I used to play MUDs back in the early 2000s. One was a buddy of my boyfriends who made his own homebrew MUD. He only invited friends and family on there to play. I was one of the few outsiders invited. It was so much fun to play. I got to play as a near sighted barbarian centaur who was a worshipper of Satan. She eventually got married to a dwarf (my boyfriends character). When one of our friends who was serving in the military died during the second Iraq war, we made a memorial to him as a player and raised his character (aptly named Crom, I think) to be a God of Warriors.
Between 1997-2000 I played circle mud every day. It was the best game ever. I used to dream I was playing it at night. Thanks for this throwback. Is it still a thing in 2023?
Welcome! Great username ;) Some muds have nice active support communities on Discord, for example StickMud. Offline games like Zork or Hitchhiker´s guide are interesting to fiddle with, but too hard for 2023 IMHO
When I was growing up probably starting around 8 or 9, I would play a MUD called Realms of Despair. A D&D style game, pretty big, very descriptive and well made as far as I knew. Thinking back on it, I believe it gave me a big boost to my reading comprehension, speed, and just general imagination, and language skills. Not that I was lacking in those areas in school, I actualy excelled at them, probably due in part to this. In MUDs you had to do a lot of reading, comprehend it, imagine your surroundings, as well as mentally map out the world. I think it's a great example of integrating helpful educational benefits and practice into an enjoyable game, such that the kid isn't even aware Instead, kids get bombarded with microtransactions and loot boxes, priming them for terrible gambling addictions or just bad impulsive spending habits. Kinda sad. Edit: lol watching the vid, the word "peonic" @5:36 is just hilarious hahaha.
I still have my zmud license starred in my mail. Last time I played was 2005ish, I made a friend first day on a job. He was typing super fast & loud. I walked behind him to see what the deal was. He was MUDing. I sat next to him asked server booted up telnet, he said zmud was on the shared drive. Fast friends
I didn't grow up with these games since I wasn't born yet. But I'm fascinated with their potential. So thanks for the tutorial, I'll try some of them out
Thank you ! I would not have noticed the 200 without your comment. I am not sure whether to congratulate or commiserate on your consideration to drop back into the black & white rabbit hole!
Great video. This is the content that we need for people to re/discover MUDs. I'm 34 and I love MUDs. Not many games gives me such satisfaction. I mostly play Aardwolf and Carrion Fields. Chears!
My brother used to play these like crazy when I was a kid, which would have been about 25 years ago. He used to call them Mushes, which i guess were a little different.
Yeah back then there were (at least) MUDs, MUSHs and MOOs I never really saw the differences, all kind of melted into each other over time. Thanks for sharing!
Not all of them are museums! Two of the subscription based games get up to 600 people daily, and Aardwolf, the most popular free one, stabilized at about 200-250. There are also plenty that have a respectable 40-60. The issue with muds is not that people aren't playing them, just that there's too many of them, because with ready-made customizable codebases they require relatively little effort and manpower to set up. So everyone and their brother would create their own variation on a theme. Also, since they were essentially indie games before even Jeff Vogel could spell "RPG", people are running them in their spare time, with no marketing budget. When the guys at Darkwind set up a nice website and spent some money on advertising, they saw an immediate spike in active user base. Now it dried out again. But since most muds have been running for upwards of 30 years, they will probably never completely die. Just like black and white film and hand-drawn cartoons.
Aardwolf with MUSH 😘👌 Usually 260+ players or so online and one of the most comprehensive dungeons out there with a huge list of actions and mobs and guilds and PVP and 23,800 rooms or so to explore. Very rich feature set, and much visual feedback. Aardwolf MUD is where it's at. My second pick is Achaea MUD and third Starmourn. Unfortunately most other games are down players. I used to play Tempusmud but last log there was maybe 2 players. :(
Thank you so much for showing us "The Fortnite Generation" the real power of MUDs back then in 80s and this really was a very interesting video as it's the first time for me to see such a genre of games! KEEP IT UP, I love it 🤩
As I get older and older one of the things that is more evident to me now than ever as a Retro MMORPGer playing Final Fantasy XI is that gaming is a very indivdualized hobby. I would have loved to have made friends with similiar hobbies but the trouble there is that if they did have those hobbies they were busy doing the same damn thing I was. In other words if I want friends who play Final fantasy XI I'm probably not going to make them on Facebook or on Social media or meet them in real life, i'm more likely to meet them playing the game itself. ands true to form my Very loud Anti Southern Self has somehow fallen in with a group of Southerners and I now just stay quiet about politics and get shit done with them.
