MU* - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

The letters M and U are intended to indicate the words Multi and User, but there are a lot of ways that acronym can resolve.

The first conclusion to them was as MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon. (Trivia: the "Dungeon" in question was the bootlegged Fortran port of the initial mainframe version of Infocom's Zork text adventure.) Richard Bartle's MUD1, a kind of multi-player text adventure, launched in 1978 and can still be experienced today. Back in the '90s, [ICE Online] hosted a MUD in area code 604 called [The Majic Realm], and following a couple of decades frozen in a crash on a VAX filesystem, it is once again playable today. In the '80s and early '90s, access to MUDs and to UseNet newsgroups were two of the major life-derailing pitfalls awaiting university students who were able to get on the Internet before it was available to the general public. But I digress.

But there are lots of other things you can add after the M and the U -- for instance, there are MUSHes, "Multi-User Shared Hallucination"s, traditionally hosts to greater emphasis on roleplay than the hack and slash activity that is the bread and butter of MUDs. We have here documented the 8bitMUSH as a specimen of its subcategory.

A MOO is a "MUD, Object-Oriented". If I had to speculate, I'd guess that they place a higher emphasis on simulationism.

(And then there are MUCKs. You can look those ones up for yourself, but not at work!)