The Search for Freedom: All Parts of the World

 

My world map at the end of this session.

    

Guest post from AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

I start this session with mixed feelings. On the one hand, The Search for Freedom continues to serve up decent CRPG fare: a main quest, equipment upgrades, dungeons to explore, monsters to fight, just enough encounters and interactions to keep everything from becoming wholly monotonous, and the satisfaction that comes with leveling up. On the other hand, despite the deceptively small map above, I’m starting to be concerned that this game is too long. The manual promises: "22 dungeon levels, each 20 squares by 20 squares, and 2 outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares." At the start of this session (after a bit over 30 hours of gameplay), I’ve cleared less than a third of the dungeon levels and explored roughly a quarter of the outdoor areas. Another point also suggests I’m only roughly a third of the way: my characters are all still Level 4, out of a maximum level cap of 13. If the game eventually clocks in at over 100 hours, I suspect that it will have long since overstayed its welcome.
      
The friendly ship captain from Hythenforge drops us off in the Dry Desert in the southeast of Shylyllia Isle. We begin to explore and are quickly thrust into battle with three lesser demons (70 hit points) and 6 fire sprites (30 hit points). I’ve been putting off a detailed description of combat, so here goes.
      

Round one: Fight.

     

Although I’ve found no real use for ranged weapons, the first step is always to try to (F)ire at the enemies because this is the easiest way to scan across the full combat map and see where everything is located. Indoors, there can be walls that allow for some tactics (and that confuse the AI), but outdoors the only relevant terrain is water (impassable) or ground. Here, most enemies are to the south of us, so we’ll focus on them first. Few melee-only enemies seem especially challenging: magic users are much more dangerous (though not consistently, since they often cast useless spells). They’re even more trouble than in Gold Box combat, because here they can still cast their spell even if they were attacked earlier in that combat round. However, if an enemy magic-user is adjacent to one of my characters there’s at least a decent chance that they’ll try an ineffective melee attack rather than casting. In any case, our party tries to surround and kill magical foes as quickly as possible. Having never encountered these enemy types before, we don’t know which (if any) use magic.

Combat order is determined each round by some combination of dexterity and a random roll, with characters and monsters interspersed. In this case we surprised the monsters, so we get a free first turn. Usually my fleetest characters (Kizke, Ruxpin, Becket) move before the slower ones (Durkon, Tyrion), but not always; this time, Tyrion moves first. He (D)elays until Elphaba can move out of his way. Becket is up next but is in the center of the pack, so (D)elays as well. Kizke darts south to swing at, and miss, a Lesser Demon. For some reason it’s now Tyrion’s turn again, so he (Delays) again. Durkon lumbers south, reaching a Lesser Demon but without enough movement points to attack. Becket Delays, and then Ruxpin goes to backstab the same Demon that Kizke attacked. Backstabbing increases the chance to hit and (if successful) does double damage; in this case we get a lucky break, because the Teddy scores a critical hit and immediately kills the Demon. Tyrion marches southwest toward the next-nearest enemies; Elphaba follows close behind, but I decide to have her experiment with spells and turn Tyrion invisible (until he attacks someone). Becket heads down too, and Round Two begins.    

       

Ruxpin (the Teddy in pink) just backstabbed and critically hit a lesser demon.

      

Elphaba delays; a fire sprite moves in from the east; Elphaba delays; a fire sprite closes in; Elphaba delays again; fire sprite; Elphaba. Why did none of my other characters get a turn in that rotation? The demon we were heading for casts "Speed of the Puma" on itself—mostly pointless since that merely gives it more movement points, but now we know they’re a magical threat. Sprite; Elphaba; Kizke lunges at (and again misses) a sprite. Elphaba moves southwest and casts "Slow" on the nearby demon and its attendant sprite; the former resists, the latter is slowed to six movement points per round. Becket and Durkon close in; a Sprite attacks the former but misses. Ruxpin attacks Kizke’s target and connects; the northern demon casts "Speed of the Puma" on one of the sprites near it; Tyrion closes in.  

    

Somehow, I didn't get a screenshot of any of the demons.