This makes me appreciate the MUD I spent way too much time in even more. We tried a couple others at other points but so many seemed terribly ugly and/or slow. Feudal Realms had a really good prompt each line so you didn't get lost in everything going on, and everything was color-coded beautifully. I know there's a little bias involved in whichever one you grew up with, but most of them didn't make good use of color to and spacing to make shit readable. And a lot had combat where you could literally go do something else in the time it took, because rounds were so slow. But yeah, game probably seriously damaged my social development and caused a lot of problems. >.>
i grew up watching my brother and dad playing i’m 14 and play for hours a day and all my friends say the game is dumb bc of no video but tbh it’s probably the most fun game i’ve ever played
I didn't know there were a lot of text base games. I only knew of one which was GangWar, were you would kill up gangs, loot them for their cash all in the attemts to be the top gang in all the categories. They brought it back when COVID started and I am back to playing it.
Great video. I started playing in college, around 91. I started on Sejnet, then wondered a bit, but spent most of my time on jedimud. I probably have not logged on any since the early ‘00’s.
Holy shit. This is quite a nostalgia hit for me. Spent a ton of time in the early 00s playing these games and I had totally forgot they existed. Wow. I wish I remembered the names of some of the games.
I stumbled onto MUDs back in '02 or '03. Funny enough, my first(and still one I play) is called Stick in the MUD. It's pretty dead now, but it's still fun to log into my old characters and level them up. Feels like the graphical MMOs like WoW and Everquest stole all the MUDs' playerbase.
I wish you were right with that religion comment 😅 // Very nice Video, I got nostalgic shivers and goosebumbs! I am only 37, but Muds were part of a long time of my early life (and sometimes beyond). I played a mix of classic fantasy themed muds and also more "modern" Dragonball(an Anime)-themed muds. Love it!
I found this on Reddit by chance. I would say some, like Aardwolf still are in the high hundred or so. Couple of years back it was in the high hundreds. I've been playing that since 98, on and off. Albeit a lot more off than late, given Elite Dangerous.
@@LuzrBum Aardwolf was sitting at I think 180 odd when I logged in last night. Used to be in the 300+ range a bit ago. But I'm sure I've seen it over 500 over the years.
Dude THANK YOU for covering this. My childhood was spent going to internet cafes and playing so called GMUD. With dudes chilling there teaching me about everything there is to the game. One of my core memories is me trying to "rizz up" as kids would say a female member of my guild called Se7en (she was like 30 and married to another guild member if i remember correctly, but at the age of like 11 you dont give a fck LMAO), and on another occasion seeing this one bully (and i mean in real life bully, not an in game one) in the cafe go to the toilet, so i jumped onto his seat and.... deleted his account (which he was max level on and prolly took like 2 years to build). As far as i know hr didnt manage to get it back via adnins somehow. And despite him being a huge POS i still feel bad about it LMAO. This was about 20 years ago, as in Poland where im from our PCs were very out of date + internet wasnt available for "household consumption" until like 2008-2010 (unless you had A LOT of money)
I remember my mom playing MUDs endlessly back in the 90s and early 2000s. I knew it was a roleplaying game, and I knew what it was about, but I never could get interested in that sort of thing. Now I kinda am interested in getting involved with some RPGs, but I have trouble visualizing worlds and game states in my mind, and I need visual references.
"Password is Noneofyourbusiness... it's not that" Password is 18 characters long... Noneofyourbusiness is also 18 characters long. Mate just pulled the most unneeded reveal and coverup ever lmao
First MUD I tried in Jr High was the original DragonMud later DragonMudII the Rom not the Circlemud which I think went down long ago but.. yeah they killed me ALOT there. Had the most fun on Megaheroes Tinymux except for that one player Dirigible Dirk who was rude to everyone.
This is difficult to answer because there are so many - www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ is a very friendly community, just ask. Also check out my other video about using MUDlet client software ua-cam.com/video/F0vvbSqhomE/v-deo.html - Aardwolf seems quite full, so there will be people there. Stickmud was always quite empty but people were friendly and helpful - tell 'em I said hi!
Yeah, but unlike WoW you could literally set up triggers, that would basically grind for you........man does anybody know a good one that is still up and running with a decent Pbase? I'm mostly A GodWars player...
Since you're a Godwars player the standard hack n' slash type MUD might not be what floats your boat, you might prefer a game with a more skill based pvp combat system like Akanbar.
Just fyi, you can be a boomer without being of the Baby Boomer generation. It has more to do with the way you act or present yourself. And not all of us MUDders are old farts. I'm not even 40 yet lol
Oh wow, 2 years later I realize how strange that . Where the heck did that come from. Maybe the Whopper? Or just generally who why what where whither whence?
