Richard Bartle Video Interview, Part One

For his latest video interview stint, Matt Barton had the opportunity to chat with Rob Bartle, one of the co-creators of MUD – the original Multi-User Dungeon application created at the UK’s Essex University way back in 1978 that laid the groundwork for decades of variants, copycats, and graphical MMORPGs. Fascinating stuff, as usual:

And for even more perspective, he’s a little background from Wikipedia:

In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.

MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987, becoming the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980, when Essex University connected its internal network to ARPANet. The game revolved around gaining points till one achieved the Wizard rank, giving the character immortality and special powers over mortals. The game became more widely accessible when a guest account was set up that allowed users on JANET (a British academic X.25 computer network) to connect on weekends and between the hours of 2 AM and 8 AM on weekdays. MUD1 was reportedly closed down when Richard Bartle licensed MUD1 to CompuServe, and was getting pressure from them to close Essex MUD. This left MIST, a derivative of MUD1 with similar gameplay, as the only remaining MUD running on the Essex University network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity. MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.