A Grizzled Veteran

Of the MMORPG Wars (Part the First)

The other day, Killa pointed out to me a truth I'd never realized about myself: That I am, in fact, a true veteran of the MMORPG experience. Yea, even the MORPG experience, sans an "m."

Back in the day, perhaps when I was in middle school or just beginning high school, I used to play text-based MUDs over the ZuggSoft zMUD client. Certainly MU*s (i.e., MUDs and their various brethren, such as MUSHs, MOOs, etc.) can't be considered massively multiplayer---not in the contemporary sense of the word---but I think they were probably the earliest recognizable ancestor of the modern MMORPG. Remember, too, that there were far fewer people in the world back then, and so MUDs may actually have had a higher proportion of the population enrolled. We don't know. Also, back in the day, we couldn't count nearly as high as we can today. It's entirely possible that Legend Mud had as many registered users as Second Life, but our primitive calculators just couldn't count that high.

Most of the MUDs I visited never had more than ten or eleven characters milling around at a given time, but that was plenty to get some role-playing, action-packed adventure going. The "con system" found in these MUDs---by which a player could "consider" a target to find out how difficult it would be to defeat---with its classic answers like "Do you feel lucky, punk?" and "Death will thank you for your gift" has become a staple of many subsequent MMORPGs. Likewise, the Orc Scout and the Gnoll Pup have been faithfully reincarnated again and again as the genre has evolved.

MUDs, I believe, are the immediate progeny of the prototypical Zork, with its many "rooms" conceptualized by descriptive text, its white house, its open mailbox, etc. And its means of moving west by typing "Move West," or "Move W," or "West," or even just "W." I remember having memorized long strings of directions---"From the healer to the weapon shop? Oh that's easy, just go S; E; E; E; S; S; W; W; W; N."

As great and wondrous as I know all that sounds, these early ancestors of the modern MMORPG left something to be desired. Graphics, perhaps. And . . . strippers?

(to be continued)