    

Round three. This time, four fire sprites move first; several of them attack but either miss or connect for zero damage. My characters have as many as 8 armor points, which means up to 8 less damage than would normally be inflicted. Kizke attacks his sprite again and misses again; Becket moves to the south of the demon and attacks to set up a backstab for Elphaba. He got its attention, anyway: the demon hits back and we receive our first injury of the combat. Durkon backstabs Kizke’s target for 30 damage, killing it. Ruxpin misses a sprite and Elphaba misses the demon, whom Tyrion then hits. At this point, the southwestern demon casts "Hailstorm," which damages all characters and enemies in a 7 x 7 square for 10-20 damage. Ouch, but why didn’t they open with that move? Kizke misses a sprite and Ruxpin backstabs and kills it. Becket and Tyrion miss the demon; the other demon moves in from the north and casts "Lightning Bolt," doing 28 damage to Kizke.

And that’s about it, really. From then on the lesser demons just try melee attacks instead of their potentially-devastating spells, and my characters pair up to set up repeated backstab attempts, first on the demons, then on the remaining fire sprites. We all get 64 XP and a total of 646 gold, both of which are welcome. Kizke is down to 8 hit points; a few other characters are hurt, but none seriously. A somewhat interesting combat, and perhaps I was briefly concerned, but it wasn’t all that challenging and there were minimal options to employ interesting tactics. Part of it is the AI—a more clever pack of demons could have wiped the floor with us—but there’s some other, ineffable aspect that seems to be missing.
      
As it turns out, unsatisfying combat isn’t our only problem. Confident from our recent battle, we soon enter another, identical combat. Wanting more information about our foes, we cast "Identify" on a lesser demon. Though it’s worked before, this time it results in all text becoming invisible, and enemies are suddenly in new positions on the combat map. Then, enemies (and our own party members) occupy many, overlapping positions all at once. I quit and re-load.

      

I love you in every universe.

     

Upon reloading, we instead meet a group of eight laughing lizards with a yellow dragon. The dragon is the toughest enemy we’ve faced in normal combat: 130 hit points, and with a choking breath attack that does 10-20 damage each to several characters. It’s a significantly tougher fight than with the demons, but we win. The secret seems to be Durkon’s "Dragon Bane" spell, which does 70 damage at a time. The rewards aren’t bad either: we get 84 experience each and a chest with 899 gold. Other fights in this area include necromancers and evil heroes; the former can cast "Lightning Bolt" and "Paralyze," but as usual don’t do so systematically. We aren’t even too badly hurt when we finally find our way to Birshada, a town geographically reminiscent of Rimuldar, located in the middle of a lake.

Birshada is another 20 x 20 town with the usual staples: a training center, an arms dealer (with some excellent +2 weapons and armor), a magic shoppe, an inn, a temple, a town square, and even a supply shop selling only torches and lanterns.
      

The best items we've seen yet. Also, a knife and dagger.

       

There are also several unique locations and encounters:

       

• The "Birshada Pottery Museum," which contains over 20 one-square rooms each with a pot. Each pot can be broken, which results in a fight with poisonous rattlesnakes.

• A small gnome with "a pale band of skin on his third finger where a ring may once have been" who promises to tell us where to find a Bloodstone if we can guess his initials. Up to three characters are allowed; for now, we have no idea.

• Nearby, another little gnome introduces himself as Gnimsh. "Can I help you?" he asks. I try RING, INITIALS, GNOME, JOB, HELP, SOULSEEKER, BLOODSTONE, SPHERE, RED SPHERE, KAMAZOL, but get no response.

• A second temple, the "Temple of Bane the Unforgiving." As we enter the high priest approaches us. "What do you say to him?" Whatever we try, he replies "Begone, infidels!" and boots us out. We’ve never heard of any Bane before this.

• A small section of town called the Poor House. A beggar asks for a single gold piece; when we give it to him, he tells us that his cousin "in the North Carpalas Mountains has been to the Isle of No Return and back." That sounds useful except that the Carpalas Mountains are back on the first island/continent, and we have no way to get back there.

