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