[isoskeles]

MUDs were great, and they were partially responsible for me being able to work up my knowledge, experience, and confidence to start up a career in software engineering. I learned a lot from trying to make my own MUDs (from using ROM 2.4, some tiny codebase called CVagrant, and from scratch), as well as a little bit about Linux.

This is all aside from playing. I somehow convinced many of the right people in middle and high school to play a Tolkien-based MUD with me. It was really great back then, but I don't play any more nor does anyone I know. There are only a handful of MUDs that have the playerbase to make them interesting.

Also, I'm not sure if it's still the best place to browse what MUDs exist, but many can be found on http://www.mudconnect.com/.

[zlynx]

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was a huge influence on fantasy and MUDs. I don't know which one you used to play. I used to play MUME (currently at https://mume.org/ )

My brother still plays sometimes. He has a lot of friends there. Sometimes they have over 30 people on at the same time! Heh. It used to be hundreds.

[rcakebread]

Genesis, the first LPMUD founded by Lars Pensjö in 89', is still up and has huge Tolkien-based domains and guilds.