• The Poor House is also home to a more enterprising soul, who requests 100 gold for some "very useful information." It’s a seller’s market so we pay: he advises us to look for a hidden temple in the Forest of Spiders (just east of town). Near him, writing on a wall advises that we visit the town square’s beautiful fountain.

• The aforementioned fountain, in the corner of the town square.

• Also in the town square, a colossal statue of a dragon (as usual, described in text but not shown graphically). "It stares at you with cold stone eyes." It sounds like an obvious candidate for the "Stone To Flesh" spell, but the clerics won’t learn that until they reach Level 10. No item that I have seems to affect the statue.

       

Finally, we find Dorf, the man we were sent to by the man in Hythenforge’s so-called blue house. He directs us to a location east of town where he buried a Red Glowing Sphere. "You'll need to keep it out of Kamazol's clutches," he tells us, since three such spheres exist and they are "part of the rituals for restoring the mighty sword Soulseeker."
     
We throw enough coins into the Town Square fountain and are advised that we have "earned a drink from the Fountain of Knowledge." We can choose to drink, or not. If we do, we see a vision of "a great altar," "a great statue of an unknown god," "a large, menacing tower of pure darkness" descending into the ground, "the evil lich-lord" Kamazol laughing to himself, and "a golden throne" upon which sits a faceless, blurry "future king of the realms." Somehow our party interprets this as a positive portent, and we all receive +2 luck "for this morale-raising vision." 

      

Look! Something's wrong with Hen Wen!

       

We trek back to the desert, find the Red Sphere, and return to Dorf. "Very good," he says brusquely, before utterly changing the subject and teaching us all "Mountaineering." After several hours pass in-game, he informs us that we must next reach the Isle of No Return, where the portal to Aegea may be hidden. Dorf recommends that we explore the nearby dungeon Sardain, which is blocked by mountains and so was previously inaccessible. 
                                                                                 
We smash untold pots and fight untold numbers of rattlesnake battles (does anyone remember the old classic, but punishingly hard, beat-'em-up game Battlesnakes?) to clear the Pottery Museum of both vermin and antiquities. After one of the battles, we find a scrap of paper tied with string to a two-handed sword. The paper reads, "DRAGON 3E 4S." The snakes don’t often hit but can poison us when they do. We become too careless and as a result Ruxpin is killed (again). We pay 3000 to resurrect him at the Temple, decide to sell all our goods . . . and the game crashes with a black, blank screen. We reload several times because it turns out the game is crashing only when Ruxpin (not any other character) is the one selling items. 

    

The docents have since denied us re-entry.

      

About this time, I re-read my notes and I realize that I may have missed my chance to get the scabbard from the Pit dungeon on the previous (and now-inaccessible) island. I email the game’s creator; Dr. Feldman isn’t sure, but he suggests that perhaps I'm now in a "walking dead" situation. I’m not yet sure if that was true, but we had definitely missed the scabbard. We reload in the Pit, walk to the scabbard and its forcefield, and (U)se the Bloodstone. "The force field dissipates into a fine mist," and we have the first of three pieces of Soulseeker. (I’m not sure why the scabbard is a necessary part of reforging the weapon, though). Luckily it doesn't take long to re-emerge from the Pit, meet the captain, sail across the river, Flee from every encounter, and march to Birshada.

     

The finest craftsmanship.

     

Clearing out the rest of our to-do list, we (S)earch Spider Forest and find the hidden temple, run by "Father Bob." He asks for a donation of 300 gold, and when we pay it, he "blesses the party." I can’t tell what this has accomplished, and the temple is empty when we try to enter it again. We also repeat all our earlier explorations of Birshada. Meanwhile, the pot clue said "DRAGON 3E 4S." The town square’s dragon statue is five squares east, and three south, of where we found the note. Furthermore, three squares east and four south of the statue is an otherwise-empty square that is curiously labeled "special" on the automap. No amount of looking or searching on either of those squares accomplishes anything. 
    

Not the biggest mystery from this session.

