[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Malsua asked:

Were you playing muds in the 90s?

Do you remember Illusia?

Did you happen to get in on the Alpha test of the Graphical Mud "The Highlands"?

That was the game that I created. I built the client, my wife and friends built content and we had a team of gods who ran around fixing the world. Another guy dealt with the server but I hosted the game server at my house in NJ! We were using Smaugwiz as a placeholder for the Alpha test.

We had 1500 folks in on the Alpha test and the server crashed frequently. About 3 months later, Everquest launched. We started playing that, lol.

My first MUDding experience was actually a turn-based game on a telnet-based BBS in 1989. I don't remember anything about it other than it was some kind of dungeons and dragons high-fantasy "I cast magick missile against the darkness" nonsense.

Eventually I found out that Prodigy was a thing, and I got one of their free trials. I went immediately to their new-age chat area and become an online tarot reader. The co-owner of that chat area assigned me to be their file librarian. That netted me free Prodigy service. I got to playing GemstoneIII right after it broke out from its origins, GemstoneII, which was available on GEnie.

I got into Gemstone and even went to one of their "gatherings" in Chicago, and met up with a few fellow gamers at the NY Ren Faire. Gemstone was written primarily in GSL (Gemstone Scripting Language) and they insisted they weren't a MUD (They were, and they still are). At one point, Gemstone had I believe over 7000 players. And then - EverCrack was invented.

GemStone outlived its origins on CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and GEnie. They had just been introduced on Prodigy when I started playing, and I continued through to their debut on the WWW. People kept selling their characters and special items for real-life money, and it really degraded what was already not all that great roleplay. I didn't feel like paying anymore for something that was just - not fun anymore. So I went on to another game, Inferno, which was a MOO - and not to be confused with InfernoMud, which was also a MOO, but not the same one.

I ended up being head builder of Inferno for a couple of years, but they were having financial troubles and things went south when they tried charging subscriptions to play. The owners turned the game's management over to one of the other players who had some coding experience, and eventually the game died. It was a great game though, and I really loved the codebase.

I shifted to Armageddon and started playing there around 2002. I became a builder a couple of years ago, and I'm on staff now. Arm started out as stock DIKU, then the original owner named Dan added his own spin to it using DMPL (Dan's Mud Programming Language). Eventually they ended up rewriting pretty much the entire code, turning it into something that has parts that resemble DIKU but is really not DIKU at all anymore. It's got a lot of javascript in it now, something that didn't exist in the 1990's (js started as Mocha in 1995 but wasn't available as an available coding option for game developers until early 2000-2005).

I don't remember Illusia. I've never played any graphical mud at all. The only "graphics" games I've played were the Kings Quest series, Myst (the original), and Kingdom of Loathing, which is a stick-figure browser game.