Glad to see someone post this. I laughed when I saw this article and some of the comments here. I laugh at most games which think they are "complex" or "challenging", whatever. Go play a MUD, one of the hard ones, get back to me.

MUDs were ridiculously fun. In college I was starting an LPMud of my own and somehow stumbled into using lex/yacc to alter the room and dialogue descriptions depending on point of view. For instance, a character would leave town to visit a cursed place, and then when they came back to town, they'd find it completely abandoned and threatening. But meanwhile, the other players in the town would experience the character speaking in with bizarrely altered words and speech patterns since the character was possessed. (I did this by taking the Swedish Chef filter and altering it.) But then the university admins found it and deleted it. Argh.

I had a friend whose character figured out how to put on a hockey mask, take out a chainsaw, and then hack off your limbs and give your limbs back to you - this was by coding from within the game, sort of.

They still are pretty fun. There's something about graphical RPGs that just gets old. Like, after a few generations of increasingly mindblowing worlds, you become desensitized to it.

MUs are to games with graphics as books are to movies. In a modern game, you're limited to whatever art the designers put into the game. In a MU, you can create whatever persona you would like. It's also a small enough community to where you can have a major impact on the worlds you play in, if you so desire.

One of the really nice things I found about MUDs was how surprisingly accessible they were for creating your own content. I taught myself to program on an LPMUD, and the multi user nature of MUDs taught me a fair bit about optimising code, even for simple class abilities for characters, since they were typically run on underpowered boxes that people had brought in and dumped on a university network, and when players find out that some times can make the server chug for everyone else by using abilities, they will and encourage others to do so as well :)

Uni taught me a lot about the theory of the things that I'd learned in practice previously through MUDs.

I'm actually still running a MUD (Genesis, the first LPmud) and one of our main issues is that we don't get many new developers who want to help out and code. Nowdays players just want to play, getting them to go through the extra effort to learn to code and help out developing the world is very hard.

It's also hard to get new players but a web client has really helped with that. Very few new players stick around though. But enough to keep it going. The lack of developers is probably what will kill the game eventually.

Welp, I just signed up. There goes my day.

Is there any info for developers wanting to contribute? I looked around the site and didn't see anything mentioned.

Once you get out into the main world outside the tutorial there is a board you can post an application for wizhood on. Or just send an in-game mail to me.

A lpMUD I used to play is still up and running 25 years later. At this point though it's just a chat room with spells for the admin staff.

Kids these days still play MUDs. They're called MMOs.

WoW is just a skin on top of a MUD; but said MUD skins are nothing new either.