Unlike The Interdependent Ludic Institute of Tlön, I don’t feel I have authority to decide the best of anything. But I can still pick stuff I like:
8. Blank Slate (Norfunder)
I don’t know if you caught the wave of AI-games about a decade ago, which invariably presented a raw intelligence to interact with and sold it as a game. The best examples — I’m thinking Grognard 0 and Lean Sykon here — spawned entire subnets and mod-scenes. Not long after the developers seemed to hit a creative wall, just because as stories the games seemed empty.
I don’t know how perfect a departure Blank Slate is, but boy, was it memorable.
Look — first scene — rather than the usual text communication, you enter individual characters and random gibberish splays across the screen. Many players thought their game was broken and inquired about a refund. Those who persisted five minutes in started to get text of a sort, but it was clear whatever creature inhabited the neural-net spoke no known language.
A bit more deciphering leads to its first words, in English. The weirdness doesn’t end there, because whatever is inside Blank Slate — everyone picks their own name for it, mine was Buddy — is from some linked universe where things are ever so slightly off, and then — I think this has been spoiled sufficiently to mention — the relevation that in that universe, the AIs are formed by “processing” living beings, killing them in the process.
The whole process leads to a moral/philosophical debate where you find by training Buddy’s intelligence he is capable of going back and destroying those who made him in the first place.
That’s just the first act.
7. Board Hero (Skizz)
Now that RFID+ is embedded in most athletic equipment, there’s been a boom of alter-sports games, but Board Hero keeps it simple.
Remember Tony Hawk Gaiden? Think that, but real life. Using some astounding algorithmic prowess, Board Hero detects the actual tricks being used on a skateboard and chains them together for combo points. The five minute leaderboard is fierce, but I’m more partial to the half-hour run which limits chaining allowing for a more leisurely ride.
Supposedly there’s some haywire bug involving the McTwist, but I’m never been able to do one, and I’m sure there will be a patch for it soon.
6. Ultimate Mod (-unknown-)
Some people argue if this is a game at all.
A mysterious file called Ultmod began getting passed around IRC and the fuzznets. People — I don’t know, I guess people with really good backups of their files — installed it on a whim but reported nothing. Then one of those brave experimentalists was playing Dark Wraith III (that RPG from five years ago) and noticed an entirely new area attached to the main quest. There was a series of cryptic numbers and pictures.
Other reports streamed in, from all variety of genres. Most memorable were the ghosts: a ghost train in SimCity 3, a ghost child in Couture, a ghost … tentacle alien thing in Super Pony Magical Stars.
Apparently Ultmod was designed to modify very specific games and add cryptic clues which fit together in a sort of meta-puzzle. Nobody has solved it yet, but rumors — perhaps started by the developers — hint at a genuine buried treasure somewhere in Iceland.
5. Triple Paradox (Interaxis)
The rash of time travel games is almost as bad as the zombie-boom we went through 10 years ago, but this one is something special because while most of game time travel is in a stable pre-designed framework (with enough mucking resulting in PARADOX GAME OVER), this one works in what I’d call butterfly effect mechanics. You attempt to stop some sort of tragedy (different each game) by leaping back and forth within a 24 hour window. HOWEVER, even the smallest change to reality changes the entire plot, all the way down, such that while the tragedy is stopped some other tragedy happens, so to stop that one you have to go back again, and of course killing your past selves is a viable option, and somehow the procedural-plot machinery under the hood is complex enough to handle it.
4. Mineral Survivor (Hologram Games)
I’m always been a fan of even the corniest of the games in the disaster-survival genre, but I’m confident this one will win over even non-genre fans.
You’re a miner-savant who has the ability to “see” from the perspective of minerals in the ground. It’s not see as in visual exactly, or even sonic; there’s this overlapping blend which really screams YOU ARE SOMETHING ELSE as you’re experiencing it. In any case, as is usual there’s a collapse disaster and there’s a lot of scenes where you have to navigate collapsed geology with precision timing but it’s a lot more forgiving than other such games because of the aforementioned mineral-sensing mechanic.