I used to play MUDs back in the early 2000s. One was a buddy of my boyfriends who made his own homebrew MUD. He only invited friends and family on there to play. I was one of the few outsiders invited. It was so much fun to play. I got to play as a near sighted barbarian centaur who was a worshipper of Satan. She eventually got married to a dwarf (my boyfriends character). When one of our friends who was serving in the military died during the second Iraq war, we made a memorial to him as a player and raised his character (aptly named Crom, I think) to be a God of Warriors.
Great story - imagine making your own Fortnite just for friends ;)
💕💐
@@nelcorazs Loev you too!
Try the game Gemstone IV. Best Game I've ever played.
Between 1997-2000 I played circle mud every day. It was the best game ever. I used to dream I was playing it at night. Thanks for this throwback. Is it still a thing in 2023?
It is still a thing, albeit niche. 100s of MUDs have closed, many have
I'm 20 years old and got fascinated about Text Adventure games. I'll definitely play some
Welcome! Great username ;)
Some muds have nice active support communities on Discord, for example StickMud.
Offline games like Zork or Hitchhiker´s guide are interesting to fiddle with, but too hard for 2023 IMHO
@@LuzrBum Zork is available on Steam, so it makes life easier. I'll begin playing it.
Thank you for the Discord hint, I'll join the StickMud server.
When I was growing up probably starting around 8 or 9, I would play a MUD called Realms of Despair. A D&D style game, pretty big, very descriptive and well made as far as I knew. Thinking back on it, I believe it gave me a big boost to my reading comprehension, speed, and just general imagination, and language skills. Not that I was lacking in those areas in school, I actualy excelled at them, probably due in part to this. In MUDs you had to do a lot of reading, comprehend it, imagine your surroundings, as well as mentally map out the world. I think it's a great example of integrating helpful educational benefits and practice into an enjoyable game, such that the kid isn't even aware
Instead, kids get bombarded with microtransactions and loot boxes, priming them for terrible gambling addictions or just bad impulsive spending habits. Kinda sad.
Edit: lol watching the vid, the word "peonic" @5:36 is just hilarious hahaha.
Good comment
I still have my zmud license starred in my mail.
Last time I played was 2005ish, I made a friend first day on a job. He was typing super fast & loud. I walked behind him to see what the deal was. He was MUDing. I sat next to him asked server booted up telnet, he said zmud was on the shared drive.
Fast friends
Nice! The last time I tried, Zmud got flagged as a virus - arguably correct :-)
Thank you for covering this topic. Indeed, an unduly unexplored piece of gaming history.
I didn't grow up with these games since I wasn't born yet. But I'm fascinated with their potential. So thanks for the tutorial, I'll try some of them out
Good luck - you may want to browse www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ for ideas
Congratulations from 20 subscribers to over 200 in a year. Thinking about restarting Wheel of Time mud after 14-year hiatus
Thank you ! I would not have noticed the 200 without your comment.
I am not sure whether to congratulate or commiserate on your consideration to drop back into the black & white rabbit hole!
Great video. This is the content that we need for people to re/discover MUDs. I'm 34 and I love MUDs. Not many games gives me such satisfaction. I mostly play Aardwolf and Carrion Fields. Chears!
My brother used to play these like crazy when I was a kid, which would have been about 25 years ago. He used to call them Mushes, which i guess were a little different.
Yeah back then there were (at least) MUDs, MUSHs and MOOs I never really saw the differences, all kind of melted into each other over time. Thanks for sharing!
Not all of them are museums! Two of the subscription based games get up to 600 people daily, and Aardwolf, the most popular free one, stabilized at about 200-250. There are also plenty that have a respectable 40-60. The issue with muds is not that people aren't playing them, just that there's too many of them, because with ready-made customizable codebases they require relatively little effort and manpower to set up. So everyone and their brother would create their own variation on a theme. Also, since they were essentially indie games before even Jeff Vogel could spell "RPG", people are running them in their spare time, with no marketing budget. When the guys at Darkwind set up a nice website and spent some money on advertising, they saw an immediate spike in active user base. Now it dried out again. But since most muds have been running for upwards of 30 years, they will probably never completely die. Just like black and white film and hand-drawn cartoons.
