Picking the handful of games that made me is somewhat tricky. Not picking the games that made me, but picking the handful. The house of my gaming past is on fire and I only get to grab what I can carry? That’s not how I think.
One of the things I tend to chew over with games is their almost utilitarian nature – the idea that games (and art generally) is there for a purpose. Moreso: that pleasure and its various shades are a purpose. As such, depending what interested me at any given time, I could do an autobiography via games, talking about why I went where, when and what that said about games and what it said about me. Something like Garry Mulholland’s lovely This Is Uncool.
So I’m narrowing it down a bit. Looking back, it interests me how many games were external things which changed everything. I spend most of my gaming time sitting inside this screen. But some of the most memorable games I found out there. I left home, went somewhere, met a game, and when I came back, I was a different person. An Adventure. There and back again…
The Hobbit (Melbourne House)
So appropriately enough, we start with this. I’ve told this story before on podcasts, but it seems I never got around to doing so on the site. Could you humour me?
When I first remember hearing about gaming, the Hobbit loomed large. It was introduced to me by my best friend. He was the youngest brother of three. I was the oldest of two. As such, he was exposed to a mass of illicit information via the elder siblings: things which appeared to me as they’d been dropped from another, more exciting world: American Comics; The less Enid Blighton strain of choose your own adventure books; Eddie the Head, the Iron Maiden Mascot who prompted intense theological arguments.
Our Catholic education left us sure that God was more powerful than the Devil. However, it was equally true that the cover of Iron Maiden’s NUMBER OF THE BEAST album proved Eddie the Head was more powerful than the Devil, because it pictured him using Satan as a marionette. So… who was strongest out of Eddie and God? It troubled us.
Anyway, relevantly, this same friend introduced me to computer games.
The idea of games in the home was alien. While not exactly technophobic, my parents always lagged behind the technological curve. My friend enlightened me about the joys I was missing, primarily on our weekly walks to the swimming pool. Every Wednesday, our school trudged the half mile to the local baths. There and back again, he told me about his latest adventures. “Oh yeah – I waited until sunrise, so the Trolls turned into stone…” “I can get in this barrel in the Elf King’s cellar, but I can’t work out a way to make them throw me in the water.” “Yeah, I don’t go that way any more… there’s spiders up there.” “Oh, I’m in the Goblin Dungeon, and there’s a trapdoor in the basement.” “Ah – I tricked the wizard and the dwarf into a cave and then locked them there.”
I listened, mouth agape. This thing he spoke of was the greatest thing in the entire history of humanity.
Time passed and I finally had a chance to go to his house and see the game. I’d say months, but I suspect with a kid’s perception of time, it was actually just a fortnight. It felt like eons. You can’t imagine my excitement at sitting there as the spectrum sang its atonal loading noise song. Christmas-morning anticipation ran through me.
The game started. A hobbit-hole door appears on the screen, in lurid green.
I glance over at my friend: “YOU NEVER TOLD ME IT WAS JUST WORDS!”
That’s how games and I got together and in that moment, there’s the future echo of our relationship. That is, joyous awareness of their infinite possibility, depression at their stunted actualities.
But it was a start. I OPEN DOORed and was away.
Kung-fu Master (Data East)
I was in the arcades before Kung-fu Master, of course. I’d have been nine by the time it came out in 1984. The arcades were the only time I saw games – or in the working men’s clubs, which was either a game of Scramble (in Cannock’s sprawling club) or something Galaxians or Phoenix shaped (the GPO around the corner). I dug them a lot. If you wanted an Us and Them moment, it’d be when a kid asked me why I was playing the game, as no money ever came out (as opposed the to the fruit machines). I was dumbfounded: pleasure comes out.
Kung-fu master was different, because it was a game I saw a lot. Being in various places, it was the introduction to the idea of games following me around. The idea that a game could be a shared social language – and bond – between complete strangers in different places. It was a shared social experience, despite being single player.
It also had awesome flying-kicks.
The small things appealed. The incredible precision of its control system. A button press and a whiplash kick with none of the slowness of most games. The size and clarity of the graphics. The plot. It seemed far more like a real place – more immersive – than anything I’d played before. I’d realised that visual representation alone wasn’t enough when I burnt through 50p coins with Dragon’s Lair the year before. It was the right kind of visual representation. It was a game which made me jump around the room like an idiot. Pac-man or the space-ship games didn’t make me do that. They made me go pschu! psuchu! laser noises, at best.