     

The bridge to Birshada is perhaps the best spot for grinding I’ve found so far. Almost every time we cross, we have a chance to enter combat against seven troll fighters and three troll mages! These are powerful fighters and spellcasters: the mages can "Slow," "Paralyze," summon "Hailstorms," and even "Petrify" us. The battles are challenging at first, but the rewards make it worth it: roughly 130 experience per character, and over 1000 gold worth of loot. We grind on the bridge trolls, get everyone up to Level 6, and buy some +2 flails for everyone. These seem to be the second-best "normal" weapons in the game (maybe the best, since they’re one-handed and so allow the use of shields). We also get some +2 shields too. Unsure of how else to proceed, we explore the rest of the continent (finding nothing), grind more, and reach Level 7 and a new sets of spells for everyone.

      

Fighting an infinite series of trolls on Birshada's bridge.

     

I have to say that the game definitely keeps upping the stakes at an effective rate. Enemies start to feel easy for a while, then we reach the next level of challenge and it’s touch-and-go again. Money starts to feel irrelevant for a while, then it isn't because we need to spend 4,000 gold per set of +1 armor. In Birshada, we have no shortage of mysteries; I have no clues as to any of the following: what to ask Gnimsh, how to guess the gnome’s initials, what the statue is about, or what Bane’s temple is for. I suspect (hope) that some of these are linked. Otherwise, our next stop may need to be the Sardain. I’m intrigued by this game and don’t hate it, but I’m not rapturous about it either. I need to find a way to pick up the pace.

   

Time played: 40 hours. 6 party deaths. 3 reloads. 6 crashes.
    

****

   

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Next entry in this series

   07/05/2026 

Our Second-Greatest Gift

Art from the 'American Kingdoms' project by Vincent De Nil, an alt-history designer and developer. You can see the finished Medieval American Flag design in his shop, or read more about Kaiser Cat Cinema and the project behind it.

    

"For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace." — John Winthrop, "City upon a Hill" speech, 1630. 

    

"I will have my own kingdom." — Conan the Destroyer, 1984.

        

We didn't plan this—AlphabeticalAnonymous began writing his entries for The Search for Freedom almost a year ago—but it seems fitting and proper that the game is on the "active" list (and coming to its pinnacle—just as America celebrates its 250th birthday. AA has drawn all of his subtitles from the document that inaugurated the new nation, written by a brilliant but flawed man, one of the founding fathers of a brilliant but flawed nation.

   

Today we celebrate a quarter millennium of that nation's existence, now the oldest alive under the same written Constitution, and there are times that we seem more flawed than ever. And yet I hoisted my flag this morning with pride. That pride is in some ways defiant; the kind of pride that says yes, there are many ways in which we suck and have continued to suck, but come and show me another country with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. But it's also a pride borne from what I see as the first great American virtue: a firm belief in the inevitability of both national and personal progress.

    

Or, to use another term, leveling up.

       

       

My country was born at the dawn of a new era for humanity—an era in which life started to steadily get better for most people. The job of the farmer plowing his field barely changed between ancient times and about 1800, and then all of a sudden farmers had the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steel plow, and the gasoline-powered tractor. In 1800, the average person rarely strayed far from home; a century later, people rode on steamboats, trains, and automobiles (with vulcanized rubber tires) and were about to get wings. Communication with distant places in 1800 was an expensive and lengthy process that was out of reach for the average person; a century later, they had telegraphs, telephones, and phonographs. The drudgery of daily life in that period was made easier by electricity, sewing machines, typewriters, fountain pens, and refrigeration. Not all of this progress was American in origin, but we were the standard-bearers of it, the nation that inspired much of it and reflected all of it. If some other nation invented it, America probably reverse-engineered it, improved it, and mass-produced it.

        

During the same time, we made progress on our sins. We ended slavery, ended segregation, ended legal discrimination, and elected a Black president. We stopped making territorial acquisition the object of our wars. We expanded democracy, expanded the franchise, funded arts and sciences, kicked off the New Deal, and legalized gay marriage. We welcomed immigrants. With a 300-foot statue. Sure, we gave them a hard time for a generation, but then we embraced them and added their distinctiveness to our ever-evolving culture. We took the lead in establishing the United Nations, the body that will perhaps someday help bring our excesses into check. We have much work still to do still, but no end to the line of individuals willing to carry the flag even against stubborn resistance.

