Game 579: Multi-User Dungeon (1978)

 

          

Multi-User Dungeon

AKA "MUD1" 

United Kingdom

Independently developed

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

Date Started: 12 June 2026

      

*****

 

MUD Day is Saturday, 20 June 2026!   

 

Join me in the Multi-User Dungeon as hosted by British Legends.

    

I will be in the game from at least 18:00–22:00 UTC. 

 

See the bottom of this entry for further instructions and matters of etiquette.

 

****** 

     

In some ways, the entire history of CRPGs can be seen as an attempt to mimic the narrative flexibility of a tabletop RPG session. If we were to judge CRPGs solely against this aspiration, however, we must regard them as a dismal failure. Fifty-one years after the first "pedit5" player fought a goblin in a hallway, the average CPRG player still can't smash a window, light a fire as a distraction, or trick a bandit by pointing behind him. Not only can the most powerful character in Skyrim not make his own bid for the throne, he can't even speak his own dialogue to his wife. If he could, she wouldn't be able to respond.

      

CRPGs have always worked within these limitations by adapting only certain aspects of the tabletop experience. In the early days, some games focused on logistics and combat. They let the player imagine his own game world, motivations, and dialogue, stuck him in a wireframe dungeon, and simply tried to replicate the mechanics of tabletop combat. These games, for whatever reasons, are the ones that were affixed with the "RPG" label. A second effort, just as valid, involved minimizing the mechanical content and emphasizing the narrative content and flexible role-playing through verb-noun commands. Its flagship product was William Crowther's Adventure (1976), later called Colossal Cave Adventure, the inspiration for Zork (1977) and an entire line of adventure games, both text-based and graphical. Although we later regarded them as a different genre, the intention of the creators was no different than that of the creators of Wizardry or Ultima. Here's a quote from Dave Lebling, one of Zork's creators, in the December 2015 U.S. Gamer:

      

The kind of D&D I played was sort of a slight twist on regular D&D, which at that point was still in the boxes. It was the old, old, old D&D. The dungeon master who ran our group way downplayed the number parts. It was all about storytelling for him, because he loved to just talk and evoke the environment you were in and all that, instead of, oh, well, you have a +1 and he's got a -2 . . .

     

All that numeric stuff really pushes you away from the story and into the nerdiness, if nothing else. I mean, it's nerdy enough without the numbers, but it gets even nerdier with it. That was a good D&D sort of background in terms of trying to create a story, instead of trying to just be obsessive about the numbers.

       

If history had gone another way, we would regard Zork, Spellbreaker, and King's Quest as "CRPGs" and everything this blog has been covering for the last 16 years as something else. "Battle simulators," maybe. Quest for Glory would be regarded as an "RPG-battle simulator hybrid." This blog would be the "Battle Simulator Addict."

     

Although later commercialized by Infocom, Zork began as a team effort on the PDP-10 mainframe system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before TSR, owners of Dungeons & Dragons, threatened the creators with legal action, there was a period in which the game was called Dungeon. It was this version that made its way over ARPANET and various other file-sharing networks to University of Essex student Roy Trubshaw. An instant fan, he started building his own adventure game in 1978. Because he envisioned it as a game in which multiple players could interact in a Dungeon-style game world, he called it Multi-User Dungeon (MUD, later MUD1 to differentiate it from other games of the same style). He was joined in 1979 by Richard Bartle, who took over as the primary developer of the game when Trubshaw graduated in 1980. That same year, the University of Essex connected directly to ARPANET, and Multi-User Dungeon was playable by a global audience (for more on the birth of MUD, I recommend Jimmy Maher's excellent article on the subject).

     

MUD retained Zork's well-written and evocative descriptions of places, inventory puzzles, and a general "main quest" to collect as much treasure as possible (oddly dumped into a swamp instead of stored carefully in a trophy case). But it also added elements more suited to CRPGs, including experience and leveling. The multi-player aspect ensured that each player faced a world of human-controlled NPCs whom he could fight, engage in alliances, and rob.

        

Starting out in MUD.

       

The official MUD was available in several places in subsequent years. It ran on the University of Essex's system, accessible via ARPANET and later dial-up modems, from 1979 to 1987. A version was licensed to the British CompuNet service from 1984 to 1987, and an authorized version was hosted for a time at the Dundee College of Technology. CompuServe bought the rights to the game in 1987, renamed it British Legends, and hosted it until 1999. This version was subsequently rewritten in C++ by Viktor Toth and made available online starting in 2000. (During this time, "MUD" changed from a single game to a genre with many descendants; we'll cover that next time.) That brings us to the present.

