WoTMUD, the Wheel of Time MUD, is something I sunk so, so, so many hours into in the 90s. It’s still around too, and was officially sanctioned by the late Robert Jordan himself. Had/has the most intense and fun PK/PvP of any online game I’ve ever played. Played it a bit again during the pandemic and surprisingly still holds up as fun some 25 years later.
There was a Wheel of Time MUD (The Weave) that I and a lot of friends played on and met on for nearly half a decade. It eventually disappeared and nobody's been able to find the source or area files to bring it back.
MUDs are generally so low-maintenance that we kind of wanted to bring it back as a preserve or a museum -- somewhere we could go when we were feeling nostalgic.
I wrote an in-MUD game for a Wheel of Time-themed MUD around 2005; I stopped in last year to see how things were going and was pleasantly surprised to see that not only were my game and helpfile still in the MUD, but that there was an ongoing game as I logged in. Satisfying to know that something I made over ten years ago is still being enjoyed.
I basically learned to program for Wheel of Time-based MUDs... first on The True Source, then on The Weave, and then on As the Wheel Weaves.
It was amazing how much drama existed behind the scenes and how there would be a family tree of staff/codebases stemming from that drama and stolen code/areas. As the Wheel Weaves is apparently not running anymore, but a few years ago I found a split of a split that still has an in-game game that I wrote that people still apparently play and enjoy. It's really gratifying.
Yes! :) I played Wheel of Time MUD for years. It was great fun. I've not played a video game since that managed to capture the atmosphere, danger and risk in the PlayerKilling system there. WoW and other MMO's never really came close. I heard DaoC was pretty good but was still busy MUDding when that was popular.
Coincidentally I just started a sideproject making a browser based rogue-like game... with online multiplayer! Don't know if it's been done before but it's a fun little project...
MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.
I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!
January 19 2001 - at 07:53:56 in the morning - i first logged in to Discworld MUD. This was about ten years after it first launched. Since this date I have spent roughly 20000 hours actively playing this game and I'm not even close to "winning" or "finishing" the game.
No matter when you login there's roughly at least 100 people logged in playing. It's social people from all around the world.
I just felt like writing a sentence about this game to spread the word a bit. Games evolve so quickly these days. New games are released daily making all other games obsolete. Discworld MUD however has a quality I still haven't found in any other game - be it World of Warcraft, Elder scroll online, TERA or whatever. Discworld MUD is a game with so many small variations that you can never finish - and even now, 27 years after it was first launched, you can still create a new char that is possibly unique compared to any other that ever played.
It may surprise some HNers to learn that there are still thousands of MUDs online today in many different settings: fantasy, sci-fi, absurdist, and more, some of them with hundreds of players on concurrently. And not just MUDs, but MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes, which can have wildly different playing styles.
I played WoW for years and I'm not sure it ever matched the depth of experience I've somehow extracted from lines of scrolling text. MUDs will be around long after the last gnome leaves Ironforge.
MUDs are also the subject of my first indie iOS app - MUDRammer, a Modern MUD Client for iPhone and iPad. I'm hoping to build a client that's helpful for new mudders but powerful enough for the mudding veteran on the go.
Somehow, the MUD I grew up playing (MUME -- Multi Users in Middle Earth) is still alive and has a good amount of players. The game itself has served as inspiration for other worthy games (Ultima Online for example) and the PvP aspect is second to none. It is also an enormous world, covering Middle Earth from the dwarf fortresses of the Blue Mountains all the way east to the Misty Mountains, Lorien, and Fangorn.
Would also like to give some props to Discworld MUD, which served as both my introduction to MUDs and to the Discworld book series. Still hanging in there, and being actively developed, almost 25 years after it was founded. It sports one of the smartest command parsers I've encountered in any MUD.
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was a huge influence on fantasy and MUDs. I don't know which one you used to play. I used to play MUME (currently at https://mume.org/ )
My brother still plays sometimes. He has a lot of friends there. Sometimes they have over 30 people on at the same time! Heh. It used to be hundreds.
https://wotmud.info/
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