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From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds

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International Handbook of Internet Research

Abstract

Today’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games are the direct descendants of the textual worlds of the 1980s, not only in design and implementation terms but also in the way they are evolving thematically.

Thus far, they have faithfully mirrored the path taken by their forebears. If they continue to do so, what can we expect of the graphical worlds of the future?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Even though it was banned there by the parliament of James II in 1457. They banned football (soccer) at the same time.

  2. 2.

    Conflict of interests warning: this is me.

  3. 3.

    My oldest extant program listings for MUD, along with original design artefacts, are deposited in the archives of Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources. They asked first. http://library.stanford.edu/.

  4. 4.

    He acknowledged this in MUD’s very name: the D, while chosen primarily to complete a memorable acronym, formally stands for Dungeon (a Fortran port of Zork that Trubshaw had encountered).

  5. 5.

    This “personal freedom allows people to do good” world view was common among those who worked with computers at the time, probably because only those holding to that particular set of values could function as programmers in those experimental, tool-free days (Levy, 1984).

  6. 6.

    The best-known of these were ROCK (Fox, 1983) and MIST (Barham et al., 1987).

  7. 7.

    As part of a joint project with the Post Office (now British Telecom), Essex University had an X.25 connection to the ARPAnet, the network which later evolved into the internet.

  8. 8.

    There was no Federation I: the game began life in 1985 as a CompuNet project called Multi-User Galaxy Game, in an attempt to create a home-grown alternative to MUD1. It is notable for being the first virtual world to use a Science Fiction setting, although few (if any) other SF virtual worlds directly descend from it. Its de-emphasising of combat did influence other early virtual worlds, however.

  9. 9.

    He is also well known for his pioneering work on the Linux operating system, in 2005 receiving a LinuxWorld lifetime achievement award in recognition of his efforts.

  10. 10.

    TinyMUCK came with its own language, TinyMUF (“Multi-User Forth”) embedded within.

  11. 11.

    As with the MUCK in TinyMUCK, the MUSH in TinyMUSH wasn’t intended to be an acronym.

  12. 12.

    “I didn’t think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this.” Lars Pensjö, quoted in (Reese, 1996).

  13. 13.

    Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer.

  14. 14.

    Datalogisk Institut ved Københavns Universitet.

  15. 15.

    The usual figure quoted is 70%, but according to Neil Harris, who was Director, Marketing at GEnie, it peaked at 40%.

  16. 16.

    CompuServe had well over a million around this time; GEnie claimed 400,000 but the reality was somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000.

  17. 17.

    Note that although this shares the Forgotten Realms setting of the 2002 BioWare game of the same name, there’s no formal connection between the two.

  18. 18.

    Renamed the ImagiNation Network in 1994.

  19. 19.

    Avatar was the most successful ever PLATO game, accounting for 6% of all PLATO usage during its tenure.

  20. 20.

    It would be completely zero, but a few influential people in the virtual world industry did cut their teeth on PLATO. In particular, producer Gordon Walton, lawyer Andy Zaffron and designer David Shapiro (“Dr Cat”) played a lot of Avatar.

  21. 21.

    It was also offered to The Source, but was not received favourably even though it already ran on the same type of mainframe (Prime Computer) it used.

  22. 22.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s now regarded as one of Korea’s most esteemed game designers.

  23. 23.

    Indeed, it went live exactly 10 years ago to the day that I’m writing this: 27 September, 1996.

  24. 24.

    It garnered around 12,000 players, with each instantiation of the world capable of holding around 250 players – about the same as for contemporary textual worlds.

  25. 25.

    It was an offshoot of the 1992 World of Carnage (where the Koster met Meridian 59’s Damion Schubert), and although ultimately derived from DikuMUD was – and remains – an incredibly detailed fantasy world, with deep, hand-crafted quests. Delashmit, its programmer, left in 1995 to become lead programmer for Ultima Online, and it was he who recommended the Kosters to Origin Systems (UO’s publisher).

  26. 26.

    The Ultima series of role-playing games was famed for combining open-ended gameplay with a strong narrative. For a list of the full series, see http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/ultima-series.

  27. 27.

    At one point, the internet bandwidth used by UO was greater than that used by New York.

  28. 28.

    So close are the similarities that EverQuest’s programmers were obliged to sign a sworn statement to confirm that they didn’t use any DikuMUD code in the game. http://www.dikumud.com/img/server.gif.

  29. 29.

    This is why I said Fifth-Age virtual worlds were almost entirely descended from Third-Age worlds. Mythic products DAoC and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning came from a Fourth-Age world and are currently the only major MMORPGs not to be a direct descendent of MUD1 (although Simutronics’ Hero’s Journey, a derivative of Gemstone IV, will shortly join them).

  30. 30.

    A launch is said to be smooth if the players can buy and install the software without problem; they can access the servers without problem; there are neither too many nor too few servers available; the servers don’t crash; the clients don’t crash; there are no horrendous bugs that render the world unplayable. All this is well known to virtual world developers, yet products are still launched which manage to fail in every one of these respects…

  31. 31.

    Alternatively, for those with a soft spot for AC, expanding the “big three” to the “big four”.

  32. 32.

    Daniel James has long experience in virtual world design: he was a player of MUD1 (for which he wrote the wizards’ guide in 1984) and was one of the designers of Avalon in 1989.

  33. 33.

    For a reasonable list, see http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/0.

  34. 34.

    http://www.sulake.com/pressroom_releases_01122005.html.

  35. 35.

    Daily updated figures are shown at https://secondlife.com/currency/economy.php (free registration required).

  36. 36.

    The amount spent to develop World of Warcraft is variously quoted at between $30m and $60m, both with and without the promotional costs.

  37. 37.

    http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/.

  38. 38.

    http://www.activeworlds.com/.

  39. 39.

    http://vmk.disney.go.com/vmk/en_US/index?name=VMKHomePage.

  40. 40.

    http://www.multiverse.net/.

  41. 41.

    http://www.realmcrafter.com/.

  42. 42.

    http://www.worldforge.org/.

  43. 43.

    http://https://www.metaplace.com/.

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  1. School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Essex, UK

    Richard A. Bartle

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  1. Richard A. Bartle
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Correspondence to Richard A. Bartle .

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  1. Dept. Political Science, Virginia Tech, Major Williams Hall 531, Blacksburg, 24061, USA

    Jeremy Hunsinger

  2. Peachtree St. NE., 620, Atlanta, 30308, USA

    Lisbeth Klastrup

  3. Fac. Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University, Kent St., Bentley, 6102, Australia

    Matthew Allen

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Bartle, R.A. (2009). From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_2

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