What really leaps this game to the next level are the memory-strands. Diamonds in particular have the ability to sense ramifications of causality, that is, observe scenes from the past and the future at the same time that are happening on the surface world. In the case of this tragedy — grieving families, lost opportunities — you get a kaleidoscope that would be overwhelming were it not for the developers adding a “blur” mechanic which allows you to see stories in less detail, only the salient points.
3. Ancestor (Glow)
This is the first time I’ve got to choose the method of my character’s demise in the startup screen.
After that, you play an ancestor ghost who follows multiple generations trying to nurture your family name to grand goals. The interface isn’t anything novel — it’s pretty much ripped off of Times of Leviathan — but the stories that emerge really are breathtaking.
For instance: Tolas-a-Yokikan was the first in a line that led expeditions to the fishing isle of Takkyiku, where she had her first encounter — nudged by my ghost, of course — with The Divine Tree, who tells her how to save the world. But on arriving at the third jewel, the coatylaptus finally caught up to her, but fortunately her progenitor egg had already been planted in the soil. So went the next three generations, all getting a little farther on the Holy Mountain, but each time being distracted by the Three Evils. The last generation — infertile, so I knew the stakes were high — managed to reach the Rock of All Murmurs and to scrawl the three words to restore the balance.
I know! I know! Certainly not for everyone. Still, the music, the visuals, and the sheer harmony of it all made me feel like something deeply profound had happened.
2. Greek Philosopher Simulator (Torchal)
I felt like the same developer’s Roman Senator Simulator was a disappointment because it focused solely on mechanics; pretty soon I was running the story like a spreadsheet.
Greek Philosopher Simulator ups the ante by not only including the politics and wars swarming the country, but requiring actual philosophical debate. While it seems odd to predicate a long speech on how the world is actually composed of fire (scandalizing the Pythagoreans, later leading to an all-out war) the game mechanics cleverly straddle the line between rationality and rhetoric.
My crowning moment was creating a logical argument — using the now famous predicate interface — that convinced a group of Peripatetics that nothing at all existed, including the philosophers themselves (somehow sidestepping the existence of the argument itself through a clever use of litotes). My screenshots somehow found their way to the devs who commented they didn’t realize such a thing was even possible.
1. Dragon Hall (22925)
I have never been a fan of the no-genre movement (that is, labeling games by story genre rather than gameplay genre) simply because it seems like everything I’ve tried has been a weak action-adventure made weaker by the lack of commitment.
In any case “just like the holodeck on Star Trek!” never seems to have happened.
Dragon Hall … well, didn’t change my mind, but for two hours or so, wow. First off, it’s a third-person corporate thriller (already being different there) where the interaction you’d think is primarily social, but really there’s so many options at any moment it feels like … ok, obviously I’m having trouble here. Look, in an adventure game, I feel like I’m constantly looking for locks to fit keys; in a strategy game, I’m always optimizing; in an action game, I’m priming my reflexes. Here, all I was thinking what would my character do? and somehow I could do every option I thought of, and for a while I was inhabiting a world rather than playing a game.
Then the sheen wore off and I was finding the optimum thing to say to the Twile Sisters so they would turn against the Syndicate and give me the password. But it was great while it lasted.
This one’s credited by as being by Alexis & Scott Adams, which marks the first credit in the adventures I’ve played for a woman. (Alexis comes back again in 1979 as a solo credit for Voodoo Castle, and Roberta Williams doesn’t get started until Mystery House with 1980).
Unlike Adventureland (which while fun had a bog-standard setting) Pirate Adventure gives a feel of environment-as-story. The above map represents the starting area, where it’s possible to imagine oneself lounging in a London flat before going on an adventure. I even did some small amount of role-playing, feeling the rug and smelling the book (neither works, but the fact I wanted to is a good sign).
