Wow, MUDs I have not thought about the one I spent my teenage years playing until you mentioned them. I just checked and to my surprise it is still online. Too bad it looks like no one plays anymore.
Some of my best computer memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met playing MUDs during those years.
Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.
It always struck me odd that MUD playership kinda died off, seeing as how there are many many more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, I would have guessed that be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population at least level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.
World of Warcraft (and sure, Everquest before that, but less so) seems to have done a number on text-based games. Less so MUSHes and the like, but the combat loop of MUDs--even RP-heavy ones--hasn't fared well today.
I'm glad I got to be a part of that culture. I learned a lot dealing with the everyday disasters of Bad Old C and ended up with responsibility and management long before I ever would have in the real world. Plus, they were a hell of a lot of fun when you found a neat spot that maybe nobody had seen since it was built.
Really??!! That would be so good. It was such a vast game and I don't know where you can really play it anymore.
The only bad thing about it was how you had to let your character grind away for days and days on end. Most people would only come back to check on their grinds for an hour then let the script go back to its work.
I've tweaked my implementation some to make it more conducive to non-automated play. The experience needed to level is significantly lower after level 10 or so than in the original.
Also in my implementation rather than play as the original races / classes you play as Angels or Demons which can possess and play as monsters/npcs to experience different play styles without having to create new characters.
The Angel class is the default for new players and has a mechanism by which experience points are redistributed periodically from players with more to players with less which helps newer / less active players catch up / stay relevant. Veteran / active players who get tired of carrying the team can go dark side and become demons.
MajorMud had such great community support around it: Turbosentry's BBS crawling top list, Blood2HTML capture utility, MMudExplorer, Jigg's maps, Kotar's maps, the forums...suffice to say MajorMud was my late 90s and early 2000s stomping ground, transitioning from dial-up to telnet.
I will certainly have to check that subreddit out. I really miss playing them they were something really special. I learned to program because I wanted to build areas and monsters on the MUD I played.
Things are actually looking much better now for the MUD i help run.
Websockets made it possible to bring the game to a whole new crowd without requiring them to install some odd telnet thing.
We had a few years when things did not look good at all and player numbers dropped every month.