    

The game begins with a quick character creation process. The player gives himself a name and designates a sex, and then the modern incarnation, at least, emails a password that will work until the player does something to kill his character permanently. The character has attributes (strength, stamina, and dexterity), and the game tracks a score based on his various accomplishments.

      

My mess of a partial map.

       

Exploration in MUD takes place in a world called The Land, not as interesting as Zork, but realistic in its general design—except that dozens of adventurers are for some reason tromping through its fields and forests. Every player begins in the safety of the Elizabethan Tearoom but is flung into the world when he exits the room to the west. From wherever he lands, he can explore a world bounded by dense forest to the north, a wall to the east, more dense forest to the south, and an ocean to the west (the ocean is not actually a boundary, as we'll see). Within this world are a mine, a railway connecting the mine to a jetty, a crumbling ruin, a mausoleum, a misty graveyard, a cottage with almost 20 rooms, a hut, a cave, and various other features. Because the scale is inconsistent and directionality is not always reciprocal (i.e., you may leave one area to the east and arrive at the next via the north) or even two-way, the game is difficult to map. I did it (using Trizbort), but the resulting mess makes me think that the map is better thought of in figurative terms than literal ones. Indeed, if you Google MULTI-USER DUNGEON and MAP, you are less likely to find a neat arrangement of blocks a la Shay Addams's Quest for Clues and more likely to find the conceptual map created by Trubshaw and Bartle and published by Bartle in the September 1984 Micro Adventurer. It was this map that alerted me to additional explorable space beyond the western jetty.

    

The map referred to in the preceding paragraph.

       

Descriptions of these locations are generally well-written and evocative, which is slightly ironic because when many people are playing, so many messages are flying by that it's hard to remember where you are at all, let alone read the description. Some examples:

    

• Study: This is the old study used by the gravedigger who once owned this cottage, where he read up on his craft. It is decorated in sombre colours, and the windows are small and dirty. On the south wall is a large bookcase reaching up to the ceiling, made of an enchanted oak.

• Sundial in pine forest: This is part of  a large pine forest. To the northeast, the forest opens up onto a magical glade, but in the other directions is more forest, some of it too dense to allow passage. Before you stands an old, stone sundial, overgrown with ivy. The sundial has no gnomon, so cannot tell the time.

• Waterfall: Before you is an awe-inspiring sight; a waterfall plummets over a cliff and explodes in a dazzling crescendo of rainbow colour on the menacing rocks below. 

             

To the west is more game to explore.

        

Navigation in this world is with commands of a few words. Directions are simple: N, E, W, S, NE, NW, etc. If you get lost, OUT will move you, screen by screen, back to the Elizabethan Tearoom. SWAMP will move you, screen by screen, to the swamp. Other commands will be familiar to players of text adventures: GET, DROP, INVENTORY, LOOK, OPEN, UNLOCK, and so forth. The game deliberately hides some commands for puzzle-related reasons. For most commands, you only have to type as many letters as are necessary to distinguish a unique keyword: DR(op), L(ook), I(nventory), and so forth.

       

Of course, many of the commands are used to solve puzzles. Twenty years ago, on a blog called "kfsone's pittance," Richard Bartle offered: "The mausoleum is the only place in MUD1 (or MUD2) that has actual puzzles in it. I put it in specifically because people wanted puzzles and I didn't, so I showed them what a pain the world would be if it were all puzzles by giving them the mausoleum." There are indeed a bunch of puzzles—or perhaps, more properly, "riddles"—in the Mausoleum, each one written on the wall next to a tomb:

   

• MUD's rats reproduce fast! They reach sexual maturity in 35 days and give birth to 14 pups every 21 days. If you took one newborn rat home with you, how many rats would you have after 98 days?

• In what year was the following phrase first documented: tent all all all all tent (& / pospos)?

• K rymsramo vkx k uajcan dkcmocmf tcov ovuaa xvadvauqx dycmocmf ko k oyrw. Wamakov co kua acfvo jaooaux. Tvko kua ovaz?

