yup. MUD = multi user dungeon or multi user dimension. dimension because not all of them were fantasy. and particularly in the early days of the net most of them were text only. many of my early experiences on the net and even before the internet were with online text based fantasy games. island of kesmai on compuserve and then genie, dragon's gate on genie and then aol, early net muds like realms of despair and many others.

i even made and ran my own for a while and we added in ascii graphic mapping in 3d. quite fun and one of the first truly huge games on the net. we ran it on a linux machine with about 25 megs of ram and another 25 megs of disk space. hehe, talk about tight code :)

many of the well known MUDS have thousands of players registered and in the early 90's they were THE best games online. most all of them house a staff who build and monitor the various regions of the land. they are more closely aligned with the old table top dungeons and dragons system, since the staff tend to interact in roleplay with the players, taking on the personnas of gods, or evil critters or creating real time quests and all those sorts of things. you dont get that kind of real interaction in most online games and it can be extremely fun.

one of the reasons for the success of these games is that they arent graphic. sounds odd in todays multi gigabyte sight and sound million dollar production games, but when you dont have to spend a fortune on graphics and sound, you tend to concentrate on game play, and that's what's missing in a lot of the games out today...too much sight and sound and not enough pure game. developers (and this isnt aimed at CA) would do well to play some muds for a while.

K.