DikuMUD

Danish text-based virtual world (MUD)

Released: 1990
Platforms: Legacy Computer
Genres: MUD MUDs
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Perspective: Text
Themes: Fantasy
Engine: DikuMUD
Country: Denmark
Languages: English

About

DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of multi-user domain (MUD). It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet)—the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Commonly referred to as simply "Diku", the game was greatly inspired by AberMUD, though Diku became one of the first multi-user games to become popular as a freely-available program for its gameplay and similarity to Dungeons & Dragons. The gameplay style of the great preponderance of DikuMUDs is hack and slash, which is seen proudly as emblematic of what DikuMUD stands for.

Keywords

multi-user-dungeon

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

DikuMUD was created by the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science among a group of student friends: Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. According to Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD, DikuMUD's developers sought to create a better version of AberMUD. Unlike TinyMUD and LPMUD, which encouraged live changes to the virtual world, DikuMUD hard-coded its virtual world.

The making of DikuMUD was first announced on Usenet by Hans Henrik Stærfeldt March 27, 1990. At the time Madsen, Hammer, and Stærfeldt were the only developers, joined by Michael Seifert in June 1990. Stærfeldt stated that their intention was to create a MUD that was less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more like Dungeons & Dragons. The first DikuMUD was in working development as early as October 1990 and officially opened publicly running at freja.diku.dk port 4000 on February 3, 1991.

Legacy

As a result of its easily operable codebase, several major standalone MUD codebases were spun out using DikuMUD's code, namely Circle, Silly, and Merc. In turn, Merc led to ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy), which each spawned their own codebases. One such derivative of DikuMUD and Merc was SMAUG (Simulated Medieval Adventure Multi-user Game).

It has been proposed by Raph Koster (lead designer of Ultima Online and chief creative officer of EverQuest II) that Diku has resulted in the greatest proliferation of gameworlds due to being the easiest to set up and use. He further pointed out that "Diku codebases did eventually popularize many of the major developments in muds", and that the Diku gameplay provided inspiration for numerous MMORPGs, including EverQuest, World of Warcraft and Ultima Online.