mud posts

Last May, the organizers of behind the Game Developers Conference announced that the GDC Online event in Austin, Texas would be host to the first annual Game Developers Choice Online Awards on October 7. Today two of the awards were announced, including the first game named to its Hall of Fame.

That game is Ultima Online, the fantasy MMO developed by Origin Systems and lead by Richard "Lord British" Garriott. While not the first MMO, Ultima Online made the new game genre popular to the masses when it launched back in 1997 and is still running even today.

Also, Dr. Richard A. Bartle was named as the Games Developers Choice Online Awards' first winner of its Online Game Legend Award. Dr. Bartle is the co-creator of the first MUD (Multi User Dungeon) back in 1978. The text-based game was the first step toward the modern MMO games.

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.