{"id":479,"date":"2018-01-06T00:18:09","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T00:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/?p=479"},"modified":"2018-01-06T00:18:09","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T00:18:09","slug":"479","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/2018\/01\/06\/479\/","title":{"rendered":"Aaezure Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Became Immortal in Deathwish (PC, Telnet)<\/p>\n

MUD, MUSH, MUCK, and MOO, or MU*\/ M** are classes of text-based multiplayer game which tend to be played over Telnet protocol. Originating from a time where there was Internet but no web browsers, many MUDs were popular in the 80s and 90s and some are still played today.<\/p>\n

Deathwish has been continuously online since '94, making it one of the oldest MUDs still in continuous operation.<\/p>\n

Once called \"Aaezure Odyssey\", I played it in the late 90s and early 2000s. The idea of playing a game over the Internet was really appealing, and graphical online games-- while some existed-- were a bad experience over the local dial-up. To describe this experience accurately, I didn't have an Internet-capable computer at home for most of this, but it was a nice treat getting to play this game at my friend's house, free computer hour at school or at the library. I had a friend in grade school where we'd sit down at her computer and play this game together and it was overall a good time.<\/p>\n

In the game's early days, the name Aaezure Odyssey was adapted because Deathwish was off-putting for some people. Since then the game has reverted back to its original name.<\/p>\n

In 2001ish our family \"upgraded\" from a modem-less Apple II\/c to a Windows 98 computer with working dial-up so I got a lot more opportunities to play these sorts of games. I tried out a lot of different MU*s of many different genres. But I never found one I liked as much as Deathwish.<\/p>\n

My old character was definitely purged for idleness since it had not been logged on for about 20 years. I wasn't sweating that too much, especially since I wanted a new toon so that I could re-experience the whole game. The purging policy used to exist to save server space. It's not necessary now.<\/p>\n

There were some artifacts of older times in the MUD documentation and in the MUD itself. It's a remnant of a very different Internet. I swear somewhere there was at least one :\u208b). In the connected documentation to the MUD there was a helpful page explaining terms such as \"lag\", \"flame\", and \"newbie\".<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the current year. Log in, get past character creation and... there were actual other people playing this game. Not a ton, but... enough for it to shock me when I saw it. At odd hours, there would only be a few characters. On, say, a Saturday night, there would be 10-20 characters, with about 1-3 characters per human person. Seeing people playing and conversing with each other- this is on a MUD, in what is now the late 2010s. How? What is this? I'd type some 'about' command, and alongside the link to the normal hosted page, there was a Facebook link. What universe is this?<\/p>\n

I rolled a mage as my main, and a paladin alt, partied them together and multi-played them in two side-by-side Telnet clients. The client I used had good support for scriptability so I was able to brush off my Lua, automate a lot of common actions and make the experience less grind-y and save myself some typing. Eventually, I had a cleric too, multi-playing three toons at once which is the limit.<\/p>\n

There were moments in this game that were funny, fascinating, strange, surprising, and emotionally engaging. In some of the room descriptions and zone design you feel like there is entire world behind them even though it's just text. It was such an adventure playing through the mortal playthrough. See, I thought I experienced a good amount of it the first time I played way back. But the game is deeper than I ever could have imagined.<\/p>\n

Since I had reached the level cap I was given the option to \"remort\" my character- meaning, reset to level 1 except with some interesting improvements- or become immortal. Becoming immortal revealed a new game. That game is basically a meta-game. It is something awesome and really overwhelming.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Became Immortal in Deathwish (PC, Telnet) MUD, MUSH, MUCK, and MOO, or MU*\/ M** are classes of text-based multiplayer game which tend to be played over Telnet protocol. Originating from a time where there was Internet but no web browsers, many MUDs were popular in the 80s and 90s and some are still played today. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,48,103,107,125,131,150,193],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aaezure-odyssey","tag-deathwish","tag-mmo","tag-mud","tag-pc-games","tag-played","tag-retro","tag-telnet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}