GemStone IV is a multiplayer text-based online role-playing video game ( often known as a MUD ) produced by Simutronics.

LPMud was innovative in its separation of the MUD infrastructure into a virtual machine ( known as the driver ) and a development framework written in the LPC programming language ( known as the mudlib ).

Some design elements in the mudlib have become popular in other MUD libraries-for example, the library's player commands that express emotions are named " soul commands ", and the way ANSI colour is encoded ( e. g. ) has been named " Pinkfish colour " after David Bennett, the main author of the library, who is widely known in the MUD community by his alias of Pinkfish.

Genesis was created as the first implementation of the LPC language, in which the developer ( commonly known as a wizard within the MUD ) is able to create objects by using a language similar to the C programming language.

The players with immortal characters ( usually known as simply immortal players or wizards ) are the administrators of the MUD.

Richard Allan Bartle ( born 10 January 1960 in Ripon, England ) is a British writer, professor and game researcher, best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 ( the first MUD ) and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds.

He lectured at Essex until 1987, when he left to work full time on MUD ( known as MUD2 in its present version ).

AberChat is used primarily by the type of MUD known as AberMUD.

The MUD itself has subsequently come to be known as " TinyMUD Classic " or simply " Classic ", or occasionally " DaisyMUD " ( since in the final days of its first incarnation, it ran on a computer named " daisy ").

Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL ( the predecessor of C ), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.

MUD1 was reportedly closed down when Richard Bartle licensed MUD1 to CompuServe, and was getting pressure from them to close Essex MUD.

This left MIST, a derivative of MUD1 with similar gameplay, as the only remaining MUD running on the Essex University network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity.

Alan Cox had played the original University of Essex MUD, and the gameplay was heavily influenced by it.

In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, created the game MUD ( Multi-User Dungeon ).

He also took an active interest in online services, becoming a wizard ( admin ) at Essex MUD, the world's first multiplayer online role-playing game.

During the Christmas of 1985, Neil Newell, an avid MUD1 player, started programming his own MUD called SHADES because MUD1 was closed down during the holidays.

A screenshot from MUD1, the first MUD

A MUD (; originally Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain ), is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based.

The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD called Aradath ( which was later renamed, upgraded and ported to GEnie as Dragon's Gate ) and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was also ported to GEnie.

In later years the game changed its license, and removed specific Hercules & Xena trademarks, but is still running as a retooled " tongue in cheek " mythology MUD.

Several months later, in May 1993, Elson decided that the CircleMUD codebase could be used to fill a niche in the MUD community.

The MUD was founded in 1991 and opened to the public in 1992 ( receiving continuous updates since then, now twenty years later ).

For a few years this was a very popular form of MUD, hosted on a number of BBS systems, until widespread Internet access eliminated most BBSes.

* GemStone IV, Simutronics ' flagship product, a text-based multiplayer fantasy game, which has seen over one million users over the years, and is the longest-running commercial MUD in the world.

Aggressive efforts have been made to make the MUD more newbie friendly but most players continue to be well established players who have invested months or years into the game.

In its early years it was commonly conceived of as a graphical MUD, though this term, and M59s preferred " MMPRPG ", was eventually displaced by the now-ubiquitous Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, a term coined by Richard Garriott of Ultima Online in 1997.

The MUD ran for a while on a machine in Melbourne before moving to run in the UK on a machine at Compulink where Gordon " DrGoon " was added to the administration team.

The server on which Nightmare ran had a catastrophic failure, and efforts to restore the MUD to operational mode failed, resulting in the MUD's demise.

After Spelljammer was finished, Escudero was instrumental in developing a multi-line BBS called Ice Online that ran a custom coded MUD.

The " Lambda " name is from Curtis's own username on earlier MUD systems.

In 1978, around the same time Roy Trubshaw wrote MUD, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game called Milieu using Multi-Pascal on a CDC Cyber 6600 series mainframe which was operated by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium.

To distance itself from the combat-oriented traditional MUDs it was said that the " D " in TinyMUD stood for Multi-User " Domain " or " Dimension "; this, along with the eventual popularity of acronyms other than MUD ( such as MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, and so on ) for this kind of server, led to the eventual adoption of the term MU * to refer to the TinyMUD family.

There are also tools available which add hotkey-activated macros to telnet and MUD clients giving the player the ability to move around the MUD using the arrow keys on their keyboard for example.

A less-known MUD variant is the talker, a variety of online chat environment typically based on server software like ew-too or NUTS.

As a noun, the word MUD is variously written MUD, Mud, and mud, depending on speaker and context.

Puns on the " wet dirt " meaning of " mud " are endemic, as with, for example, the names of the ROM ( Rivers of MUD ), MUCK, MUSH, and CoffeeMUD codebases and the MUD Muddy Waters.

In multiplayer online games, a MUSH ( a backronymed pun on MUD most often expanded as Multi-User Shared Hallucination, though Multi-User Shared Hack, Habitat, and Holodeck are also observed ) is a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time.

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created the first MUD on a PDP-10.

It did not take long until TinyMUD had emerged as the " most popular MUD on the internet ", and a subculture of furry fans emerged within the system.

They are also used in many MUD systems, though many people prefer to edit text on their own computer and then use their MUD client's upload feature to paste the text directly in the line editor.

* Modus Operandi, a MUD set on a fictional Caribbean island, originally designed to encourage mystery-based roleplay.

* Immortal ( MUD ), an administrator or developer on a MUD

* Discworld MUD, a text-based online role-playing game based on Discworld

It is expected on BatMUD that a coder will actively work on development of the MUD, with newcomers who have not been productive enough to a level being periodically purged.