Return-Path: Date: 09 May 1993 23:31:00 -0400 From: "Patrick J. Wetmore" Subject: hurin's mud history To: hellfire@math.okstate.edu Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Reply-To: hellfire@math.okstate.edu hugh requested that I mail this thing to hellfire. so, here goes. don't subscribe me to your list, or I'll personally beat you all silly. A long time ago, when the average MUDder was still in high school or junior high or whatever and reading books and making friends instead of staring at a computer all day, this guy Aspnes made TinyMUD; it was like another game called Monster, which is really silly if you've ever played it. Boy, I bet he'd have never done that if he'd anticipated TinySex. But that's beside the point. Anyways, he stuck that baby up on the net - it was just called TinyMUD. Plain old vanilla TinyMUD. The wizard was just called Wizard. Just Wizard. The players on TinyMUD were all radically different types of people interacting with eachother, and it was fun. We'll refer to them as Dinosaurs later on, but for now we'll just call them Players. Some of the players were furry-types, some were the not-furry types, but they all hung out together anyways (in the Rec Room). Someone got really bored at this point and invented TinySex. Possibly Carneggy, but I don't know. 10% of the players were actually a young teenybopper named Claire (this is a syndrome that happens to MUDs occasionally). Let's get to some real name-dropping, though: PinkIII: a robot, similar to Pink and PinkII. Fun to talk to. Spidey & Cindy: the cutest couple on the MUD. Oklahoma: A state somewhere between Massachusetts and California. In Oklahoma, a man who called himself Nightfall and his girlfriend Chrysalis started up a MUD called TinyHELL. The second TinyMUD ever. (a hint for newbies: Nightfall would have called himself Random, but the name was taken by some goober on TinyMUD. This may or may not be true; my memory is flakey). TinyHELL was fun, too, and the players who played it were a subset of TinyMUD's players. It was the first themed TinyMUD. Anyways, name dropping from TinyHELL: Molly: a transsexual cyborg. it happens. bob: he did TinyMUD too, but thought TinyHELL was cooler. Insane_Hermit: just this guy. Anyways, Nightfall got tired of us players slashing eachother to bits in the Nexus (a place in TinyHELL where all kinds of other places met. in a virtual sense, of course), so he tried to create a Rule saying No More Killing In The Nexus. Molly, bob, and this other guy Hurin (your narrator) responded by slashing eachother to virtual pieces behind his back. Thus, the Kill Macro was invented. Also thus, the Haven flag was invented. Anyways: people saw how much fun Nightfall had by ruling a bunch of unruly college computer users with an Iron Fist, and decided they needed their OWN power trips. Thus, Islandia was created, the first of many MUDs to be ruled by committee. All the Furry types immediately migrated to Islandia, and played Truth or Dare and had too much TinySex and pretended to be woodland animals. Go figure. Eventually Islandia sank, oh well. But that's in the future. There was also TinyTIM around now, and it's still around. (A story for you: Once upon a time, TinyTIM never bothered to change 'Wizard's password from the default 'potrzebie'. An acquaintance of the TinyTIM wizards told this fact to some awful person at RPI, who logged on and proceeded to @toad everyone. This was the first recorded Evil Attack On A Helpless, Innocent MUD). Islandia was really starting to be a drag, being full of furries and committees and such boring stuff, and every room in it was Haven'd so that a decent, God-fearing person couldn't hammer the hell out of greased-up naked virtual fuzzy animals with a well-placed 'kill Gadget=100'. (A note: Gadget, to my knowledge, was a TinyVirgin who never greased up or got naked, in a virtual sense.) So the Hideous Antithesis was created with the help of such Evil Entities as bob, Molly, Grod, and dirque: BloodMUD. It was based on Islandia's own base, TinyBASE, and was an affront to Furriness everywhere. It was also the first MUD to teach the lesson: Suicide Earns Valuable Cash! Right about now we're in Spring of '90. alt.mud was still alt.mud, and some goobs from Penn decided to build the most impressively all-capable MUD that was ever conceived of by man or woman or whatever: PennMUD. Unfortunately, they announced their MUD before it was completed, or even started, and thus invoked the mighty Shub-Internet, who doused them with flames and they withered and never got laid or anything. Also in Spring of '90, the first major wave of NEWBIES arrived, driving away all the Cool Folks from TinyMUD to TinyHELL. Thus, we see the division: TinyMUD: newbies. they mostly had tinysex with eachother, but didn't pretend to be animals. TinyHELL: the beginnings of the 'Random Gang'. Islandia: Furries. Anyone for Truth or Dare? TinyTIM: Some really weird people, who were doing their own thing. BloodMUD: Islandia users who inadvertently saw '#### Please reconnect to BloodMUD@pawl24.pawl.rpi.edu (128.113.10.34) port 6666 ####' It was at this time that the Fine Art of Newbie-Bashing was introduced to MUDdom. Nothing like slumming in TinyMUD for newbies to kill-fest. Woo, what lingo! Then the narrator went away for the summer to read fucking gas and electric meters and be attacked by various four-legged hell-beasts. But he came back, and this is what he saw: TinyHELL II: it was this place with all the same people as TinyHELL. except maybe Nightfall had changed his name to Random. Islandia: bloated and dying. Classic TinyMUD: actually this happened later. Was it tarrant running it? hell if I know. TinyMUD went down right before I left in the spring, and was resurrected as an undead corpse, and eventually run by Bruce, who ruined it. TinyTIM: Still there. BloodMUD: the database was accidentally erased. the new