An Ancient TinyMud

@zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place: Here's my version of this story. This was long ago and my memories are hazy: apologies when I have the facts wrong…

Sometime in the mid-1980s I was at my small college and TinyMud was a new thing: a MUD that allowed in-game content creation. I grabbed a copy of the C code from some FTP site and fixed a bunch of bugs and enhanced it a bit. I added some administrative function and fired it up on our UNIX VAX and told the folks who inhabited our Terminal Room about it.

The new TinyMud exploded. Within a couple of days everybody on campus who used computers was creating content in-game. Vast neighborhoods sprang up. One of my friends wrote a bot — MacHinery, who played bagpipes in the Scottish Highlands. A huge graphical map was rendered on the Terminal Room whiteboards. It was a roaring success.

Within a few weeks our TinyMud was a ghost town. You could wander the abandoned creations for hours. MacHinery still played in The Scottish Highlands, but humans were no longer a thing. The game was over.

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I have a few theories about what happened.

First and foremost, the creation in TinyMud was pretty limited. Simple lock-and-key puzzles were about as complex as it got. The power of textual description took it a long ways, but the boredom seems to have set in early. This was no LambdaMOO, and while LambdaMOO found other ways to die this one seems to have just reached its natural limit.

Second was the transition between game and social network. Our TinyMud never really made it. I had imagined the place as somewhere folks could go hang out and interact in a richer environment than Berkeley Talk, e-mail and Usenet posts. Folks weren't into it: interactions were mostly async. I think Meta (yeesh) may be finding out the same thing today. Snow Crash and Ready Player One read like the future, but it's not clear many people want a virtual world to hang out in.

Of course, having the interactions be mostly in a Terminal Room where the actual human being was twenty feet away to talk to didn't help here. There were folks like myself with 300 baud modems, but they were very much in the minority.

Third is what you said. Twenty people playing was a lot for the place and time, but a big social world may require a bigger pop to sustain itself.

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That's my story. Hope it was fun to read, at least. MacHinery has passed now, and I heard a rumor that its creator has passed too. Somewhere in my heart, though, MacHinery is still playing away in the Scottish Highlands.