MUDs 4546

Al Kossow

There's more from Richard Bartle himself at

Typical of that is this snipped from a 1988 interview:

WABIT

How did it all begin? After all at the time of Eslove MUD nobody had even heard of Multi-User Adventures. Where did the inspiration for such a project come from?

RICHARD

Well it all started about ten years ago; we had an adventure game, Colossal Cave, at Eslove University. Roy Trubshaw played it a lot and liked it, from a programmer's point of view. I played it too, and enjoyed it, I've always been interested in games. After a while, Roy decided that he would like to try a multi-player game, and also that he wanted to design a language for writing adventures. Thus Muddl (Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language) was born, and Roy started on MUD to see how far he could go; he likes all that low-level programming, operating system stuff etc. When Roy reached his third year as an undergraduate, he decided that he had taken it as far as he wanted to and I took over; that was in 1980. I was more interested in the game-design possibilities. That was how Eslove MUD was born; Eslove was version three and this, MUD2, is version four.

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I spent far too much time in Eslove MUD in early 1984. Never made it to Wiz - well, I did, but was demoted for having too much help...

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Rupert