Secure Immaturity

Retrogasmic is a monthly column designed to educate you about all-but-forgotten geeky shit and why you should care about it today.

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It’s the age old argument: Weren’t the text descriptions in Zork detailed enough? Why did they have to go and ruin video games by adding graphics? Are modern video games awesome or have all these fancy polygons killed our imaginations? Who knows? But it did get me waxing nostalgic about a couple of games from the pre-graphics days and their flashy descendents.

Oh yes, kids, some of your favorite NVidia card-eating clickfests originally crawled out of a primordial monochrome pool inhabited by programs which took up less file space than this article.

Rogue

Challenge: Zork is great and all, with its words, but I want to boil dungeon delving down to its essence, man. And plus I want to die every few minutes from vampire bat attacks and random pit traps. Oh, and I want every button on my keyboard to do something in the game. Go!

So check this out. Early computers had very limited graphics capabilities. Not limited as in 8-bit NES graphics. Limited as in “Would you like the pixel to be on or off?” Making any kind of decent images in those days was like recreating Guernica on a Lite-Brite using only the white pegs. “What’s a Lite-Brite?” Get off my lawn! Plus, any graphics you could create were heavy memory-wise, so you could have an image of an awesome flaming broadsword, but that would be the entire game.

Here’s what you do. In the same way that the entire Internet can be tricked into thinking a colon and right parenthesis is a smiley face, the foolish people of the 80s could be convinced that “@” was a hero and “t” was his magic sword. Now that I mention it, this entire paragraph is loaded with wraiths and cobras! ;D

And so we got Rogue, a game of dangerous dungeon delving. You guided your text-based hero through a randomly-generated dungeon defined by #s and other members of the SHIFT+key family. Later innovations would include full access to the extended character set for more realistic wall segments. Of the “Rogue-like” games of this era, NetHack arose as the one of the most popular. In fact, it is still played to this day.

Of course, you may be familiar with Rogue’s more graphical descendant, Diablo 3.

Trade Wars 2002

Challenge: I want to play the role of a daring space merchant in a loose amalgam of the Star Wars, Star Trek and Traveller universes. But, just in case that doesn’t work out, I want the option to build a dreadnaught with which to decimate the civilizations that refused to buy my space wheat. Go!

TradeWars 2002 was a staple of the BBS scene and your board was not legit unless it had TW2002 on the menu. Turn-based in the extreme, you logged in, carefully executed the actions available to you from your miserly turn allotment and then logged out. For the day. You had to free up the phone line so another player could call in to the BBS and do their turn. It was like playing Axis & Allies with a hundred other people, but you only got one move a day. TradeWars gave the impression of a massively multiplayer online game with a stateful universe, but in reality it was because each game lasted for freaking seven months.

Even so, the idea of working the space lanes, trying to cut the juiciest deals while avoiding pirates and other players was compelling enough for the game to obtain a massive following. Players banded together to form corporations, pooling resources for the benefit of the team. Long term goals were set, gambits set in motion, and epic space battles were had. All through a series of text menus and blocky images that barely count as graphics. TradeWars 2002 brought a multiplayer cooperative and competitive strategy game unlike anything else at the time.

The ultimate realization of the massively multiplayer space trading game established by TradeWars is without question EVE Online. Listen carefully, and you too may hear its siren call promising a second job mining asteroids, micromanaging your ship’s load out, and squabbling over company politics. I kid. EVE had me in its grasp for a few months and the recent updates tempt me to return.

MUDs

Challenge: Seriously though, Zork is the mad note. I just want to be able to play it along with a hundred of my friends. Please add a godlike level of control over the entire game universe so I can realize my dream of maintaining a unicorn farm. The unicorns, which have +50 laser beam eyes of slaying, should be tended by the fair maiden Christie of Brinkley, a, er, fully interactive NPC. And there should be orcs and shit. Go!

Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, were the original digital crack. Players would get enraptured with these games and treat them with the same reverence as, say, Firefly. A decade before anyone dropped out of school or died at an internet café playing MMOs, you heard stories of people just vanishing into these online realms, forsaking the life they once knew. While I was at college, this guy I knew just stopped going to class. One day a fist-sized crater appeared in the wall near the VAX terminal. “His character got killed,” someone explained. Respawning back in Safetown after you get slain? That’s a recent development, kids. A lot of these servers had permanent death.

Oh, and most MUDs were free. That may have accounted for some of the appeal.

But let me back up a bit. Playing a MUD was akin to playing a text adventure game like Colossal Cave. You wandered about a fantasy landscape rendered only in prose. You could interact with the environment by typing brief commands like “GO EAST” or “LIGHT TORCH” or “ATTACK GAZEBO.” In a traditional text adventure, everyone you met was controlled by the computer. In a MUD, you could run into other players playing the same game simultaneously.

MUDs were much larger and more complex than their text adventure brethren. The commands available to you and each world’s charter varied from server to server. Fortunately, there was almost always someone from the community to help walk you through the world. Often after logging on for the first time and creating a brand new character, a volunteer would teleport to your location and ease you into your new text-based existence, acting as a tour guide through Gondor, as it were.

A subspecies of the MUD was the “Sim.” These worlds strived to recreate Star Trek, Dune, Robotech, or any number of popular franchises. You created a role appropriate to the world and went about your daily activities. You could play a bartender at a seedy cantina, a communications officer on a Federation starship, or a young pilot who, against his peaceful ideology, finds himself caught up in an interstellar war between giant alien invaders and a ragtag fleet of transformable mecha. Or whatever.

At the end of the day, a MUD was just a database full of text that a large number of people could access at once. It was the interactions between players and the investment of the communal imagination that brought these games to life. That, and the fact that you could create your own content. I’m not talking about dyeing your cloak purple to match your Epic Boots of Line Dancing. Users of sufficient access level and coding know-how could actually annex new regions to the game world, invent new supporting characters and introduce new game mechanics. It was not unusual on some of the less restrictive MUDs to discover someone had lovingly recreated a roller coaster theme park on the outskirts of Rivendell.

There are many MUDs still online today, needing only a TELNET client or even just a web browser to play. As for the present day version of the MUD? One might say World of Warcraft. That’s not a bad answer as WoW certainly owes much to the MUDs of old. But when you play WoW, you will only ever explore Azeroth. If you’re interested in creating your own narrative rather than participating in endless raids, there’s not a lot for you there. Players have no hand in creating new content or any sort of personalized expression beyond the aforementioned purple ensemble. For that sort of thing you need to visit Second Life, the true heir to the Multi User Dungeon throne.

In closing, it would be easy for me to get curmudgeonly and talk about how, back in my day we used our brains to create fun and we didn’t need Blizzard to mass produce our fantasies. But I like cool graphics. And those old games are still around, many of them updated and improved by graphics (see below). Imagination and communal narrative still find ways to sprout up through the cracks between multi-core processors.

Excuse me, but I need to go check out this sweet graphical front end for NetHack.

Resources

NetHack – Hub of information for all current development of this Roguelike game.

TradeWars Rising – Sylien Games’ modern revitalization of TradeWars 2002.

The Mud Connector – Directory of hundreds of MUDs, many of which are still active.

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