ABSTRACT
Almost all of today’s virtual worlds – its massively multiplayer online role-playing games – are descended from a single progenitor: MUD, the multi-user dungeon. Written in 1978 by two computer science undergraduates at Essex University in the UK, MUD itself wasn’t inspired by anything. Nevertheless, it didn’t simply come into existence from nowhere: it had to be designed, it had to be programmed, and – most importantly of all – there had to be a reason for its creation.
This essay, by one of MUD’s developers, tells the story of MUD’s genesis three times over, from three independent perspectives: as code, as design, as art. As the story is told and retold, the interrelationships between the different viewpoints become increasingly apparent. It was not by accident that two random undergraduates at a provincial British university wrote a game that sparked a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry.