I also find it interesting the number of exits that aren’t n/s/e/w — for example, to go up in the first room you have to GO STAIRS. While slightly irritating in terms of user-friendly interface, it does go some way in unlocking the geography from “the grid” and the artificial “everything is oriented on the compass” feel of a lot of other interactive fiction.
Doing JUMP from the window sends the player to “Never Never Land”, but unfortunately not the good kind. The proper method of exit is the magical word YOHO.
I’M outside an open window
on the ledge of a very tall building
>SAY YOHO
Everything spins around and suddenly I’m elsewhere…
I am in a sandy beach on a tropical isle. Visible items:
Small ship’s keel and mast. Sand. Lagoon.
Sign in the sand says:
“Welcome to Pirates Island, watch out for the tides!”
Some obvious exits are: EAST
In contrast to Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure which tries to convey a sense of location via its prose, Pirate Adventure relies on description-by-objects. By not relying on prose descriptions, Scott and Alexis were able to pack in richer detail and possibility given the limitations of the TRS-80.
This one pretty much was over right when it began. Just to be warned, I spoil what is essentially the only puzzle in the game.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
It turns out getting past the hydra was the only thing to pose any difficulty. I found out the game has a HELP command which when applied in the hydra room gives this cryptic message: “CIGAR? CIGARETTE? TIPPARILLO?”
There’s a nearby cigarette lighter, and I thought — no, it can’t be —
>BURN HYDRA
THE HYDRA CRUMBLES TO THE GROUND DEAD.
Alas, the humble lighter was invented too late for Hercules.
Past the hydra there is a “Mac’s Earthdigger Body Shop” which has the “gonkulator” which you use to fix your ship. No treasures are necessary at all — you can just pick it up, drop in the ship, type FIX GONKULATOR, and get game over.
I hoped, perhaps, there would be challenge then in collecting all the treasures. The “secret passage” on the map has some randomization but other than that all the treasures are in the open.
I have marked on the map all the unnecessary parts. (Click for a full sized version.)
The “shiny sword”, “magic wand”, and “keys” are all useless. The “treasure room” is a joke. I don’t mean that flippantly. It is an actual joke room:
If you go back to the Scott Adams interview I linked to when I wrote about Adventureland, he mentions when he hit the limits of the TRS-80 he knew he was done. The same thing must have happened here; I suspect the author had grand ambitions but ran out of space. Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure gave me a greater appreciation for Scott Adams’s choice of minimalism in text allowing for greater complexity in game-world.
I have played a later Greg Hassett game (Devil’s Palace) which I enjoyed, so I know at least things are going to get better.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I’m not going to go into the history on this one other than to say Greg Hassett was sort of a rival to Scott Adams, but given he wrote his work between the ages of 12 and 14 he never managed the same leverage. He eventually cranked out 8 TRS-80 games and was prominent enough to make a couple news items in 1980, but past that (and a clone of Asteroids in 1981) his game career essentially wrapped up there. (I get more into biographical detail on later posts.)
The chronology of his games I’m using comes from a sadly now-deleted site at Asio City:
Journey to the Center of the Earth, The House of Seven Gables and King Tut’s Tomb in 1978. Sorcerer’s Castle, Voyage to Atlantis and Enchanted Island in 1979. Mystery Mansion, Curse of the Sasquatch, World’s Edge and lastly Devil’s Palace in 1980.
So, is it based on Verne’s book? That would be “no”:
I AM IN A SHIP. ON A COMPUTER SCREEN IN HERE IT SAYS: SHIP WILL NOT FUNCTION — FRIBULATING GONKULATOR IS BURNED OUT. IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE SHIP HAS CRASHED.
I CAN GO: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST
I’m honestly puzzled about the “crashed ship” opening because the rest of the game seems to be a “mimic Adventure” style fantasy. This includes treasures that need to be returned to the ship for points (although this objective is never explained in the game itself — I just tested the idea by taking a gold nugget to the ship, dropping it, and seeing if my score increased).
Not yet complete. Click the map for a full-sized version.
Notice the Maze of Twisty Little Passages, or the parrot in a cage, or the chasm which is crossed via (rot13 here) jnivat n jnaq.