It had awesome flying kicks. And those multiple punches to the face. And knives. And splashes of red and mobs of men, falling to their deaths.
The brutality, I realised, helped and appealed. Gaming as transgression. My parents were right to be worried.
Gauntlet (Atari)
A year later and a family holiday. Still no home computer.
To a Butlins holiday camp, or some local knock-off of Butlins. People in coloured jackets. Singing. Chalets. And the best arcade I’d ever seen in my life, with prices lower than anywhere else ever. My brother and I devoured them all, but we paid almost a religious admiration to the hefty, brand-new four-player cabinet that towered like a monolith from a utopian future with excellent waterslides.
It’s easy to forget how innovative Gauntlet was. The four players. The role-playing elements, taking what was still subcultural and integrating it on the main stage of pop-culture. The use of dialogue. “Warrior needs food badly” lives on as a great thing to say whenever you’re hungry. Fast-forward to years later when as a student we’re playing Gauntlet 2, and kill a Dragon to be greeted with the phrase “I have never seen such bravery!”. Yelps from semi-grown men. Gauntlet said something new. For months we were uttering the phrase whenever anyone did the most innocuous thing. Empty the bin? Go out in the rain? Go off to dump an unfortunate ladyfriend? “I have never seen such bravery”. Ah, students. Always happy to give people reasons to hate us.
Even its exploitative elements – feeding the slot coins to get more health – Gauntlet screamed the new.
On the last day of our holiday, we talked our parents into playing. All four of us, against the dungeon. Dad silent and concentrating. Mum Giggling. I don’t remember much about the game, except how wonderful it was to have my parents along for this journey and how I wish it could happen more often. Games are for everyone. Fast-forward over twenty years to last year when my parents were visiting: Rock Band arrived, and my dad was the first person to hammer out on the drums.
It was only when writing this and doing the maths that I drew a line between this summer holiday and the Christmas, when we received a home computer. Or, at least, a Commodore 16, which was close enough to a computer. While I suspect they may have caved anyway, I can’t help but think the communal experience with Gauntlet helped things along.
Move forward another couple of years, to another version of Gauntlet. We’d had a Spectrum+2 by this point, and my brother and I played the 2-player home version of the game for hours. It was a tape multi-load, requiring you to load another bit every eight levels or so. With infinite credits, by carefully planning our deaths, we were able to march on to see what lay ahead. Eventually, one day, we reached the end of the tape. There was no final level. We rewound and started again, barely blinking.
Another lesson: gaming doesn’t end. It goes on. Winning doesn’t matter. The journey is the point; games are experiences. Games are not just games.
Transformers 2005 MUSH (PennMUSH codebase)
Okay, this is something different.
The heart of my teenage years belonged to the Amiga and homes. My home. Friends’ homes. I had friends who loved games and we travelled from home to home to play them. Immortal games. Speedballrainbowislandslemmingssensiblesoccersyndicategravitypower2chaosenginelegendsofvalourcivw
ormsonlywhendrunkharlequinanotherworldstardustliberationpopulouswizkidmonkeyislanddynablaster… oh, games. The Spectrum lived on. As far as my second year of university it was being used as a one-game console for playing Chaos when people crashed out in the early morning, machine passed around the room like – and often alongside – a spliff.
As part of my degree, I’d found myself in a placement year in an American lab in Denver. Random chance. And then I was gaming from home again for the first time since childhood.
At the time, I said I didn’t game. Hindsight proves my definitions were wrong. This was after the death of Amiga Power, which provided my first work. Broke and a little burnt out, I skipped the whole period of ‘96-’97 games. It’s an odd hole in my personal gaming history with regards to the mainstream – when Edge was hailing Mario 64, I’d headed a completely different way. In fact, I headed about as far as it’s possible to go. I only prodded it at in a shop before returning to mope in my flat.
I had a pretty shit time in America.