Aardwolf with MUSH 😘👌 Usually 260+ players or so online and one of the most comprehensive dungeons out there with a huge list of actions and mobs and guilds and PVP and 23,800 rooms or so to explore. Very rich feature set, and much visual feedback. Aardwolf MUD is where it's at. My second pick is Achaea MUD and third Starmourn. Unfortunately most other games are down players. I used to play Tempusmud but last log there was maybe 2 players. :(
Thank you so much for showing us "The Fortnite Generation" the real power of MUDs back then in 80s and this really was a very interesting video as it's the first time for me to see such a genre of games!
KEEP IT UP, I love it 🤩
As I get older and older one of the things that is more evident to me now than ever as a Retro MMORPGer playing Final Fantasy XI is that gaming is a very indivdualized hobby.
I would have loved to have made friends with similiar hobbies but the trouble there is that if they did have those hobbies they were busy doing the same damn thing I was.
In other words if I want friends who play Final fantasy XI I'm probably not going to make them on Facebook or on Social media or meet them in real life, i'm more likely to meet them playing the game itself.
ands true to form my Very loud Anti Southern Self has somehow fallen in with a group of Southerners and I now just stay quiet about politics and get shit done with them.
This makes me appreciate the MUD I spent way too much time in even more. We tried a couple others at other points but so many seemed terribly ugly and/or slow. Feudal Realms had a really good prompt each line so you didn't get lost in everything going on, and everything was color-coded beautifully. I know there's a little bias involved in whichever one you grew up with, but most of them didn't make good use of color to and spacing to make shit readable. And a lot had combat where you could literally go do something else in the time it took, because rounds were so slow. But yeah, game probably seriously damaged my social development and caused a lot of problems. >.>
MUD games are such a cool piece of gaming history. So much richer experience than what followed too.
i grew up watching my brother and dad playing i’m 14 and play for hours a day and all my friends say the game is dumb bc of no video but tbh it’s probably the most fun game i’ve ever played
I didn't know there were a lot of text base games. I only knew of one which was GangWar, were you would kill up gangs, loot them for their cash all in the attemts to be the top gang in all the categories. They brought it back when COVID started and I am back to playing it.
20 subs! You are now one closer to 1m subs sir! Good day!
Thank you! Another step towards the 1000
Great video. I started playing in college, around 91. I started on Sejnet, then wondered a bit, but spent most of my time on jedimud. I probably have not logged on any since the early ‘00’s.
Thanks for sharing! Hope it didn't hurt your GPA too much 😉
Awesome video, nostalgia :D I've been playing one called Avatar since 1997. Still running and usually gets 30-40 people on at a time!
Im still playing ages of despair hah. New area just released first one in years. I'm glad to see people still playing these things
14:48 Now there's a word I've not seen in a very long time.
I never used Mudlet, just telnet. Mudlet looks fancy. :-)
Holy shit. This is quite a nostalgia hit for me. Spent a ton of time in the early 00s playing these games and I had totally forgot they existed. Wow. I wish I remembered the names of some of the games.
www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ and discord.gg/multi-user-dungeon-279748146316312576
@@LuzrBum Danke!
Ich spreche kein Deutsch, aber ich möchte nur Hallo sagen :)
I stumbled onto MUDs back in '02 or '03. Funny enough, my first(and still one I play) is called Stick in the MUD. It's pretty dead now, but it's still fun to log into my old characters and level them up. Feels like the graphical MMOs like WoW and Everquest stole all the MUDs' playerbase.
I wish you were right with that religion comment 😅 //
Very nice Video, I got nostalgic shivers and goosebumbs! I am only 37, but Muds were part of a long time of my early life (and sometimes beyond). I played a mix of classic fantasy themed muds and also more "modern" Dragonball(an Anime)-themed muds. Love it!
Thank you!
I found this on Reddit by chance. I would say some, like Aardwolf still are in the high hundred or so. Couple of years back it was in the high hundreds. I've been playing that since 98, on and off. Albeit a lot more off than late, given Elite Dangerous.
Thanks for that! Did you mean that Aardwolf is now in the LOW hundreds rather the high a few years ago?
@@LuzrBum Aardwolf was sitting at I think 180 odd when I logged in last night. Used to be in the 300+ range a bit ago. But I'm sure I've seen it over 500 over the years.
I played a ton of Gemstone back in the day. I should check it out again.
Dude THANK YOU for covering this. My childhood was spent going to internet cafes and playing so called GMUD. With dudes chilling there teaching me about everything there is to the game. One of my core memories is me trying to "rizz up" as kids would say a female member of my guild called Se7en (she was like 30 and married to another guild member if i remember correctly, but at the age of like 11 you dont give a fck LMAO), and on another occasion seeing this one bully (and i mean in real life bully, not an in game one) in the cafe go to the toilet, so i jumped onto his seat and.... deleted his account (which he was max level on and prolly took like 2 years to build). As far as i know hr didnt manage to get it back via adnins somehow. And despite him being a huge POS i still feel bad about it LMAO.