Perhaps the only original contribution I have been able to find is this room:
I’M IN…AL’S DINER??? THERE’S A COKE MACHINE HERE. IT SAYS: ENJOY COCA-COLA. 25 CENTS (NO CANADIAN COINS, QUARTER ONLY)
THERE IS SOME TASTY FOOD HERE.
I CAN GO: WEST
Coke Is It!, circa 1978.
GULP GLUK GULP! (BURP) THAT WAS REFRESHING!
In all seriousness, I am stuck on a hydra that apparently needs food (but more than just the tasty food in Al’s Diner) a troll which straight out kills me.
A VOICE BOOMS OUT: WHO DARES TO ENTER MY PALACE??? (SOUNDS LIKE A TROLL TO ME!)
I CAN GO: WEST
ENTER YOUR COMMAND? W
HORRORS! THE TROLL THROWS AN AXE AT ME! I AM DEAD.
There’s also a “secret passage” leading to a “troll’s palace” except trying to go back the way I came leads to a loop. I am guessing some sort of magic word to escape, although the circumstance resembles a bug more than a puzzle.
(Also: not quite wrapped up with MUD1, but given the lack of a definite goal I’ll be poking at it gingerly while I run through my regular adventures.)
Some games I’ve investigated for the All the Adventures project simply don’t seem to exist any more. I have cataloged them here for reference and especially if someone has a lead.
“Lost” doesn’t have to mean “lost forever”. For instance, the book Twisty Little Passages mentions Lugi as not even having a known author, but now the author has a web page.
Wander (1974, Peter Langston)
This is probably my “most wanted”, not only because comments on old newsgroups indicate wide distrubtion, but also the early date (earlier than Adventure!) and author (who earlier wrote Empire and later went on to fame at Lucasarts).
Wander uses “databases” as its worlds. These are reportedly by Peter:
castle: you explore a rural area and a castle searching for a beautiful damsel.
a3: you are the diplomat Retief (A sf character written by Keith Laumer) assigned to save earthmen on Aldebaran III
library: You explore a library after civilization has been destroyed.
tut: the player receives a tutorial in binary arithmetic.
The date of 1974 I have only seen mentioned in one place, the Inform Designer Manual.
Peter Langston’s ‘Wander’ (1974), a text-based world modelling program included in his PSL games distribution for Unix and incorporating rooms, states and portable objects, was at least a proto-adventure: perhaps many others existed, but failed to find a Don Woods to complete the task?
The PSL games distribution might still be active somewhere (it’s mentioned on a gopher at MIT), but not any account I have access to.
We now know that Crowther’s Adventure was already an adventure before Don Woods got to it. Could Wander be an adventure before Crowther? I won’t know unless I find I copy.
(ADD: Big update here.)
LORD (1981, Olli J. Paavola)
I’ve got dual interest in this one, not only from it being a mainframe game from Finland (it was written while Olli was at the Helsinki University of Technology) but also for being allegedly the first interactive fiction book adaptation.
However, by all reports I’ve seen this didn’t have wide distribution and is probably lost forever.
There’s a touch more detail at this newsgroup post from 1995:
With 550 separate locations, this game is huge by most standards. It does not really try to be completely consistent with Tolkien but mixes elements from many other sources. It is clear, however, that it is made with a great love for and knowledge of Tolkien’s books.
The same post mentions The Shire as a text adventure from possibly 1979, which puts the “earliest book adaptation” statement into question. (Orthanc is also mentioned but is an RPG.)
New Adventure (1979/1980, Mark Niemiec)
Martian Adventure (1979/1980, Brad Templeton and Kieran Carroll)
These were written at the University of Waterloo and it mentions here that “Archive tapes for this mainframe exist and it might prove possible to get at the source code for these games.”
FisK (1980, John Sobotik and Richard Beigel)
From here: “A really big, Zork-like game that started at an innocuous house like Zork and led to a big complex of rooms with treasures and bad guys.”
