1978 · Roy Trubshaw · Adventure · Fantasy

British Legends

Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD (referred to as MUD1, to distinguish it from its successor, MUD2, and the MUD genre in general) is an early MUD and one of the oldest examples of a virtual world in existence.

Released: 1978
Platforms: Apple II mainframe computer
Genres: Adventure Fantasy MUD MUDs Role-playing
Developers: Roy Trubshaw Richard Bartle
Publishers: —
Modes: Multiplayer
Perspective: Text
Themes: Fantasy
Country: United Kingdom

About

Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD (referred to as MUD1, to distinguish it from its successor, MUD2, and the MUD genre in general), is the first MUD.

Keywords

mud
multi-user-dungeon

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

MUD was created in 1977 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex on a DEC PDP-10. Trubshaw named the game Multi-User Dungeon, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. Zork in turn was inspired by an older text-adventure game known as Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT.

MUD1 was written in the domain-specific programming language Multi User Dungeon Definition Language (MUDDL). Its first version was written by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in BCPL. It was later ported to C++ and used in other MUDs such as MIST.