily through community sites and blogs and not through mainstream sources with journalistic repute.