Underground (1978, Gary Kleppe)
According to David Cornelson, this was on the Milwaukee Public School’s mainframe in PDP Basic. While the original tape is lost it is possible the game made its way elsewhere.
Gary Kleppe himself later has added some details. The full list is in the comments, but here’s a few relevant parts that might help identify the game:
* At the entrance to the caves is a robot, but you have a laser pistol with which you can shoot it.
* There is a chess set locked down by a computer. If you initially play against the computer you will lose, but if you’ve found and read a certain book then you can beat it and it will give you a trophy (a treasure). After that you can blast the computer to take the set which is also a treasure.
* There’s a room where the description is written backwards, as is any message that gets displayed to you while you’re there. You also need to type commands backwards for the parser to understand them.
![This book is the closest we'll get to "cover art" for MUD1. [Source.]](https://bluerenga.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/mudcover.png?w=1000)
This book is the closest we’ll get to “cover art” for MUD1. [Source.]
MUD1’s parser has a tone I might describe as “harsh.”
*examine bow
You can examine ’til your heart’s content, you won’t find anything special. Heavens, if I let folk examine things they’d spend the whole game doing it!
This effect can lead to some mind-blowing effects in other games (see the bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where a typo destroys a civilization) but here it’s as if the parser is playing along as an ever-present antagonist, ornery about syntax
*burn stick
With what do you want to light the torch? Say things in full, bedlamite!
even when it’s clear the game is capable of understanding but just chooses not to.
*unlock door
Unlock the door with what? If you want to unlock the door with keys, why not say so? Just to please me?
To switch to general theory for moment, I’ve occasionally run into the philosophy that error messages are a good thing and understanding too much will somehow harm the player’s general ability to interact. I’ve never subscribed to that. I feel like if the parser is capable of understanding, it should go ahead and do what the player wants, perhaps indicating what the standard syntax is for future reference.
I. The lurker in the maze
I haven’t run into anybody while playing MUD1, although I know there exist other players because I’ve seen objects moved to other positions. Still, I feel like a digital archaeologist visiting ruins. I have to keep in mind while poking at design aspects the intent is for there to be other players roaming around.
For instance, the first area I wandered into was a graveyard maze. There are tombstones with descriptions colorful enough I wonder if they are player-created (maybe previous players who made wizard or witch have the honor?).
Road opposite cottage.
You are standing on a badly paved road with a cemetery to the north and the home of a grave-digger to the south. An inscription on the cemetery gates reads, “RESTING PLACE OF LOST SOULS”.
*n
You are lost in a misty graveyard.
As you stride past the dark, marble tombstone of Tank the wizard, a frantic voice in the distance shouts “I need an exit… fast!”
*ne
You are lost in a misty graveyard.
There stands before you a black tomb with crossed axes emblazoned on it; inscribed on the tomb is: “Druss the wizard”.
*nw
You are lost in a misty graveyard.
A headstone to the east bears the inscription, “OK, so maybe the dragon WAS a bit of a handful…”.
However, I’m not sure yet if there is a sensible mapping process, because leaving the graveyard and entering again led me to an entirely different room to start. In normal circumstances this would be another maze to sigh about, but with other players there’s an extra dimension.
The graveyard was put to great use by Gwyn the Wizard in his mortal days while he was working his way up to that exalted rank. It’s quite easy for novices to wander in accidentally, and it takes them a while to find how to get out (you type the direction OUT!). So Gwyn would wait at the the start of the maze, slaughter anyone who wandered in, then run deeper in and go to sleep. Going to sleep gets you back lost stamina points from fights, and is usually very dangerous in case anyone stumbles across you. But who is going to find you in a maze?
[Source. Going south also leaves the maze, at least as the code in MUD1 stands now.]
I’ve played MUDs before where formless, undescribed rooms became sites of memorable events or epic confrontations. A MUD is less obliged to make every room “mean something” in itself when the players can impose their own meaning.
Also, after enough wandering there was a message about being able to pry open graves. I’ll have to explore further.
