Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (3 page)

Bartle drew heavily from his past as a games master in tabletop games to create the rules for the new world he was building, but today he is hesitant to give any one title much credit for this
influence, even
Dungeons & Dragons.
‘The D in
MUD
stands for “Dungeon”, which as
DUNGEN
was the name of the version of [the text adventure]
Zork
that was kicking around at the time . . . but there was nothing remotely
D&D
about the game as Roy wrote it.’ The games may seem similar to outsiders, but the
distinction rings true in the details:
MUD
included none of the monsters, classes or races – such as orcs or elves – that characterise
D&D
. The debt owed to other
computer games was also of only slight importance: ‘I’d written more computer games of my own than I had encountered by other people back then,’ Bartle says. ‘Really, there
were not a lot around!’

As the first in a new genre at the dawn of computer games,
MUD
was staking out plenty of unclaimed territory. While its apparent innovations were technical, there was no template for
the game design, and Bartle was taking a philosophical approach. He envisaged an open-yet-closed environment, where the gameplay should be emergent, allowing improvisation yet remaining
challenging. Some constraints couldn’t be avoided: players were to have freedom, but not complete freedom. They would have powers and characteristics, but these could not be unlimited. In
setting out these rules, a game designer, consciously or not, establishes a ‘constitution’ for their world. And where others might have piled on rules in an undirected
way, Bartle and Trubshaw gave their world political intent.

‘Roy and I had an unspoken understanding of what
MUD
was about,’ says Bartle. ‘To use a cliché, we were singing from the same hymn sheet.’ Part of this
was the culture of hackers to which they each belonged – they respected and admired programming ability. This was both a leveller and hard to fake, and egalitarian views with a meritocratic
slant seemed natural. ‘In this small world of idealistic programmers, people were judged by – to lift a phrase from Martin Luther King – the content of their character,’
Bartle says. ‘In the world beyond, they weren’t.’

But as well as embodying an idealised programmer culture,
MUD
’s design was also a reaction to the country’s social politics. For Bartle and Trubshaw ‘the world
beyond’ meant a Britain that was riven with inequalities, in particular, perceptions of class. ‘Roy and I were not from wealthy backgrounds . . . we had and still have unfashionable
accents,’ Bartle says. ‘We were constrained by what society declared must be true about us, rather than what really was true about us.’

Programming had given them a taste of freedom, though, and they revelled in it. From there, it seemed a short step to give freedom to other people too, and with
MUD
they had a way to
deliver it. ‘I don’t know that we ever discussed it in such terms, it was just emergent from the culture,’ Bartle says. ‘Computers gave us the chance to be a force for
good.’

Games can be a natural harbour for meritocratic ideas, with clear objectives and rewards. But it was not inevitable that
MUD
would be a game, and initially it was planned as an
interactive world hosted on the computer, albeit with the hope that a sense of purpose would emerge from the rules governing the nascent cyber-society. But the technology that Bartle and Trubshaw
relied upon for linking players – a primitive mesh of early computer networks – predated the internet, and large numbers of players didn’t look likely. It meant they would not be
able to achieve the critical mass of players to give the required ‘sense of purpose’, and they concluded that they would
have to ‘gamify’
MUD
, using the word long before it became adopted by marketers.

To create a sense of purpose in the game, they needed a matrix of risks and challenges that players could overcome to earn rewards – a technique that would later come to be known in the
industry as an ‘achievement system’ – and this became the basis for quietly giving the game a political position. Bartle considered various rewards, and each suggested a different
bias. ‘What did I want to use the advancement mechanism to say?’ he recalls thinking. ‘If I’d chosen equipment, which is how most of today’s major MMOs handle the
endgame, then I would have been endorsing materialism, a subject I was neutral on. If I’d chosen a skill system, which was breaking through in the face-to-face RPGs of the time, I’d
have been saying that practice was more important than imagination, which I didn’t believe.’

He settled on levels – allowing players to earn ranks, as a soldier progressing through the army would. In itself, this was not an innovation – numbered levels had existed in
role-playing games for some time, and Bartle would certainly have been aware of them from his experience with
Dungeons & Dragons
. But he is adamant that he chose this set-up to express
a principled stance: to invert the power of British class labels. ‘If I picked a levels system, I would be saying that people were arranged in strata,’ says Bartle of his choice,
‘which I vehemently disliked because in real life I was a prisoner of the stratum in which I was born. The difference here, though, was that people could rise through strata! They could
become who they really were, not whom society determined they should be! Yes! That was it!’

So the game was built, even from the early stages, with a subtle motive: to show the iniquities of the class system into which the two had been born, and to present another, idealised society.
In their game, all that stopped players from rising through the classes was their own ability.
MUD
was the medium Bartle and Trubshaw chose to say unpalatable things about the real
world.

MUD
was a long way from being complete when it was time for Trubshaw to take his finals. At the same time, the DEC-10 computer
that housed all their work
failed, so he abandoned his plans to finish the code, passed the keys to his virtual dungeon to Bartle, and left to get married.

Bartle worked hard to add to this ‘crucial’ core of the code. He tied up loose ends and eliminated bugs, and added a final few essential features, including allowing users to play as
women. It took dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours, but at last
MUD
was ready.

On the surface
MUD
looked like any other text adventure: a paragraph of writing would describe a scene, and the computer would then wait for an instruction from the player, a
protagonist in the game’s story. With each command, another sentence or two would appear, and the narrative would unfold. It was silent and picture-less: all of the scenes were built in the
imagination of the user. But while the best traditional text adventures were often witty and characterful, they were also static, solipsistic affairs, moving only as quickly as the player pondering
the puzzle allowed. There was no sense of another presence in the game, other than perhaps an abstract notion of the designer.

