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Old 12-26-2007, 02:04 PM   #2
shadowfyr
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
Re: British Legends - The Original & Still the Best!

Kind of a pretentious claim. lol Do we know that this is in fact historically true, or are you only counting the ones on the internet? I am wondering, because the roots of these types of systems go a long way back, to *prior* to the existence of places like Compuserve and I know of at least one still floating around called Tele-Arena Which I found and played briefly before I ever got access to things like AOL, Compuserve, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of games from the BBS era are damn hard to play on most modern clients, since they often took advantage of some things like text positioning, which may or may not exist in some clients at all, are not complete in most of them, and when they are complete, exist in clients that are imho barely better than MS Telnet (while even back when playing Tele-Arena, clients like Telemate, which had a script system, existed). It would, for example, be nearly impossible to create a new TWHelper "script" that emulated the original behaviors of that program in any client that also supported the full set of ANSI functions needed to play the game. Its either/or, but never both.

Mind you, I don't know it Tele-Arena ever expanded into any of those ANSI graphics tricks, or used those commands, so its unclear if that would be a problem for a modern client. And, unlike TW2002, you don't need a helper. lol

Anyway, point is, it would be kind of interesting to see where the "real" start of MUDs was. Some, like the people on Discovery Channel, in their "Rise of the video game", series gloss over the facts, so much that they imply that it went from Adventure to muds, then straight into MMORPGs... So much for them doing any research on the subject. Worse, they imply the same as you do, that it started on Compuserve, thus glossing over everything that existed in peer to peer BBS systems, including the ones that somehow provided ways to redirect calls, and/or multiple phone numbers, before that. You would think they would at least try to get it right, or show something more interesting than the old pure B/W Adventure screens, which bear no resemblance to a mud at all. lol
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