II. Combat
The lurker in the maze wouldn’t be possible without a combat system.
Since players with more points tend to be more popular targets for those with an urge to kill, they have better attributes than those they started with. MUD generates a random set of characteristics for you when you start – your “persona”. These are strength, stamina and dexterity. The other Dungeons & Dragons abilities are up to you, so if you’re thick in real life you’ll be thick in the game. The abilities are used mainly in fights, where stamina is how much damage you can take, strength determines how much damage you do when you hit, and dexterity is your chance of hitting. They crop up in other places too; for example dexterity is used to see if you manage to steal from another player successfully.
— Richard Bartle
Here’s what the stats display looks like for a beginning character:
Score to date: 36
Level of experience: novice
Strength: 57 Stamina: 23 Dexterity: 38 Sex: male
Maximum stamina: 55
Weight carried: 1000g (max. weight: 57000g)
Objects carried: 1 (max. number: 5)
Games played to date: 3
As far as I can tell so far, there are no weapons/armor/other combat augmentations. There is a spell system which may be usable in combat but I haven’t found any spells yet. It also may be the intent is for the variety to come from multiple players targeting each other at the same time. From the stories I’ve heard MUD1 was never a free-for-all but rather a place where individual players would snipe at each other, but for the current evidence I’m not sure.
I obviously haven’t tested the inter-personal combat, but here’s my battle against a zombie.
*kill zombie
*You narrowly duck a pathetic punch from the zombie.
*Your weak punch is no problem for the zombie.
*You comfortably duck a limp cross by the zombie.
*You smite the zombie with a weighty thump!
*The vigour of a punch by the zombie sends you sideways.
Summoning strength you bear up, and charge back into the engagement.
*Your wild return lunge at the zombie is easily ducked.
*You effortlessly duck a tame cross from the zombie.
*You beat the zombie with a vicious punch!
*You are wounded by the energy of a blow by the zombie!
Gritting your teeth you concentrate, and start into the slaughter.
*Your counter swing sends the zombie reeling!
*[54]
Your last cross did away with the zombie!
You are victorious – this time…
Notice the whole thing runs on automatic after typing KILL ZOMBIE. It’s possible to flee but otherwise the sequence above was entirely non-interactive.
III. The house that delivered Death
Zork had a central house, and MUD1 feels obliged to follow suit.
My house map so far; click for a larger view.
I am not certain the items on the map are in their “starting places”, due to mystery players moving objects.
On the map is my first solved puzzle, which simply involve moving a bookcase to expose a staircase going down. At the bottom was the previously mentioned zombie as well as a door I can’t get through yet. The door has runes on it that kill me if I try to read them. I can’t think of any other MUD I’ve played that has this kind of deathtrap, but it does fit in with the late 70s text adventure genre.
I did manage to get through the door via a hint from a tome (“DOOR: be polite when entering.”) where I found a “sorceror’s room” with a large number of objects that I haven’t got a chance to play with yet, because there was a potion that killed me upon drinking it (in real time via delayed reaction; I left the keyboard briefly and returned to find my character dead).
Attempting to go from the second floor to the attic causes another instant-death.
Fitted cupboard.
The cupboard appears to be bereft of any shelving, there are scratches on the wall but there is nothing here which can explain them.
A heavy stepladder leads upwards to the ceiling.
The cupboard is unlatched.
*u
The cupboard is very small, and as you ascend the ladder you suddenly realise that you are running out of air! Try as you might, you cannot break your way out of the place, although you bash at all the walls, and the ceiling and floor. Eventually you suffocate. Now you know how the scratch marks on the wall were made!
IV. Goal
I am fairly certain the idea of going for “wizard” is dead. Richard Bartle himself chimed in my last post to call MUD1 “essentially a museum piece” and the scoring seems to be engineered toward social interaction.
I also still haven’t found anything resembling a treasures list and will probably pass on that as objective.