This was about 20 years ago, as in Poland where im from our PCs were very out of date + internet wasnt available for "household consumption" until like 2008-2010 (unless you had A LOT of money)
Wow!
Great video. Always wondered about MUD games. I grew up past this point.
3.5 era. Very coo
Thanks - stay tuned next video should contain so very low level basics of Mudlet - and feel free to subscribe
I remember my mom playing MUDs endlessly back in the 90s and early 2000s. I knew it was a roleplaying game, and I knew what it was about, but I never could get interested in that sort of thing. Now I kinda am interested in getting involved with some RPGs, but I have trouble visualizing worlds and game states in my mind, and I need visual references.
"Password is Noneofyourbusiness... it's not that" Password is 18 characters long... Noneofyourbusiness is also 18 characters long. Mate just pulled the most unneeded reveal and coverup ever lmao
You guys really should try the game Gemstone IV. Best Text Based game ever. Plus it's the longest running of it's kind.
My buddy just got me into Duris mud and I picked the hardest level... we die a lot...
thanks for the video, its helped me to understand some research work in academy
Happy to help, ping me if you want to do a live Q&A. Another great resource is also www.reddit.com/r/MUD/
Try T2T mud (The Two Towers). Much more interactive :)
man went from 20 to 880
Loved Vampire Wars and Nodeka. Nobody wants to role play in these new games. Damn kids.
anyone know of a decent sci-fi / futuristic MUD?
Correct me if I am wrong, but there used to be a game called Deadly Temptation? Back in the lates 90s / early 2000s if I remember correctly....
Deadly Temptation doesn't ring a bell, I would suggest posting your question here www.reddit.com/r/MUD/
I might stream this with a team for real thanks for the info.
ua-cam.com/video/_6nNPbWWx2A/v-deo.html
First MUD I tried in Jr High was the original DragonMud later DragonMudII the Rom not the Circlemud which I think went down long ago but.. yeah they killed me ALOT there. Had the most fun on Megaheroes Tinymux except for that one player Dirigible Dirk who was rude to everyone.
Okay this is pretty cool
Glad you liked it!
Thanks these seem really interesting where would you recommend starting?
This is difficult to answer because there are so many - www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ is a very friendly community, just ask. Also check out my other video about using MUDlet client software ua-cam.com/video/F0vvbSqhomE/v-deo.html - Aardwolf seems quite full, so there will be people there. Stickmud was always quite empty but people were friendly and helpful - tell 'em I said hi!
wow, this video is like a time machine :D
These games were the biz in the 80s, made you use your imagination.
And improved your reading comprehension and speed, your literary imagination (visualizing what youre reading) and typing proficiency.
MUDs weren't 80's though. The Internet barely existed, except for a few lucky ones and the military. MUDs like this came into their own in the 90's.
Fantastic! Thank you.
My pleasure!
Stickmud 4 the win!
thought i would sub cause of your small millstone calibration. but after the boomer comment I definitely did
Hey there! Nice content.
You are entertaining!!!
Thank you!
I see that you have 69 subscribers, nice.
ugh
Like commented and subscribed 👍
thank you!
This is amazing
It was noneofyourbusiness lol
It matches the character count at least
wait the password is noneofyourbuisness suspiciously the password typed had the same amount of characters
I used to play ivory towers and armageddon
found about this game from my it teacher. It looks amazing :D and your video is very nice, gonna check more of your content later
priest !blessed !high5
This is very interesting
Yeah, but unlike WoW you could literally set up triggers, that would basically grind for you........man does anybody know a good one that is still up and running with a decent Pbase? I'm mostly A GodWars player...
Aardwolf is one that keeps coming up in my comments
Since you're a Godwars player the standard hack n' slash type MUD might not be what floats your boat, you might prefer a game with a more skill based pvp combat system like Akanbar.
NuclearWar 4eva!
I prefer abandonedcodex.net port: 4000
Just fyi, you can be a boomer without being of the Baby Boomer generation. It has more to do with the way you act or present yourself. And not all of us MUDders are old farts. I'm not even 40 yet lol
Not even 40? Get off my lawn! ;)
@@LuzrBum Hahaha
Ooooh .. no H in wimpy
Oh wow, 2 years later I realize how strange that . Where the heck did that come from. Maybe the Whopper? Or just generally who why what where whither whence?
@@LuzrBum 😂
bune ak zuladan iyi
Its unfortunate how poorly online gaming has evolved over the years