I remember armageddon! I was a "god" there due to my work on a couple of other popular muds (Epic and SillyMUD), but was likely better known there for taking up the challenge of building a character there and seeing how fast I could kill everyone in alphabetic (and then reverse-alphabetic) order.
the challenge became easy with two things:
1) you could set your "title" to anything you wanted, as long as you included your name somewhere in the title. I named my character "Delver", as in "Foo the Delver in Spells" (the first level mage title)
2) I found a remote area that increased mana production, camped there, and summon/fireball'd everyone very quickly
good memories.
as an aside, there's a copy of SillyMUD running at legitimatesounding.com 4000 for those feeling nostalgic.
I'll join in the shameless plugs - I tried to kind of mix classic MUD styles with classic BBS Door games like Legend of the Red Dragon and integrate it with the Slack client: https://www.chatandslash.com/
I did this largely because I like punny names (the original name was Slack & Slash, but much like BetterSlack, the kind folks at Slack desired I change it, and I complied), and because it seemed like a silly enough idea that it could work.
Blur. I played from 97-04. I never played Bluemage or ExtremeMUD. The only other muds I played were a bunch of Star Wars permadeath muds and a few wheel of time ones.
The level of in-character roleplaying I saw was so convincing and thorough (and intimidating), like when someone gave me a tour of the Fighters' Guild (iirc), that I thought I was on an on-rails scripted experience. They would take me into a room, and the regulars who were hanging out would exchange some banter with my tour guide. Was way too impressive to not be scripted.
So I made some snarky in-character comments to amuse myself since I was, after all, just listening to a script. And then I felt like a goof once everyone responded to me, clearly unscripted.
It's pretty magical to experience a world where the roleplaying is that seamless.
I've been the crime boss of Armageddon multiple times since I started playing in high-school around 2005. Most recently created a character in 2016 after a 5-year break. Back to a break, prolly for longer this time.
Duties include shaking down noble houses, bribing law enfocement, and executing assassination contracts.
I was late to the MUD scene, only hopping on during my high school and later years, from 2006 onwards. But there was one that a lot of friends from my school played. Shame it's been shut down, though I heard an old fork of it recently got put online, with active building community...Might have to go find it now.
There were so many MUDs back in the 90s. I was an avid ShadowLands player myself. My interest in programming grew tremendously when I downloaded the source for DikuMUD and CircleMUD and started tweaking things. It didn't take long to turn into an outright passion.
Anyone interested in RPGs owes it to themselves to apply for a character on Arm. One of the best and most seriously-undertaken computer games of all time.
Like in EVE Online, There is so much history in MUDs. Thousands of people spent years in them, living adventures, insane stuff happened. And here is a thread about MUDs and hardly any two people mention the same one. I played Nuclear War, and Genocide for a bit.
Genocide should have a book written about it, it was the first massively multiplayer online playerkilling game, the first FPS (in text). And it was awesome.
the challenge became easy with two things:
1) you could set your "title" to anything you wanted, as long as you included your name somewhere in the title. I named my character "Delver", as in "Foo the Delver in Spells" (the first level mage title)
2) I found a remote area that increased mana production, camped there, and summon/fireball'd everyone very quickly
good memories.
as an aside, there's a copy of SillyMUD running at legitimatesounding.com 4000 for those feeling nostalgic.