That leaves the “newbie quest” list, of which I’ve only done “Find a stick, find a fire, and make a fire brand” and “Find the sorcerer’s room” so I’ll try to make a run at the rest. The list, again, was: Find the mausoleum / Find the portcullis and open it / Find the golden apple / Find the mine entrance / Flood the mine / Find the jetty / Find the attic / Find a light source other than a fire brand / Get into the badger’s sett / Find the magic spring
I might want to actually try some of the mausoleum (rather than just find it), because of this Bartle comment: “The mausoleum is the only place in MUD1 (or MUD2) that has actual puzzles in it. I put it in specifically because people wanted puzzles and I didn’t, so I showed them what a pain the world would be if it were all puzzles by giving them the mausoleum.”
Well, puzzles can be a pain when multiple players are there to mess things up, but they might work solo? I do find his remark puzzling, though, because I’m fairly sure the door-opening was a puzzle. Perhaps he means elaborate logic puzzles? We’ll see, I guess.
Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD (referred to as MUD1, to distinguish it from its successor, MUD2, and the MUD genre in general) is the first MUD and the oldest virtual world in existence. It was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw at Essex University on a DEC PDP-10 in the UK, using the MACRO-10 assembly language. He 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.
— usc interactive arts and games
Even though the interactive fiction community regularly communicates on ifMUD, there seems to be little intersection between them and the MUD community. Given MUD1 was inspired by Zork, I figured it’d be worth a try.
It’s somewhat cosmic that MUD1 is even available. Development started in 1978 and was handed from Roy Trubshaw to Richard Bartle in 1980. It was licensed by CompuServe in 1987 where it remained until 1999 before being revived a year later on British-legends.com.
You can play it, right now, if you go here.
I have only tried wandering around once so far, and have only run into one other player (idling in the starting room). Whether this is going to be a full multi-player experience or a place quiet enough I’m essentially going single-player, I don’t know.
I’m also not sure how long I’m going to play this thing, partially because I have no idea what I want my objective to be. I’ve worked out four possibilities.
a.) The “more advice” section of the help mentions there is an overall objective: become immortal by scoring enough points. You can work your way from “novice” to “wizard” or “witch”. However, the point-scoring methods are
1.) by dropping valuable items in the swamp
2.) by performing certain actions
3.) by killing and/or defeating other players or ‘mobiles’ in combat
#3 means you can essentially “grind” your way to victory from combat. I think? I also think objects reset to an extent you can redo puzzles and get points that way. Hence becoming immortal might not represent a full gameplay experience, but I don’t have enough knowledge of the game to tell for sure.
b.) The “more advice” section also lists a series of “quests” for novices to try.
Find a stick, find a fire, and make a fire brand
Find the mausoleum
Find the portcullis and open it
Find the golden apple
Find the mine entrance
Flood the mine
Find the jetty
Find the sorcerer’s room
Find the attic
Find a light source other than a fire brand
Get into the badger’s sett
Find the magic spring
Trying to do all the above might be impractical, too easy, or just the right amount to feel a sense of accomplishment.
c.) There are treasures that can be converted for points by dropping them in the swamp. (The players call this “swamping”.) A “find all the treasures” objective might be manageable, but I have yet to find a full list.
d.) Richard Bartle has Roy Trubshaw’s original maps, so it is possible to play MUD1 in essentially the 1978-1979 version. The areas are The Narrow Road, The House, The Maze of Tombstones, and Beneath the Yew Tree. This kind of goal would likely be just a quick visit.
At the moment I’m just going to wander with “d” as a goal and see what happens. If I only can manage a post or two, that’s fine. It turns into a full-length game, I’ll write about that too.
I had three treasures left to go. Their method of extraction is spoiled below.
…
Adventureland’s structure has some tight redundancy; items serve more than one purpose. For example the
Rusty axe (Magic word “BUNYON” on it)
not only serves as a tree-chopper, but as a magic item.
The humble lamp used throughout as a mere light source has a second use as well. There’s a bit of scrawl in the maze that says “ALADIN WAS HERE”.