But
MUD
was a real-time experience enriched by the knowledge that other players were in the world with you. They could help, chat or fight, but the real difference was the sense of
company, however filtered. Simply knowing that a real person controlled the other character in the room, rather than an algorithm, gave the game weight and urgency. Your behaviour mattered, and its
consequences were more exciting and unpredictable. As gamers had found when playing postal games, a semi-anonymous community could be compelling.

It was in the nature of academic computing circles to share their new technologies. University of Essex students had acquired games such as
ADVENT
and
Zork
from universities in
the United States. When
MUD
was completed, Bartle returned the favour – the game was available to anyone. The design of the program required networked access, and it was also, it
turned out, very addictive. The University of Essex became a globally popular destination for the embryonic gaming scene, and eventually access to
MUD
was
restricted to night time hours to reduce the load on its system. As Bartle puts it, ‘It wasn’t all that important that we could occasionally get through to overseas
computers. What was the bigger deal was that people on overseas computers could get through to ours.’

MUD
became a phenomenon. The computing world was still small enough that if you were involved, you would probably have tried playing it, or almost certainly knew
someone else who had. Some gamers became obsessive: people joined computer clubs solely to take part in
MUD
, and it wasn’t uncommon for computing students to find that they had spent
their entire allowance of mainframe access playing the game.

Over the years, as it grew in popularity and the technology became more widespread,
MUD
became a genre: clones and derivatives popped up in other universities, sometimes with twists on
the name:
MOO
,
MUSH
,
MUCK
and so on. They came to be known collectively as MU*, and often borrowed the underlying technology of the original game.

By 1984, home computing was becoming established in Britain, but the technology needed for playing
MUD
was still out of the reach of most domestic users. Taking part in a game required
a constant phone connection, the cost of which was prohibitive for all but the most affluent, or for those using someone else’s line. Despite the computer game market flourishing on home
machines,
MUD
was stuck on its own parallel, much slower, track.

But networking technology was developing quickly, and in 1984 the government privatised British Telecom, sole supplier of telephone connections at the time. Freed from state control, the new
company was eager to expand into new markets, and bringing the emerging computer networking technologies into the home seemed an ideal venture.

The idea of linking
MUD
to the new telecoms market came from an unusual place. Simon Dally had been involved with the same gaming ’zine scene as Bartle in the seventies, coming to
know him
through
Sauce of the Nile
. A few years older than Trubshaw and Bartle, he had already established himself as a successful editor, responsible for
championing the best-selling
Henry Root Letters
through a doubtful publisher. He was enthusiastic about the prospects for
MUD
, and encouraged its two creators to join him in
forming a company to exploit it.

They called it MUSE, for Multi-User Simulated Environment, and set about shopping around their creation. The original
MUD
game was available to users through the earliest dial-up
services, Compunet in the UK, and CompuServe in the US. These were slow and painfully expensive for home users, but they worked, and when Bartle and Trubshaw’s technology was ready for
another iteration, and with BT hungry for new outlets, an exclusive deal for
MUD 2
was struck.

BT may have been enthusiastic, but the company was also desperately disorganised. Privatisation had liquefied the management structures, and although the MUSE team had been introduced at the
board-level, repeated restructurings saw them passed from one department to another, on each occasion a little further down the food chain. After several moves, MUSE found a more sympathetic home
with Prestel, a BT company that ran its early iteration of the Internet. The code was rewritten, hardware was purchased, and the team were set to go. And then their run of bad fortune started in
earnest.

Simon Dally had been suffering from mental health issues, and in 1989 he sadly committed suicide. His behaviour had been erratic for some time, and the company’s finances had been left in
a disastrous state. Trubshaw and Bartle were obliged to buy his share of MUSE from his inheritors to retain control of the company and its assets, vital for continuing their business.

Meanwhile BT took fright, and MUSE’s project was downgraded yet again. The government ran a Youth Opportunities Programme, intended to train unemployed and unskilled teenagers for the
workplace by giving them experience with large employers. BT assigned
one of these trainees to manage the MUSE relationship – it was he who eventually agreed their
contract. ‘It was a gradual decline,’ muses Bartle, ‘from speaking to board-level directors to being signed off by a youth opportunities employee.’

MUSE stayed proactive, issuing licences across Britain and the US wherever they hadn’t already been allocated. But with such rapid expansion, perhaps friction should have been expected.
The companies MUSE dealt with were a mixture of network infrastructure providers and amateur bodies pursuing a medium that they loved, and plenty of licensing deals or negotiations fell through,
often while locking out the opportunity to approach other providers. MUSE was beset by an astonishing run of bad luck, and though the company mutated and adapted, it never quite thrived.

The core experience that MUSE was offering was also caught between two technological eras. Text-based games depended on the imagination rather than graphical wonder –
MUD
’s
hook was multiplayer connection, but throughout the eighties and early nineties this remained prohibitively expensive. By the time the pricing had become palatable, gamers preferred games with
high-end graphics, and whatever the pleasures of text adventures, they simply weren’t popular any more. For
MUD
to have been a breakthrough success, affordable network technology
would have had to emerge while graphics were still primitive. It didn’t, and in the absence of that technology it’s hard to imagine a way
MUD
could have achieved mass
appeal.

But it is worth looking at what
MUD
did achieve. Today, establishing an MMORPG – the modern, graphical equivalent of
MUD
– requires building a critical mass of
users, attracting and managing them over months, and constantly iterating the game to ensure that it stays balanced. It is such an ambitious endeavour that it’s common for games to be
cancelled before they even reach the public for testing. This is in a mature market where PCs and consoles are everywhere, and connecting them to the network has no additional cost.