     

       

Americans level up. We get better. We get stronger. We grind. We atone. We apologize (sometimes dragged kicking and screaming). Even when the majority of us are doing something wrong, there's usually a group shouting and pleading for us to start doing it right. That minority becomes the majority. We invent. We learn from our mistakes. We don't just dream of a better future; we make plans for it. We go to the moon.

   

We still have many, many flaws—many sins for which we have not atoned. But like any patriot, I love my country despite those flaws, perhaps even because of them. What a boring country we would be if we had no flaws! What future would we look to if we had already arrived? What chance would there be for any of us to be pioneers of progress? American patriotism—indeed, patriotism everywhere—means not loving your country uncritically, but loving it enough that you want it to do better, that you want to help it move forward. 

            

Progress is rarely a straight line, alas. We hit roadblocks, bumps, obstacles. We get busted down a level or two by a vampire. An intellect devourer makes us all stupid for a while. Afraid of change or at least disliking the pace of it, people resist the inevitable. They secede; they lynch; they gerrymander. They march Japanese citizens to internment camps. They plant themselves in front of the doors to schools in Little Rock. Their tactics sometimes work to delay the march of progress, but not to halt it. (I think it's insane that they don't see how futile their efforts are even as they're doing them.) Many people in my country today will not be hoisting their flags, will not be enjoying lobster rolls and cheeseburgers and fireworks, because they believe that we're so deep in one of these setbacks that the nation is no longer worth celebrating, even on its birthday. I feel sorry for them. I believe that in the not-so-distant future, when all the woes of today will seem like a bad dream, they will regret having squandered this chance.

       

                 

Equal to our commitment to societal progress is our belief in the virtues and possibilities of individual progress. Our society is awash in literature, entertainment, speakers—propaganda, to some extent—that encourage us to "level up." Our holy trinity is Dale Carnegie, Charles Atlas, and Tony Robbins. We even bent old-world religion to it, in the form of the "prosperity gospel." It's in our DNA, the idea (oversimplified but not entirely false) that a mail-room clerk can end up as CEO, that talent and hard work is all you need to go from rags to riches, that the only royalty is earned royalty. It is our origin myth, the defining separation between the new world and the old world, where emphasis on clan and caste served to suppress the primacy of the individual. If such things are increasingly untrue of the "old world," I would suggest that America's example had a lot to do with that. 

    

Although I'd probably wax about the virtues of my country on such a momentous birthday anyway, all of this does have relevance to my blog. I don't think it's a coincidence that RPGs are an American invention. I'm not talking about the concept of "role-playing," which goes back to ancient times, nor the thematic nature of most RPGs, which we owe to a Brit. (Although let's not forget American Robert Howard!) I'm talking about the character sheet. I'm talking about experience points. These are the ultimate expression of self-improvement, of progress, of leveling up, in ways that we can measure and quantify. I first encountered this dynamic in a game where a peasant from Geraldtown, irrespective of any existing nobility, becomes a Baron. It is very American to say: start grinding against rats and eventually you'll be able to beat anyone. It is American to ignore thousands of years of history and to see kingship as something you can earn through effort. Look at the way we interpret "role-playing." We insist that it involves making choices consistent with our desires. We think of a game as offering a lot of "role-playing" if it maximizes the character's agency. The term could equally be interpreted as fulfilling one's role rather than defining it. If the RPG had been created in some other cultures, that peasant from Geraldtown would spend the entire game trying his best to be a good peasant.

      

        

It is also very American to focus on the goal and not the means. Sociologists have observed this in anomie theory, a distinct illustration of which is the RPG hero who triumphantly hoists the grail amidst a pile of bodies. Most RPGs, both tabletop and computer, including the earliest, allow the characters to be good or evil, or even to vacillate between the two, in their pursuit of certain objectives. Most players will choose good, and many plots assume that they do, but we still want that choice. We bristle at the idea of having that agency taken from us. And to the extent that we choose to behave virtuously anyway, we want it quantified. We want to be able to visit Hawkwind. We want a karma meter.

