The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [11]
DNGEON was eventually released by Infocom as Zork. My parents insisted on purchasing a computer system instead of a game console, a decision I disagreed with at the time (I wanted an Odyssey) but one that in retrospect changed my life for the better. It was thanks to our Atari 800 that I was introduced to Zork.
I still remember the struggle to open a locked door in Zork. All we had was a letter opener and a placemat. After days of puzzling over how to get through the door, it hit me in a flash—slide the placemat under the door, push the letter opener into the lock, knock the key out of the lock on the other side, and then pull the placemat back! It’s a triumph that stuck with me decades later. In all my years of gaming, few games have provided as satisfying an experience.
Even Zork couldn’t capture the feel of a party of characters however. Text-based games could handle only one player at a time until the advent of multi-user dungeons (MUDs). In 1978, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University created the first MUD, a nod to its dungeon-crawling predecessors (Glenday 2008: 170). Following in the footsteps of the single-player computer games, MUDs allowed players to adventure together in groups just like the Fellowship. The goal was to accumulate enough points to become a wizard, like Gandalf, and thereby be granted powers that mere mortals did not possess.
My experience with MUDs began with Ivory Towers. In Ivory Towers two different-aligned cities, one chaotic and the other lawful, battled in an endless struggle against each other. My character, Lamech, ascended in the ranks of a tight hierarchy of chaotic priests. Lamech was a noncombatant, a novelty in a bloodthirsty world where killing other player characters was the norm.
It’s noteworthy that I was playing Ivory Towers at the same time Indra Singh was playing Shades, a rival MUD (1999). Shades players were reviled across Ivory Towers, who would invade when Shades was down (or they were bored), gleefully committing mass murder in a bloody invasion that ended as quickly as it started.
Eventually, I switched to the Finnish LPMUD BatMUD. I made and lost friends on BatMUD, and even met my spouse Amber there. After a long and storied history as a satyr paladin known as Talien Radisgad, I left BatMUD to join the coding staff of another LPMUD, RetroMUD.
Over a decade of experience as an administrator on RetroMUD led to my master’s thesis, The Impact of Anonymity on Disinhibitive Behavior through Computer-Mediated Communication. I also became a staff reviewer for the MUD section of Gamers.com, which gave me an opportunity to view the breadth and depth of MUDs at the height of their popularity.
Given the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons across campuses in America, it was ironic that I had difficulty finding pen-and-paper gamers in college. When I moved to Michigan to pursue my master’s degree, I ran a brief second edition campaign with players from RetroMUD: Darren, Damien, Amber, and Chris.
In 1980, computer technology had advanced enough to make graphic visualizations feasible. Rogue, created by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold, bridged the gap between the old text-based games and the new graphics, exchanging text symbols for dungeon icons.
Rogue was a solitary dungeon crawl with randomly generated obstacles. The goal was to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the lowest level of the dungeon and escape with it. I played Rogue extensively on the Atari 520 ST, but never made it to the bottom level. The Ur-viles inevitably showed up and all was lost.
As computers advanced, MUDs advanced along with them. When graphics became detailed enough to represent characters in