[Simucal]

The MUD that I played on in middle school and high school, Viking MUD, is still around. http://www.vikingmud.org

I think the directions to the main areas will be burned into my memory forever. On this MUD, when you reached level 20 (which took around a week) you had a choice to make your character "eternal" and continue adventuring or you could choose to make your character a "wizard" who could create new areas yourself and write scripted actions for your area. However, you could no longer take part in the actual game itself. Scripting the areas I had created was some of the first programming experience I ever had.

A big difference between most of the games today that I play and some of those old MUDs was that there were very serious consequences to dying. You lost a level and all your gear if you died and it was extremely easy to die in the game, both from NPCs or other players in certain zones. Dropping from say, level 28 to 27 represented a solid week of hard leveling effort that was lost. I remember I died 3 times in one evening and almost wanting to cry I was so upset. It did make the game that much more intense though because the stakes were so high.

I still login occasionally but it is rare to see more than a few players who aren't idle. I remember that the quality of the community was very high. I don't know if it was because there was a relatively high bar to join and interact with the game that self-selected those kinds of people or what. You had to have the technical chops to connect to the internet, download and install a MUD client and then connect to the appropriate server. Then to be successful at the game itself you had to have a lot of patience, have a good memory and be able to read and react quickly.