Avalon (MUD)
| Avalon: The Legend Lives | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Yehuda Simmons |
| Engine | Hourglass |
| Platform(s) | Platform independent |
| Release date(s) | 1989 |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy MUD |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
Avalon: The Legend Lives is a text-based online multi-player role-playing game world that was first released on 28 October 1989 at the gaming convention Adventure 89. It has maintained a continuous on-line presence with consistent and intact persona files and player history since the late 1980s, rendering it the longest continuously running on-line role-playing game in history.
While it follows closely in the tradition of many early Multi-User Dungeons, it was Avalon that pioneered many features that have since become signature components of the role-playing game genre: real economies, distinct ecosystems and weather effects, gods with followers and priests, player housing and autonomous governments, skill-based real time PVP combat, and a fully realized warfare conquest system as well as pioneering plotted quests rather than the standard puzzle or treasure dash systems seen in first generations MUDs and MUA.
Within Avalon, players are offered the opportunity to "live another life"; to fully immerse themselves in the gameworld—a world of merchants, thieves, princes, gods, dragons, and more. It was the first game of its—or any—kind with its own history and narrative that was decided by the players themselves.
Avalon's first non-public incarnation was written as a 4-8 player MUD called Lands of the Crown on the BBC Micro Model B 32K in 6502 Assembly Language during 1988 to Early 1989. It was superseded by the fledgling Avalon coded in the bespoke language Hourglass in ARM Assembler, written by Yehuda Simmons and then joined circa May 1990 by Daniel James, run on the Acorn Archimedes A440. It debuted at the last of the Mega Meets, Adventure 89, and initially ran on the IOWA system from 11 November 1989 until it went independent during May 1990. It opened its first 'Hostplay' in Camden, London, which hosted 10 2400 bit/s modem-based dial-in lines and 6 onsite machines from which to play. Avalon arrived on the internet via Avalon.co.uk on October 14, 1994 and made the leap from the venerable Archimedes to an Intel Pentium Architecture PC running Debian Linux. Moving forward it transferred to a dedicated managed server on Red Hat Linux where, other than shifting to Ubuntu (operating system), it has remained ever since.
A second iteration of Avalon opened in Sheffield, UK on 1 May 1992, primarily to circumvent the exorbitant cost of online play at national UK call rates. This remained open until Sunday, 7 May 1995 at Avalon Version '87 when its players made the journey and transferred onto the now global Avalon.
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