It wasn’t particularly anyone’s fault. I realised swiftly that due to laziness and extreme distractability labwork really wasn’t for me, and so treated every day at the job like a prison sentence, up to and including marking time’s passing with lines on my wall. The people I was working with were lovely, but at least a decade older than me, and with families. As such, I was stuck, without a car, on my own, a long way from any place I’d want to go, and was bored to the point of insensibility. It was seven months into the ten before I’d managed to locate my sort of people to have fun trouble with, by which point – and looking back at the sort of ill-advised adventures we went on – I suspect I was more than a little bit mental.
It was also the year when I went native on the internet. I ran a website, lived on mailing list, and discovered MUSHes.
You’ll probably be aware of MUDs, the text-based Multi-User Dungeons which were the first to explore the place the modern MMOs colonised. MUSHes – Multi User Shared Hallucinations – were, if the acronym didn’t give it away, the poncier side of it. Imagine a role-play server where 98% of the time you were going hey-nonny-no! in the chatroom. They were nothing but the proverbial glorified chatroom.
On the other hand, they were glorious chatrooms.
At the beginning of the trip, I had no idea they existed. I knew about MUDs. I also knew how much they could devour your life, from the all-night sessions some of my housemates had at the university labs. That didn’t sound that interesting to me. That sounded like doing the same repetitive things for hours. Surely that wouldn’t catch on? As history proves, I was totally right on one observation, and totally wrong on the other.
I discovered Transformers 2005 MUSH by running through the corridors of the internet, seeing with amazement that there appeared to be enormous functioning community of fans for anything on there. This was, I stress, 1997 and we were amazed by such things back then. I didn’t count myself as a Transformers fan. I liked the toys as a kid. I read the (superior) British comics back then. I hadn’t really paid much attention to them for over a decade. The idea of an ongoing free-form roleplaying game set in the universe, just after the end of the films… it intrigued me. I had an idea for a character, applied, and soon I was playing. For hours a day. To the point where I ended up in serious trouble with my lab supervisor.
MUSHes are roleplaying games, but they’re primarily plotless. Proper events – TinyPlots – are planned, which people can come and join in with – but much is based around players just hanging around and improvising scenes in character. Instructions are posed, with it entirely up to you to describe what your character does in either curt sentences or enormous florid passages of purest spam. Tf2k5 had a relatively complicated combat system with a load of statistics, but later MUSHes I joined – with themes not based around enormous warring robots – operated off little more than a +roll command to decide who would win when no consensus could be reached. Improvised roleplay with vestigial gaming. Performance art a sentence at a time.
I’d be interested to know how many people reading this played any MUSHes. It’s something that few actually talk about. The closest to a games journalist exploring it is Leigh Alexander’s regular riffs on her time playing Yahoo-Chat Final Fantasy roleplay, which isn’t quite the same thing – MUSHes have maps, places to build, things to interact with. I’m comfortable calling them a game and keeping them in the same part of my head as the Hobbit.
When I got back to England, I continued to play in a more casual fashion. Well, relatively casual. With the pay-for-dial-up of the time I built an enormous phone-bill despite that. But the real work was done, in terms of what it taught me about gaming. It was a social game which provided me, in my lowest year, a social life and drama-aplenty. It left me with the ability to type at my normal ludicrous speed and honed my ability to pull ludicrous metaphors and turns of phrase from the ether – it was a real part of how the year of isolation turned me from an adept StuCampell/JNash/TaylorParkes/NeilKulkarni copyist into something approaching someone with their own style. And those hours gave my first experience with RSI, which haunted me down the years.
Games can sustain you. Games can improve you. Games can destroy you.
Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass)
Next time I left home to play games, the mood was more triumphal. After the experiences in the sciences, I knew my degree was useless. So I did the bare minimum of work and concentrated on writing. Somehow – the old stat about 1 in 10 people leaving university claiming they were looking for work in the media, and there only being jobs for 1 in 100, nagged at me while I worked bars in those months after graduation – I got a job. PC Gamer hired me as a staff writer. I was to work in a room with a mass of relatively young, booze-hungry men, and one woman whose job was to scare us all into doing some work occasionally.
And I was, apparently, going to review some games.
