The first multi-user dungeon opens on a university network

What happened

Trubshaw's interest was technical before it was creative. He wanted several people logged into a university mainframe to share one described space and see each other's actions, a harder problem than it sounds on a machine designed to keep users apart. Having solved it and rewritten the program twice for maintainability, he handed it to Bartle, who filled the shell with rooms, objects, riddles and a ladder of ranks carrying a persistent player from novice to wizard with authority over the world itself.

Access widened as the university's computer became reachable from outside, including through research networks and, at certain hours, over international links, which brought in players with no connection to Essex at all. What they found there is now familiar to millions: cooperation, hierarchy, in-jokes, deliberate cruelty, and elaborate improvised etiquette to manage all of it. Bartle's later writing about the different reasons people play in shared worlds came directly out of watching this one.

The world at the time

British universities in 1978 had a mainframe or two, terminal rooms, and administrators watching processor time closely. Home modems were rare and expensive, and public online services barely existed. Playing a game on institutional equipment was a favor granted or tolerated, and the players were students, staff and whoever they could arrange an account for.

What it changed

Hundreds of text worlds followed on university networks and dial-up services through the 1980s, then commercial versions on early consumer services. When graphical worlds arrived in the 1990s their designers were frequently veterans of text worlds, and the problems they met with economies, griefing and community management had all been encountered on a mainframe in England.