       

It took a long time for this approach to RPGs to be understood by the rest of the world; we've seen how many of the early European games just didn't really "get it" when it came to experience and leveling. The nation that grabbed hold of the RPG concept most vigorously was of course Japan, a subject worthy of a much more thorough discussion, but there's an extent to which Japan in the post-war period and through at least the 1980s was consciously trying to emulate American values. It fits.

   

Ah, but I digress into details and lose my original purpose. If you don't agree with my thesis that the RPG as we know it had to be invented in America, you must at least concede that it was. And thus, on the day of our 250th birthday, I ask you to tip your hat, raise your glass, and shout "huzzah" to this magnificent bastard of a nation, this nation that you have at times despised and at times admired, that sometimes has you shaking your head in disgust and sometimes has you dropping your jaw in awe, that for all its flaws at least gave the world RPGs. I'm going to continue to do my patriotic duty to analyze this American-inspired art form and make its virtues and vices known to the world at large. And in support of this mission, with a firm reliance on the patience of Irene, I solemnly pledge to you my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

        

         

P.S. To answer the question suggested by the title: Jazz, of course. If there is a God, he created America to make jazz. Everything else has been a side quest.

Multi-User Dungeon: Summary and Rating

 

Playing the game with the WizTerm client. There are apparently even more advanced client applications.

     

Multi-User Dungeon

AKA "MUD1," "British Legends" 

United Kingdom

Independently developed

Written in 1978 for a DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex 

Date Started: 12 June 2026

Date Ended: 27 June 2026

Total Hours: 20 

Difficulty:  Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

         

Summary:

   

The original Multi-User Dungeon combines the attributes and leveling of an RPG, the text interface and parser of Zork, and multiple other players who can help you, fight you, steal from you, and kill you. The result is a tension-filled, chaotic experience as many players simultaneously explore The Land, solve puzzles, gather treasure, and gain points—all with the goal of making it to the "wizard" level with its consequent immortality and administrative powers. MUD spawned an entire genre and remains fun to play today, although a decrease in the number of users and stricter moderation means that modern users don't quite get the original experience.

   

****

         

I remember when an episode of NCIS engendered widespread derision for introducing a character who holds "the high score in virtually every massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game." The absurdity of such a statement comes first from the idea that MMORPGs are all about a "high score," as if they're all just complex games of Pac-Man, but also from the idea that there was enough time in a single person's lifetime to master all of them.

   

MUD, ironically, does have scores, but it also demonstrates, at a very early age in the lifetime of multiplayer games, the time commitment necessary to master even one. I invested about 20 hours in the game over these three entries, and I barely scratched the surface of its puzzles. I spoke to one of the game's original players, now a wizard, who has thousands of hours in the game, and he says that there are puzzles that even he hasn't solved. 

      

A view of The Land from the west, from Richard Bartle's web site.

        

Even getting to wizard status is harder than it first appears. I discovered through my conversations with existing wizards and administrators that it's not just a matter of making 102,400 points without dying. (Even that's harder than it seems, since treasure decreases in value as your rank goes up.) That just qualifies you. To make it to permanent wizard status ("perm. wiz." in the lingo), you get apprenticed to an existing wizard and quizzed in the game's puzzles. There might be even more requirements that I don't know about.

    

These types of things make me feel better about my decision to exclude multiplayer games from my list in the first place. My experience with MUD and Legend of the Red Dragon (1989) a few years ago have been positive, but they've also shown me that multiplayer games would be progress-killers—and not just because of the time commitment. MUDs and MMOs naturally have societies, and with those societies come norms, language, and cultural mores. We've had to tiptoe around a few of these in our explorations of MUD, including being careful about spoiling all but the most introductory puzzles. (I do want to emphasize, though, that no one explicitly told me this was necessary, or suggested that I wouldn't be able to continue to play if I published any secrets.) The wizard I spoke with told me that the existing wizards will put characters in limbo (an actual place in the game) or kill them outright, if they violate rules like playing multiple characters at the same time (including killing your own characters for the points), abusing other players, and "passing information to other players," although this latter violation must be loosely enforced since plenty of wizards passed on information to me (again, though, only for introductory puzzles). Overall, mastering the game means making it a part of your life and identity in ways that is never really true for single-player games.