Thief wasn’t the first game I reviewed (The Chaos Engine was, back in my home town, just to see what it felt like). It wasn’t the first game I’d reviewed professionally (UFO on the A500 for Amiga Power). It wasn’t the sample review I sent with my CV (The Curse of Monkey Island). It wasn’t the first game I’d reviewed in the office (which was some racing game which I had to play briefly and write a 300 word review for in half an hour as part of the interview process). It wasn’t even the first game I reviewed as a staff writer (which was a 280 word micro-review of a rendered adventure which I can remember nothing of bar I kicked it to death). But since that was delayed until the following issue, my debut as a writer for PC Gamer in the magazine was Looking Glass’s magnum opus.
It seems miraculous to me now. It’s like if Lester Bangs’ first assignment was to go and interview the Velvet Underground. Within the first week on the job, I’d found my Lou Reed.
Of course, yeah, I know. Egotistical on all sorts of levels. But I was nothing but ego back then, with a tower of McCain Oven Chips bags wobbling on each shoulder, and everything to prove. The only thing was that I didn’t realise how important it was. I lacked context. I was new to the world of PCs, only having owned one for a few months previously – never being rich enough to own such a thing before. The Ultima Underworlds, System Shock; these were games I knew by reputation, and little else. I was coming to the world’s premier stealth game clean. And I could see all the parts of it mesh together. I could see how elegant its stealth-mechanism was, so obviously better than the digital fakery of Metal Gear Solid (Thief was Defender to MGS’s Pac-Man). Most importantly, I could see the ghosts of all those other games of the past: I was shouting incredulously at the Hobbit, because in my head, it looked like Thief. This was it. This is how games should be.
Almost gave it a mark in the seventies, of course. The Bonehoard almost made me give up. I persisted and ended up giving it ninety. Which sound kinda mean, until you remember I was a AP veteran and true believer. As such, I’d never given a ninety before in my life.
The lesson, however, comes about a year later when I find myself in drunken conversation with a Looking Glass veteran who’s over to show off Thief 2. I mumble an opinion that I tended to think of them as this sort of progressive, intelligent developer. I mean, in 60s rock terms, kind of the Velvet Underground.
She doesn’t blink: “Oh, yeah. Totally”.
The lesson being: people believe in games as much as you do.
The lesson being: you’re not an idiot to think that.
The lesson being: you’re not an idiot to think.
Thief, in a real way, justified my entire approach to the medium. So, if you’re ever looking for something to blame, blame it.
Alternatively, the friend who showed me the Hobbit. If he only made me play football, you could have all been spared.
Related Stories:
Used to spend many lunchtimes in school going to a nearby arcade to play Gauntlet with some schoolmates; it really was a game ahead of its time. Stunning someone and grabbing food from under their nose never got old.
Skip forward 21 years, and I played my first multiplayer Gauntlet game since then on XBox Live the other night. Cool.
I tried to play Thief again recently, but one annoyance is that the key bindings are a mess. By default, your character runs. You _can_ set a walk modifier, but that doesn’t work if you move left or right. Argh. I tried creating an AutoHotKey script without much luck, and no-one on the Thief forums could help me.
P.
Great writing Kieron. You should do it for a living or something.
I remember The Hobbit on a friend’s Spectrum, but had stronger memories of Jetpack.
I think my own first adventure game was actually called “The Adventure Game”, and it was a big, fat cartridge that went into the back of my Vic 20. I can still remember having to DROP the big carpet before DROPping the mirror so that the mirror wouldn’t smash. I even remember that it was written by someone called Scott something… wow… that must be… like a bunch of years ago. Didn’t even realise I remembered all that until I read your article!
We also had a MUSH or MUD back in college; it had a levelling-up system where if you were injured, you recovered over time but gained more hitpoints. Of course, I discovered that hitting _yourself_ to the point of near death, then recovering, then repeating, meant I soon had god-like hitpoints, at which point a dungeon master sent me an “Er, Paul….” message.
P.
Now The Hobbit is all good and well, but COME ON, Horace and the Spiders owned it fangs down. When bored of squashing spiders you could always hook him up with some some smooth slopes to ski on. After that Atic Atac, JetPac, Jet Set Willy and IK+ were all right up there.
Attempting to rescue Sylvia in Kung-Fu Master was always fun, although for myself Shinobi was even better. Replaying that until I could finish the game on a single life took quite a bit of practice.
I preferred Way of the Exploding Fist to Kung Fu, especially punching the bull in the face.