• Find Milne [NDDL XKXAYB DX NK TAH JIWCO RZBS AZ B JASVKUFH JL VD] [ZLNZ HELAMH NN ZS TOB DIUGM LBHS AL B FAQNGQXT HZ RZ]

• Leave the Mausoleum by way of the cricket chirps: 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 19.64/s, 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 3.57/s. Where are we?

• For your birthday, I can make you the 52607th Duke, the 31870th Queen, the 1835th King, or what numbered prince?

          

The mausoleum riddles.

         

Typing the literal answer gets the associated tomb to open up, with some kind of treasure or encounter on the other side. I solved three of these but have no idea on the rest. [Ed. We later learned that these mausoleum riddles have changed a number of times over the years.]

   

But of course there are other puzzles in the game—those that involve the intuitive use of objects and the parser to produce results, just as in any text adventure. Some of the many that I annotated while exploring the land:

   

• How can I see in the dark, for all the many places that require you to see in the dark? 
• How do I get across the ocean to the other island or to the shipwreck seen from the shore?
• How can I pry up the golden bolt in the railway track? 
• How can I get a piece of valuable ore out of the mine's walls? 
• How can I survive the trip to the bottom of the cliff at Lover's Leap? 
• How can I unchain a sacrificial blade from an altar?
• How do I get the ruby out from the eye socket of an idol?

    

And this is in addition to all of the "what am I supposed to do at the . . . " questions that could be ended with a variety of locations (e.g., "sundial," "shrine," "badger's sett") and "what am I supposed to do with the . . ." questions that could be ended with a variety of objects and creatures. 

          

I have solved a number of these puzzles, and more besides, but I guess I won't be offering the solutions in my blog entries. It's against the etiquette of the game. While I normally don't shy away from spoilers for old games, here for the first time I'm entering a shared space, and I feel I must bow to the old adage of "When in Rome . . . " I suspect that somewhere out there in Internetland is a detailed spoiler site, but if so, it's not on the surface web. It's somewhat impressive that this information hasn't been widely spoiled on some GameFAQs site after nearly 50 years.

       

It was worth a try.

       

While we're talking about shared space, I should make it clear that these puzzles exist for every person simultaneously, and most of them can only be solved by one person. If someone else gets to the Mausoleum before you and opens all the doors, tough luck. If you need the axe to break down the door to the Royal Bedchamber but someone else got to it first, you'd better find some other place to explore. Resets of the game world do happen, specifically:

  

• When enough treasure has been dumped into the swamp that there's hardly any left.
• When someone with administrative power commands it.
• When nobody has logged in for a few minutes.

   

The third stipulation means that they happen relatively often these days, but it might be that they don't happen at all during the Saturday afternoon that many of us are playing.

   

For these reasons, many players eschew the puzzles and focus on the social interaction and player-versus-player combat. Talking with other players is a bit like having a conversation in the early days of chat rooms. Everyone is talking at once, some of them sending direct messages, some shouting to everyone playing the game. You talk to a particular person with the syntax:

 

TELL Chester, Hello! How are you?

   

Or you can just shout to everyone:

   

SHOUT I don't know how to play this game!

   

You can FOLLOW a specific user if you want to see how they do things. You can HUG, KISS, and TICKLE people, which seems to confer points to their score. You can GIVE them things and also try to STEAL from them. Of course, you can also ATTACK or KILL them. I'm told that it's against etiquette to attack anyone more than two levels below yours, but I don't think anything in the game prohibits it.

                 

A brief conversation with another player. She probably would have been creeped out if I'd TICKLED her.

        

Other players aren't the only ones you can attack. There are a handful of monsters in the game, including a zombie, an ogre, a dryad, a giant spider, one or more vipers, and a bunch of rats. Most of these enemies won't attack unless you instigate it. I had more success when I started combat than when the enemy did; I think it may be because when the player starts it, he can specify a weapon (ATTACK RAT WITH AXE), whereas the game doesn't always seem to assume the player is using a chosen weapon when he's just defending himself. I'm not entirely sure.

       

Once combat begins, it proceeds in rounds, sometimes dozens of them, as the game describes the action: "You narrowly side-step a limp slash by the zombie"; "You hit out at the rat with a mighty punch!"; "The savageness of a blow by the ogre sends you sideways." The underlying rolls aren't really transparent, but they seem to take into consideration your weapon, level, strength, and dexterity. Your stamina is your hit point reservoir, and you die if it reaches 0. You can FLEE combat to avoid this, but the action causes you to leave your entire inventory behind, and you lose points. To recover your stamina, you need to SLEEP and hope no one kills you in your slumber or leave the world entirely and don't log in for a while (you restore one stamina point per minute).