        

An article from a 1984 issue of Micro-Adventurer claims that MUD is moving to the United States because phone calls are cheaper there.

       

Another reason that it's good for me to have excluded MMOs is that it's virtually impossible to recreate the original conditions of the game. This is true for single-player games, too, but playing on modern computers with emulators mostly just avoids a lot of frustration. In the case of MMOs, the games are continually updated and the original versions lost. We've seen that as far back as the PLATO system, on which it is no longer possible to play the original versions of Moria, The Game of Dungeons, or Orthanc. In the case of MUD, thanks to information I received from Viktor Toth (current owner of British-Legends.com) and a PDP-10 version that commenter Rob turned up, we know that the Elizabethan Tearoom is a late addition and the mausoleum puzzles have changed (a forum on British-Legends.com has a historical archive of them). An entire second area of the game, called The Valley, was available for a while, then not. Special Telnet clients have made the interface easier. Even its name has changed over the years; according to co-creator Richard Bartle (we exchanged emails last week), it has been called MUD, MUDD: Multi-User Game of Adventurous Endeavour, Multiple User Dungeon, British Legends, and of course the name that I've been using.

     

This screenshot of a 1985 session (from the book An Introduction to MUD) shows that the longer name was being used as early as 1985, anyway.

      

We also can't recreate the social conditions of the original game, as much as I tried with "MUD Day." According to my wizard correspondent, back in the 1980s: "There was no safe space. There were often people waiting to kill you as you entered, and people willing to kill them when their stamina became low." This type of behavior would be punished on the modern server.

      

None of these factors have anything to do with the game's quality, of course; they're just explanations for why I'll mostly continue to exclude MMOs and regard them as "N/A" for their winning conditions when I don't.

      

I spent a few more hours with the game after MUD Day. Recognizing that I was never going to "make wiz," I concentrated on at least finding my way to the shipwreck at sea and the northwest island. And I did! It turns out that an area of "slippery rocks" that I assumed all led to death was in fact a maze, and solving it led (finally) to a boat. There were a lot more deaths to be had at sea, simply by going in the wrong direction, but there are hints to get the player through this additional maze. Eventually, I set foot on the shipwreck and then, later, on the island. A sign warned of a dragon, but I never met him. I just picked up some nice treasures, tried to leave, and found that getting safely home isn't just a matter of reversing the directions I used to get there in the first place. I eventually decided I was satisfied having made it to this far-flung area.

     

On the northwest island. I finally found a broadsword!

         

Before I quit, though, I spent some time with the idea of scripting exploration, taking advantage of the fact that if no one is on and you sign out, the game resets. Then you can just sign in and do it again. The following sequence, for instance, is worth about 500 points:

    

W. E. E. E. N. N. N. N. E. SE. [Enter all the solutions to the Mausoleum puzzles.] N. GET ALL. S. W. GET ALL. E. E. KILL ZOMBIE. GET ALL. W. SW. GET ALL. NE. S. GET ALL. N. SE. GET ALL. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. SWAMP. DROP ALL.

                

My top score.

        

But that only works if you're the only person in the game, and even then little variables can screw it up. Also, I don't think you can type more than about 10 consecutive commands at once. 

        

I knew that MUD really wasn't the game for me when I found myself getting annoyed that other players were present while I was trying to map. I kept thinking, "Why won't he go away and let the game reset?" and "Why is he talking to me?" Elaborating on the first question, on a couple of occasions, I joined the game to find users logged in but clearly not playing (the game does not kick you off for inactivity). They were just sitting in one place, their users probably having left the terminal emulator running while they went off to do something else. I had fun dealing with my annoyance by STEALing from them.

      

Gameplay in MicroMud (1988) for the Commodore 64.

       

What I really want, I thought, as I kept slowly filling in my map, is an offline version of MUD, like Zork, but with MUD's leveling and combat. It turns out that not only does such a game exist, but also that I played it eight years ago! It's called MicroMud (1988). I came across my own entry while searching for information about the game. I even made a map, which is still in my "recents" list in Trizbort. I can't believe it. I have absolutely no memory of playing this game or writing about it, although its existence does explain why even as I started MUD, I had a vague sense of the directionality of major areas.