Oo actually it was called “Adventureland”! Wiki’ing just brought back so many buried memories…. ah happy, innocent days filled with bees.
“There used to be quite a war between C64 fans and Spectrum fans…”
i am like some kind of japanese soldier found in the jungle 50 years on, for i am still fighting this war. fuck the C64!
This is too awesome. I really should be working. http://www.freearcade.com/Zplet.jav/Advland.html
@leederkrenon
Yeah well the C64 had colours many many colours! i justed to look at the back of the cassete box’s and laugh at the specturm screen shots
how do you answer that good sir!
Gillen! I’m sure you gave Thief 89%! Because didn’t you then agonise about it in your Thief 2 review??
PS I’m not some kind of obsessive saddo. I just seem to happen to remember that little factoid.
PPS Am still playing through Thief again, taking it slowly, savouring it. And it really still is that good. Better, in fact. Now one has enough distance and perspective to divorce it from the tech, from the LG legacy, one realises just how astonishingly good it is.
Even the zombies bug me less this time round.
GameRankings say PCGUK (ie. Kieron) gave it 90.
It was a good review. You don’t remember many reviews over ten years later, but that’s one of them.
I went through a period where I stopped writing all together due to a persistent bout of anxiety. It was a combination of 9/11 and getting laid off from my job. Playing the Discworld MUSH was fun, but it also eased me back into writing.
@leederkrenon. I’m still in that jungle too. I’m not entirely sure why the spectrum was so much better than the C64 but it is one of the few certainties in life that i still cling to. Can someone break it down for me and prove once and for why the speccy was the better machine.
We had colours, it was just you couldn’t change the colour of the individual pixels; they were in blocks of 8×8. Clever programmers (nay artists) could get a lot of colour variety. Anyway, games as awesome as Knightlore (how the fuck did they do that with just 48k) and Laser Squad didn’t need loads of colours.
Was it me or were the C64 pixels bigger than the speccy’s? Was the speccy HD before it’s time?
@leederkrenon. Fuck me, i’ve just noticed your avatar! Is that the actual Leeder Krenon?
Who was the little whipper snapper with the pistol from Rebelstar? Dammit, i’ve gotta go back and play it again….
“Don’t make me go in the cupboard again daddy……”
Shakes fist @clive dunn
http://c64vsspectrum.com/R.html BIFF
http://c64vsspectrum.com/O.html POW
http://c64vsspectrum.com/Y.html BAM
need more proof heathens?
Worst. Proof. Ever.
in fact that site is like a gold mine of my youth and im only 30
we have come a long way fellas
at least no ones waded in flapping their gums about amstrads.
The Spectrum was lovable _because_ it was a little crap. The Spectrum was to the Commodore 64 as the PC is the Apple. I have owned both a Spectrum and a PC which, honestly, occasionally needed a whack on the side to start them up, Doctor Who-like (in the PC’s case, a hard drive was dodgy; with the Spectrum, there was a particular chip that would slip out of its socket, and a whack would settle it back in again).
P.
@cullnean. lol, no-one would dare defend a Amstrad. Jesus, they were truely shite.
I used to resolder my first spectrum from time to time; i’d blow a small hand held fan through it in the summer as well. I like to think i was overclocking the poor thing!
@clive dunn
i will in no way mind you, admit to having my tiny little mind blown by elite on my uncles spectrum
hang on im not doing this right
I think the earliest work of computer genius i played was 3D Ant Attack. That thing played like a beautiful tense film for me. Just you and your girl and those terrifying ants!
@Cullnean. Lots of arcade ‘ports’ on that comparison site. Porting never really worked on the spectrum. Something PC’s are still struggling with i guess
Oh, Ant Attack was quite brilliant. When you look at Gauntlet on the Spectrum now, it looked like an absolute mess, yet I played for hours _and_ bought the “Deeper Dungeons” add-on pack.
“Tau Ceti” and the follow-up “Academy” were also excellent immersive space-sims – Academy even let you design your own ships, including the cockpit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Ceti_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_(computer_game)
P.
Interestingly (um kinda) the issue wherein KG reviews Thief is the earliest copy of PCG that I have in the big massive stack of them that I have piled away.
I can’t remember exactly and may be making it up, but I have a feeling that Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 2 also got reviewed in that issue.
What a month!
