MUD1

MUD1
Developer(s)	Roy Trubshaw Richard Bartle
Platform(s)	Platform independent
Release	1978
Genre(s)	Fantasy MUD
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

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.

MUD was created in 1978 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.

In 1980, Roy Trubshaw created MUD version 3 in BCPL (the predecessor of C), to conserve memory and make the program easier to maintain.Richard Bartle, a fellow Essex student, contributed much work on the game database, introducing many of the locations and puzzles that survive to this day. Later that year Roy Trubshaw graduated from Essex University, handing over MUD to Richard Bartle, who continued developing the game. That same year, MUD1 became the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game as Essex University connected its internal network to the ARPANET.

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