Of MUD and Men

Many years ago in my early days of computing me and my friends used to hang around the BBS’s. Ah I can still remember the day I upgraded my 2800 baud modem to a 14.4 kbps. Those bulletin board pages would load up so fast I though I would never need anything faster in my life. To be that young again.

We Navigated the different Bulletin Boards for several reasons. First off was trying to find phone numbers to the infamous Warez boards where we could download software. It was funny we never did anything with it just downloaded it and left it on our computers. I guess it was a young geeky way of rebelling, Ooooo we where doing something illegal. I think the culmination of my hacker carrier was the downloading of a program that could hide viruses in regular files. Big deal I had no viruses I just had the program, I was really to chicken to actually keep a virus on my computer for fear of infecting my self. I was just satisfied in the knowledge that I could do it if I wanted to and left it at that.

The other thing me and my friends did on these boards was play MUD’s. Old text based BBS games. The first massively multi player games made. To be truthfully a MUD is a multi user dungeon and only described one type of game we played, one called Legend of the Red Dragon. But before I get to that lets talk about the first type of game I played, One called Barren Realms. In it you goal was to create and build a kingdom. You populated it with peasants, built an army and attacked other kingdoms (players). It was turn based with a turn being a day so you only had to connect once a day to check on your kingdom and launch attacks on your opponents. Years later I got hooked on several similar games made to be played on the Internet, once called Utopia and another called Plantation. Ah the nostalgia, I had a lot of fun with that game, it was
one of the first times I was able to play with other people in a giant world and was well before anyone of use had even heard of the Internet.

Now on to the important one the MUD, Legend of the Red Dragon. In it you created a character, fought evil monsters, welded mystical powers and all that other stuff you expect from an RPG except for the first time ever you could kill other character controlled by people. You could sent them mail, start romances and generate strong rivalries. Once a day all the BBS’s would connect to one another and exchange data so you could even attack people on different servers. You simply chose someone to attack and at midnight they would resolve the combat. I still remember the huge server wars we used to have me and my friends. Well all this old tech network gaming was brought back to my memory by a site pointed out to me on a forum I visited. Someone has ported LoRD to the Internet under the name Legend of the Green Dragon, LoRD is apparently still trademarked. So if you feel like some old time nostalgic gaming start a new character and come meet me online. Name is the Shepard Extion.

Hope to see you there.