I gave Thief II 89%.
(It’s always worth remembering that Vanilla Thief II pre-Patch was a bit of a mess. As in, levels were missing a mass of furniture, etc)
BG got reviewed in the same issue – it was quite the month for finding our Lou Reeds at PCG. I believe Fallout 2 may have been the month before or something.
Spectrum vs C64: C64s were for the Rich kids so got wanky tedious games. Spectrums were brought by PUNK ROCK WARRIORS.
KG
KG
KG FTW
@KG
SWINE!!
my C64 was second hand with 8 shoe boxes worth of games, that was one fell of a motherfuckin deal.
and could also be used to attack burglars effectivly while using the tape deck as a morning star unlike your puny spectrums.
plus biege is the future of games.
Speccys were technologically inferior, there’s no denying it.
But they were the plucky ragamuffin band of misfits, who solved the clues and found the treasure.
The C64s were the rich kids who got everything they wanted, but had no soul and ultimately lost the girl to the Speccy.
lord have mercy on these poor misguided soul’s taking solace in their inferior spectrums
and lest we forget dear lord we had the almighty SID sound chip which allowed me to listen to sweet tunes to go with better graphics while the Sinclair bunch smoked fags and talked girls in to letting them touch them with their wildeian wit behind the bike shed.
im still doing this fanboi thing wrong.
Wot Kieron said. I should refresh before typing comments.
@Kieron Gillen
It may have been your review of Thief that put me off buying it. The later parts with zombies and tosh was not what I was looking for. I wanted to sneak into houses and steal stuff. So I played the demo repeatedly instead.
There is probably something deeply wrong with a 8 year old boy playing Ant Attack 3D whilst listening to his dads King Crimson tapes being loudly distorted due to over-eager azimuth adjustments.
@KG: Didn’t you write for AP under the moniker of “Cookie Monster”? Which would make Theif the first review published under your real name?
I vaguely remember that UFO review too. No specific details as such, but it’s always the most glowing and most critical reviews that stick in the memory.
The most obvious influence the Hobbit had on me, was that if anyone ever sits down next to me and starts singing about gold I’m forced to kill them instantly.
Spectrum = three-chord punk
Commodore = wanky prog rock
Amstrad = incontinent folk music
I’ve been a MUSH roleplayer since I discovered the things existed while at university in 1998. Though I just hang out with a couple of friends now, since I discovered (after far too long) that everyone on the internet is completely insane.
It’s fun watching things like WoW roleplayers go through the same internal dramas and stupidity that we did in the late 90s though. Never did play on a Transformers MUSH. Comic books all the way for me.:)
Ergates: Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that, but realised it opened a whole other can of worms so decided to side-step it.
KG
You’d have thought I’d have learned to spell the name of what is probably my favourate game ever by now….
“I” before “E” except after “C”…
I have stopped reading this halfway through to add: “WOO! CANNOCK!”
Wow… when I saw that TF2005 MUSH login screen my face just about melted off. It’s like someone finally acknowledged that my secret hobby for 12 years is actually.. you know, a real thing!
Kieron is right, 2k5 is still going strong and hell, we’ve even upgraded the combat system. I’ve been playing there forever, I’d be curious to know who you played there Kieron. :)
As for some of the other comments; yeah it is mostly about friends and a big nerdy chatroom, but there is some amazing roleplaying that goes on. Some structured, some not. Way better than most of the messageboard junk that I have seen. I won’t shamelessly plug, but you can google around for the wiki and check out any number of logs going back 12 years or so.
If anyone is curious, hit up Hazard when you get there.
Yeah, the 2k5 MUSH is still going strong. We also have a wiki page, for all your needs and instructions on how/where to log on and how to apply. New players are always welcome!
http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
MUSHing is like helping to write a big story. :)
I played a lot of MUSHes. Practically destroyed my college career with ‘em, actually. When I hear about people getting addicted to WoW nowadays, I think, “Sonny boy, I did that back when you were lucky to have ANSI color.”
I remember my elation the first time I was given a ROYALTY flag. My introduction to procedural code through @ commands, and the creation of silly things like hand mirrors that would show you other people’s @desc statements. I went to CWRU in the early ’90s, meaning that I was involved in TinyM* back in the day; from there, I made my way to a number of others.
