MUD: Swords with Friends
Matt Barton · 2019
The United States and Japan weren’t the only countries playing and making video games in the 1970s. Indeed, one of the most influential of all video games was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, students at the University of Essex in Britain. The name MUD is an acronym for Multi-User Dungeon. The Dungeon part of the name was Trubshaw’s idea. He’d played a FORTRAN version of Zork —whose name had temporarily been changed to Dungeon . The popularity of MUD s increased throughout the 1980s as more Americans equipped their computers with modems and subscribed to commercial networks. MUD s reached their peak in the 1990s, when the Internet made it possible to bypass the subscription and usage fees of services like CompuServe. One by one, the private networks shut down, but MUD fans found they had many more alternatives on the Internet than they ever had before.