database was lame in comparison. it was rm'd. Big News at This Time: more newbies. mostly furries. Rec.games.mud was created, too. MUDding was legitimitized! Not really. Rec.games.mud soon became reknowned for having far more scathing flames than alt.mud ever did. TinyHELL II died, of course. So then we got Chaos. Which was TinyMUCK. Which was programmable. Same people, same wizards, new toys. The Pirate Ship, for one. Bugging incidents. Fun for everyone! The Crossroads project was started. All the furries talked about it; the evil bastards wouldn't give me a character. Islandia sank and died. No tears. All the furries went and had tinysex somewhere else. Chaos eventually bit, and Brigadoon took over. The first and only MUD to host the Random Gang that wasn't actually run by Random. (maybe it was the other way around, and brigadoon was first. I don't really remember). Anyways, Kaine was a wizard. Now do you understand how utterly abominable Brigadoon was? But it had a cool floating island made by hugh, and lots of people had withered penises, for no good reason. But brigadoon sank, too, and then came DreamScape, which was a Random'n' Moira mud, but that sank, too, and then came Asylum, which was an older MUCK, and that sank, too, and then came Space Madness, and that's sinking because MUSH is awful and wrong. In between some of that stuff, we've got: TwinsPeaksMUSH: the best MUSH I've ever played. it was really cool. SanctuaryMUSH: a silly mush. nobody played it much. PernMUSH: I once tried to impress a dragon uninvited. They @toad'd me. buttholes. The CrossRoads Incident: a chapter in itself. all lies! Goldman Diku: a dikumud, which, according to rumor, had its source in an account which could have .rhosts written to. According to another story I've heard, mysterious players named 'Abdul' and 'Wajeem' hacked up the source so that level-gaining was a cinch if you cast spells in your sleep, and proceeded to attack other players at random. All rumor and innuendo. alt.callahans: a bunch of mudders from a random'n'moira mud got bored one day. 'Tactical Invasive Posting' invented. All the preceeding hideously out of order, of course. Anyways, here's some elaboration on CrossRoads: Allegedly, some naughty wizard on CrossRoads who most certainly wasn't Tourmaline gave her password to two naughty players who most certainly weren't Grod or Hurin. The two naughty players proceeded to cautiously and quietly create several other wizard characters with which to @toad particularly vile Furry characters with, or so I'm told. Eventually, all the stolen unauthorized wizard characters were @toad'd. There's more: the Furries were in an uproar at this blatantly disrespectful violation of their most sacred inner sanctum. They demanded the heads of the alleged perpetrators, who maintained their innocence. They wrote nasty email saying 'an experimental database on our system was corrupted in an attack by one of your users.' Threats of lawsuits were shouted far and wide across the net! And absolutely nothing happened to anyone, as people found other things to occupy their time with. About this time, the net was blessed with the sacred presence of Joel Furr. Actually, I have no idea when jfurr showed up. I'm just making this up. CrossRoads had other problems, though, as all the wizards were argumentative and always in an uproar over some furry issue or another; even Chris, who was supposed to be the level-headed guy. So they all got pissed off and rm'd the bloated thing. Then they all went to play FurryMUCK, and were only occasionally harrassed by Hurin, and harassed a whole lot by Joel Furr, who was often mistaken for Hurin. This is about the present, I guess. Go back a few years, and imagine a young math ph.d. candidate type working on a disk-based mud server. Imagine in him pink fuzzy slippers, with a propeller-beanie on his head. Imagine him inventing TeenyMUD and a rather more angstful fellow running a TeenyMUD and calling it (EVIL!)MUD. Imagine that the initial server was a little buggy, and typing 'kill bob=100' would corrupt your password so you could never play the game again. MUD karma. At some point, DIKU was invented, and people who liked to hack and slash at pretend monsters but couldn't program for shit played it. Also at some point, the number of LP people whining about TinyMUD people not taking them seriously and that TinyMUD people should stop flaming all their requests for serious discussion about programming grew to such a level that I got annoyed and newgroup'd alt.mud.lp. So don't say I never did anything for you, you LP-weenies. Names to drop: Tweeni: cute chick! TERL: handsome stud! Other things that happened: BloodMUD II: the coolest LP yet. Erased in a hideous accident. Those of you who've played it know it was a Righteous in the Filmy Eyes of Shub-Internet. BloodMUD III: an UnterMUD, pre-programming-language. Erased in a hideous accident. Detect a theme? a secret mud: don't worry about it. MURPE: i was the first one to use the acronym, yes. had about 2 players. got tired of hacking on the source and erased it. EliteMUD: a return to TinyMUD 1.4.something. Then summer came. Short-lived. a MUCK that was unnamed: Woodlock called it ScudMUCK. It was actually FuckMUCK. database deleted in a horrible accident. CI: the source is up for FTP. hopefully not to be deleted in a horrible accident. spoofmud: grod's mud. it's fun. MOO: a sound a cow makes. CoolMUD: buggy. ColdMUD: from the guy who made TinyFugue. TinyWar: the nonexistent alternative to TinyFugue. /* drunk, fix later */ PoohMUD: interesting for a while. but then something happened. i forget what. rec.games.mud.* subdivision: I was actually a candidate for moderator of rec.games.mud.announce. Have no idea why. This is a very Hurin-centric history, of course. Other stuff may have happened; I either forgot it, or don't think it's important, or didn't know about it. pat.