That said, the all-time time-waster for me turned out to be a MUD after all, albeit a very MUSH-like MUD: DiscworldMUD, which as I understand it is still around.
@Kieron
I’m interested in the Geoff Tuffli thing for several reasons. First off, he was incredibly good at setting design, and was responsible for three of the best original-themed RPG MUSHes out there: Pandemonium, HellMUSH II, and Gohs. I’m pretty sure he was involved in some others, but the setting design was pretty immaculately done.
Also, unlike most gods, he did most (or all) of the code himself. I think he may actually have been the only admin on Gohs.
Second, I’m largely just interested to see how a MMORPG designed by MUSH people differs from an MMORPG designed by MUD people. Though I suspect the majority of people involved in the design of Champions are MUD people (or actually probably MMORPG people), there’s a chance that story isn’t going to end up an afterthought, and that systems designed to [i]support[/i] storytelling might actually exist.
I’m not confident that the graphical medium is well-suited to all that, but interested to see what they come up with.
Hazard: That’s a dark secret. Mail me and I’ll probably say. I suspect I played longer over at Lost Years with the alt. An OC, a Decepticon. Oh – and I briefly played Sunstreaker at 2k5 too, except it never really worked that well. I played him particularly sociopathic.
Sunder2k5: I admit, when going to look at the site, I had a bit of a glow at seeing the timeline – seeing where I’d play up to, and the events afterwards which I only really could guess at the full import. It’s a big ol’ story.
Tom: Ditto. My time on the MUSHes is, I suspect, why I don’t go completely into modern MMOs. I’ve disappeared down that hole once before.
KG
For some reason all I can see on the Transformers title screenshot is “TRANSFORMERS BOOB MUSH”
Re: UFO A500, I hand copied that review onto the internet years ago when I had an AP tribute site and things like scanners were a disfunctional mess. It’s become a part of my history; that obsessive time in the years after APs demise when I’d lost direction and argued continuously on alt.digitiser and the like.
My time with MUSHes (mainly of the comic book superhero/villain roleplay variety) ended mainly when it became clear that most of the current places were (a) running out of players, and (b) all turned to crap by their administrators.
On many places, the application requirements were getting excessive, requiring you to write a whole massive document (upwards of 100k!) on everything your character can ever do, get it approved by staff, then be held precisely to that document for your entire playing time (unless you submit any equally detailed amendments to it).
The stated goals here were to let other people know what you can do, to ensure you’re serious about playing the character, and most importantly, to weed out the “twinks”, or “powergamers”. These were players who messed up the otherwise harmonious consent-based roleplay (you tell me what you’re trying to do to my character, I decide whether it succeeds or not) by always having to get their way — perhaps by overstating their powers, or by always being insanely lucky, or by even just pulling new powers out their arse.
The trouble was the sinister agenda behind these applications. The real goal, even if staff didn’t consciously realise it, was to have a document that they could beat players over the head with should they stray (purely in the eyes of staff, of course), and even more importantly, to force players to invest heavily in their characters, so that staff have leverage over them right from the start.
(Nor did the applications weed out twinks. Ironically, it actually made them worse, because now they had more ammunition with which to achieve their power fantasies or whatever goes on in their heads.)
Worse, I was part of staff on several occasions, and even found myself slipping into the same mindset as all my fellow clique-y staffers, believing that our job was to be bouncers and police rather than administrators and facilitators. Thankfully, my specialty was code and my position always either codewiz or hosting provider, so I don’t have any real instances of player abuse to look back upon in shame — though I did partake in some of the behind-the-scenes grumbling about players the staff didn’t want around any more, and were looking for reasons to get rid of.
So yeah, I pretty much have to agree with HopperUK that I stopped roleplaying on MUSHes around when I discovered that “everyone on the internet is completely insane”. I do still hang out on a few, but only for chatting with old friends. I don’t really see myself getting into that scene again, especially since the superhero MUSHes don’t seem to have retained their player counts to anywhere near the degree of e.g. the aforementioned Transformers MUSH.
I loved me some MUSHes, but thankfully they never did anything worth mentioning to my life. (Outside of giving me an excuse to write, anyway.) I could never stay interested in one more than a month or so.
And there were always crazy people. Never bothered me much, but still. Ewww.