      

By the time MicroMud was published by Virgin Games, MUD had become an industry. Creators Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw had founded Multi-User Entertainment (MUSE), and they were operating the original MUD for CompuServe (which renamed it British Legends) and a sequel called MUD2 (1985) for British Telecom. (There were eventually at least half a dozen versions of MUD2 running on different systems.) Because MUD was a commercial product, it had been deleted from the University of Essex system, but a variant called MIST was still running there.

        

Duncan Howard's book (1985) helped new players get used to the game.

               

MUD obviously became a category-namer for a large number of other games with similar characteristics. Most of them were created by people who experienced the original, though at least one, Scepter of Goth (1983), seems to have been developed without knowledge of MUD but with the same inspirations (RPGs + Zork). Other games often given as MUDs like Drygulch (1980) and Island of Kesmai (1982) were multiplayer RPGs but without quite the same interfaces. My understanding is that a proper MUD needs:

    

• A text interface with a noun/verb parser.
• Detailed descriptions of rooms.
• Inventory puzzles.
• Experience and leveling.

  

In other words, Zork with RPG mechanics. (I've read of MUDs that don't have experience, that focus heavily on interactive storytelling or interaction between players, but these almost always have other names and are recognized as "branches of MUDs" rather than MUDs proper.) Authors have developed hundreds of these MUDs on local networks as well as the Internet at large all the way through the current day. Naturally, in popularity with online players, they have been eclipsed by MMORPGs.

       

This 1995 publication shows that there was still a market for MUDs into the Internet Age—along with MOOs, MUSHes, and MUCKs, apparently.

       

I explored a bit of MUD2, but it's harder to get registered for that one, and guest players are restricted in what they can do. From what I can tell, it uses the same (or a very similar) map as MUD, but it has some interface improvements like colored text, keyboard shortcuts, and additional commands.

       

The title screen for MUD2.

    

And a bit of the gameplay.

        

A GIMLET of this game completely misses the point, but because I always offer a GIMLET for a numbered game, I went ahead and completed one. It earned 26, which is pretty solid for a 1978 game. I rated it highest in "NPCs" (5), substituting actual NPCs with the way in which you interact with other players (I've done this for other online games). I gave 4s in "encounters" (for the puzzles, but also some monsters that require special solutions) and "Gameplay" (nonlinear, replayable). I gave a miserable 19 to MicroMud, and I'm surprised to see that with that game, I gave a 0 for "Game World" (I gave 3 here). It might not have a backstory, but it holds together nicely as a world, and you can't say that the player's actions aren't felt.

       

If you want to learn more about MUD from a single-player experience, including spoilers to a lot of the puzzles, I highly recommend Nathan Mahney's six-part series from 2018-2019 (starting here). Once I decided I was done, I read his entries and spent a lot of time slapping myself over the solutions to some of the puzzles. 

     

The man who started it all, Roy Trubshaw, went on to a long career as an IT manager for various companies before starting his own consulting firm in 2008. "I appear to have fallen into a niche of cleaning up failing websites or projects," he reported. Richard Bartle earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Essex while designing MUD. He ran MUSE until 2007 and began teaching computer game design at his alma mater in 2002; he retired last year but holds emeritus status. Throughout this period, he has consulted with developers on video game world design and has contributed to a number of articles, interviews, videos, and podcasts. In 2003, he published Designing Virtual Worlds, which he has since made available for free. It's a behemoth, clocking in at almost 1,000 pages. Last year, he published the first volume of a second edition.

    

I don't know whether I'll try any more MUDs, but I'm glad I had this experience with the first one.  

           

****

   

Previous entry in this series.

   

****

   

For further reading:

    

• MUD resources and information on Richard Bartle's web site. 
• The first of a multi-part series on MUD at CRPG Adventures. 
• The first of a multi-part series on MUD at Renga in Blue. 
• The Digital Antiquarian's coverage of the game. 
• My coverage of MicroMud (1988). 

    06/27/2026