       

A very long, and ultimately fruitless, battle with an eagle.

          

Equipment-wise, you don't have much to help you in this game. There are sticks all over the place, and that's the best weapon that most players will get. Once you reach the third level, you can use an axe in combat, but as far as I know, there's only one of these in the game. I never found anything that seemed like a traditional RPG weapon or piece of armor, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. 

        

The overall goal of the game is to amass as many points as possible—or, more specifically, to amass as many points as necessary to reach the rank of wizard (i.e., "make wiz"), which essentially makes you invisible and gives you some administrative control over the game world. The three major ways to gain points are:

 

• Drop treasures into the swamp; the value of this is commensurate with the value of the treasure. I think the most I got was around 100 points, but there could be more valuable treasures than I've found. You can check the value of your carried treasure with the VALUE command.

• Kill Enemies, which give you a handful of points (e.g., 8 for the rats).

• Kill other players, which gives you 1/24 of their score.

• Solve certain puzzles.

         

I gain points, and level up, by setting a dryad  on fire.

         

Certain point thresholds are accompanied by title upgrades: "novice" to "warrior" at 400, to "hero" at 800, to "champion" at 1,600, and so forth. Leveling up is accompanied by increases in the game's attributes. "Wizard" or "witch" (for female characters) is at a distant 102,400 points. I managed to achieve about 1/100 of that score in a few hours of gameplay in which I explored mostly alone and wasn't attacked by any other players. I think a truly dedicated player, creeping online in the dead of night like me, taking advantage of frequent resets when no one else is online, and just dropping treasure after treasure in the swamp, might be able to make it to the top in a week or two of furtive playing. Obviously, it would have been much harder when players were always attacking and the treasure wasn't all yours.

 

My best score as of this entry. Shortly after this, I had to flee from a dwarf and got knocked down to about 1,260 points.

        

There are spells in the game, but not in the traditional RPG sense. They're all focused on interaction with other players. Each has a percentage chance of working based on the character level. SUMMON, when successful, will make a player drop his entire inventory and teleport to you. FORCE makes another player do a particular command. WHERE tells you a player's location. You can change a player's sex with CHANGE, put him to sleep with SLEEP, and DEAFEN, DUMB, BLIND, CRIPPLE, and (mercifully) CURE him. WISH, which works 100% of the time, lets you ask a boon from any player with the rank of wizard. That doesn't mean they'll grant it 100% of the time.

   

There are a lot of things I don't understand. Rules seem to change on the fly, I suppose based on a wizard who activates one of the game's switches. Creatures go from docile to hostile. Fighting between players is disallowed and then suddenly allowed. A B-52 bomber flies overhead and drops a payload (not kidding). You occasionally run into a beggar; sometimes KICKing him gets you points, and sometimes it provokes a tough combat.

      

There are two types of death in the game: One from battle, which is permanent (you have to create a new character), and one from environmental damage, which is temporary (you have to leave the game for a while). Environmental deaths include jumping off a cliff without a parachute, slipping on rocks, entering the gassy marsh with a lit torch, and a variety of other mishaps.  

      

Having played for about six hours now, and having mapped a decent portion of the game, I can't help but feel there are depths to it that the casual player doesn't experience. There are strange messages, entrances to the underworld where dangerous enemies await, and an entire continent across the sea that I still don't know how to get to. I feel a bit like the Man in Black in Westworld, insisting that there's a deeper level, a greater meaning. The distressing thing is, I'm not sure experienced MUD players will even tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

      

What is this "emerald and red" message about?

                

That will suffice for a long introduction. I'll have more after "MUD Day" on Saturday, 20 June, when I will be playing the game at least between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC (14:00–18:00 EDT, 11:00-15:00 PDT, 20:00–00:00 CEST, etc.). I hope many of you will join me to help me experience the game in proper multi-player mode. If you do decide to join.

 

• There are instructions here.
• To abide by game etiquette, no attacking players more than two levels beneath you.
• I'm told it's against the rules to play two characters simultaneously.
• And no verbal abuse.

   

Whether online or for my next entry, I'll see you soon!

   

****

   

Next entry in this series.

     

****

     

For further reading:

    

• MUD at British-Legends.com. 
• 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). 

 

06/2682026