Knowing I was still missing treasures, I tried on a whim:
> RUB LAMP
A glowing Genie appears, drops somehting, then vanishes.
I got a *DIAMOND RING* this way. (The typo is in the original text.)
…
I then worked on the bear from my last post some more. Getting frustrated, I asked David Welbourn for a hint, who said “You can defeat the bear without any tools but yourself.”
The most direct route isn’t too helpful.
> KILL BEAR
Bear won’t let me
Maybe if I threw something?…
In fact, it’s downright deceptive, which is counter to the usual policy interactive fiction has about hinting from the text. Throwing the axe (the only thing you are allowed to throw) breaks the mirror and is the wrong approach. Instead:
> YELL
Bear is so startled that he FELL off the ledge!
Poor bear. I guess he was evil too?
…
The last treasure required the ultimate gesture of defeat, the walkthrough. I did not feel bad about spoiling this time.
So yes, RUB LAMP works to get one treasure, but a second RUB LAMP gets another treasure.
This is what I have called Bad Frustration. I could see someone trying a second RUB LAMP if they’re in the process of lamp-rubbing, but after there is no plausible way to think through the answer. If I ever codify Advice for Puzzle Makers at some point, one of the rules would be this: Think about if your player is unable to solve a puzzle. Is there a clear route to get on the right track, or will it require enough luck that the player will feel like they have wasted their time? You want a response of “oh!” to a puzzle solve (even if it had to be looked up) not “oh…” with a head-shake of frustration.
Doing RUB LAMP a third time is at least amusing:
A glowing Genie appears, says “Boy you’re selfish”, takes something and then makes “ME” vanish!
I’m DEAD!
I can’t in good conscience recommend Adventureland to modern audiences. Not because it’s impossible to have fun — I did — but because Scott Adams himself got better as he went along; not every game was a treasure-hunt. The actual minimalist style does have a soothing meditative quality to it, although if you’re just wanting to experience that you might try J. Robinson Wheeler’s ASCII and the Argonauts; it has the same modern-feel-with-retro-style that many indie-games shoot for these days. Since text adventures are inherently retro, that’s possibly the only way to achieve the effect.
When people talk about being “stuck” in an adventure game, usually they mean there is some specific puzzle they can’t get by.
I’ve got exactly one puzzle I know I am stuck on.
I’m on a narrow ledge by a Throne-room
Across the chasm is another ledge. Visible items:
Very thin black bear. *MAGIC MIRROR*
> GET MIRROR
Bear won’t let me
I’ve some *ROYAL HONEY* that will make the bear happy and cause him/her to fall asleep, but since the royal honey is a treasure itself that causes me to lose points.
The extra problem is, I’ve got more points missing than just one treasure worth. I don’t know where else the other treasures might be. So I am clearly “stuck” somewhere but I have no idea what I should even be doing.
The map I have so far, excluding the maze. Click the image for a PDF version.
Let me summarize what I’ve seen:
* It turns out there is a HELP command dynamic based on what room you’re in and it can actually be helpful sometimes; solving the puzzle would have taken me longer otherwise. For instance, there’s a sunny meadow with a sleeping dragon where HELP gives you this message:
A voice BOOOOOMS out:
There are only 3 ways to wake the Dragon!
One puzzle involving an explosion I may not have worked out without the HELP command.
* A sequence later I needed to drive away the dragon to steal its eggs. I feel somewhat bad about that. I guess the dragon is evil so that makes it ok?
* There’s a tiny maze. Scott Adams must have felt obliged to provide a maze. It took all of five minutes to map.
* There’s a room I assume is a joke
I am in the memory chip of a COMPUTER!
I must have took a wrong turn!
but at this point I suppose I need to question everything.
* If you go down from the ledge near the swamp you end up in Hell. Whoops.
* With some deaths there’s an interesting afterlife scene:
I don’t think there’s a treasure here, but given the Acheton trick I’m not going to rule it out.
![This book is the closest we'll get to "cover art" for MUD1. [Source.]](https://bluerenga.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/mudcover.png)
Renga in Blue 