greatdane
10-14-2020, 11:07 PM
Hi there. This'll be long. If you don't care about this type of shit, fuck off.
Back in what must have been 1996 and a few years on, I played on a MUD called SojournMUD. Now, a MUD was a text-based roleplaying game. It was all text. There were no graphics. It might tell you that you stood in a forest, and then present you with a paragraph of text that described the appearance of this forest, along with the directions you could move into--typically the cardinal directions of north, east, south and west. The same was the case if you went into town or anywhere else. In that day we lived in the grid of N E S W. It would also tell you who/what was in the current "room" -- rooms were squares on the NESW grid.
Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. This was basically the standard fare of MUDs. Much debate amongst grumpy old cunts can be had about the true origin of this platform, but the fact remains that the codebase upon which most of the succesful MUDs were built had its genesis in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark (where I grew up!). Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet (DIKU; or the Institute of Dataology at Copenhagen University) is where the first easily adaptable MUD codebase was written. When DIKU was published, MUDs went from some obscure thing run in local unversity servers to something everyone could launch as an actual game. This coincided rather conveniently with the advent of domestic internet.
There were many more MUD codebases than just DIKU. I won't go into details here because anyone who gives a shit probably already knows about it, and anyone who doesn't won't care. Suffice to say that DIKU was to MUDs what EQEMU has been to private Everquest servers, more or less. It was a way to bring what had once been very isolated pockets of online gaming into the mainstream, and from there sprung many branches of what would eventually become the entire tree of wildly varied MUD codebases.
Now, on to something that you fuckers will care about. There was this here game called Sojourn (later renamed TorilMUD) which had its root in the DIKU codebase, but heavily modified, as was any MUD worth its salt in that time. This game was based around the Forgotten Realms which was the most mainstream D&D universe of its time. In its heyday (I would say 1996-1999) thsi game featured about two hundred players online on a good evening. It was regarded as one of the most popular MUDs. Online gaming was, after all, in its infancy. This is where MMORPGs were born, after all.
And on this MUD called Sojourn, the late and much venerated Brad McQuaid played. He played a ranger called Aradune. That was his "main." I'm sure he probably had other characters as well, just as anyone who has played Everquest for years has surely made a number of alts, but Aradune was his primary handle. I was rather young back then so I had no real relationship with him; he was one of those big-name players who the youngins and newbies looked up to. Much like the bigshots of any Everquest server.
Then one day - and I can't claim any sort of involvement - Brad McQuaid apparently decided to make a game for himself. A game with actual graphics. He was no doubt inspired by early MMORPGs such as Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, and the promising income from monthly subscriptions. Why, one could have a hundred thousand dollars each month if one built a game that enough people would want to play! Wouldn't that be neat?
I was never friends with "Aradune." I was like fourteen years old when he was already on the path to bigger and better things, so it would be dishonest if I claimed I knew him. I didn't know him any more than your average casual player on P99 knows the guild leader of the top raiding guild of the year. But his status was legendary beyond anyhing that we have here on this server, and he went on to create what we've spent a decade enjoying.
Here's a little bit of overly wordy trivia. I do not possess the skill of brevity, I'll admit, so if you're still reading, you're very patient indeed. Let's start with some simple stuff:
- Noone at the time had even the slightest notion that Everquest would become as popular as it became. The blokes who built this game came from MUDs that had maybe a couple hundred players online at a time, and even though they may have thought that they would attract more than that with a graphical engine, they had never in their wildest imaginations supposed that this would turn into tens or hundreds of thousands. This is why Everquest's servers were barely functional for the first month or so. They were totally unprepared.
- Some of Everquest's original code may have been copied directly from DIKU. Now, the fundamental essence of DIKU(MUD) was that it could never be monetized. It was perhaps the world's first piece of opensource code: anyone could download it, work on it, modify it, and launch their own game--as long as they did not charge money. Then Everquest came along, charging money, and one thing stood out: the feedback to many of the game's built-in emotes were direct copies of what was in DIKU. Word for word, when you /smile or /grin or whatever in Everquest. There was even a threat of lawsuits at the time, but I don't believe anything ever came of this. Knowing quite a bit about MUD codebases, I don't think the inner workings of the game were really copied - there would just be too many things that needed changed in order to accomodate a graphical engine - but we do have relics of the DIKU legacy in the form of such things as the six-second "tick." That's MUD thing.
- While I've just said that I don't think Everquest plagiarized the DIKU code, I'm afraid that it did basically copy SojournMUD in almost every regard. Brad McQuaid was not some paragon of originality. Vast swaths of Norrah are lifted wholesale from the gameworld of SojournMUD. The races are basically the same - a direct copy, in fact, down to their general stats and everything - and the world itself also bears a striking resemblance to the MUD where Brad blazed his trails. Two human cities (Waterdeep with its rich port and and Baldur's Gate as a more rural region with large stretches of land around it--ring any bells?) and a swampy troll city, a neolithical-themed ogre city. Leuthilspar, the city of gnomish inventors. The dreamy elven forest city of... honestly, I can't remember the name. There was your frigid northern city of the barbarians, your stronghold of the dwarves deep in the mountains... really the only meaningful difference was that the dark elves actually lived in a subterranean area called the Underdark, which Brad McQuaid could not plagiarize without suffering legal action because Wizards of the Coast were making good money off of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt novels at the time.
- Even the classes of SojournMUD were remarkably similar to what we have in Everquest. You had the warrior, a class with very few skills beyond rescue (the MUD equivalent of taunt) and kick, bash and disarm. You had rogues who mostly just backstabbed, picked locks and disarmed traps. You had invokers, which are wizards in EQ but fill the same space: little more than direct damage spells. Conjurers became magicians: slightly worse damage spells than invokers but also the ability to summon elemental pets. Shamans, the masters of buffs and group heals (I guess that didn't carry over into EQ) with a spirit animal pet. Bards with their buff songs. Paladins and anti-paladins (shadowknights) who were basically watered-down warriors with some spells from the cleric and necromancer classes, respectively. The illusionist with its crowd control and defensive magics, much like enchanters. And hell, what do you know, ranger was regarded for years as the worst class on TorilMUD. The classes and races of that game were copied almost wholesale into Everquest.
- To put it briefly, each and every class and race in Everquest is a rather direct copy of their likeness on SojournMUD. I mean literally all of them. The whole lineup of classes and races, complete with their general roles and relative stats, simply simulated straight into Everquest. Wait, actually, Sojourn didn't have Erudites. That's the sole exception. Of course, then Kunark came out with its iksars and suddenly the game deviated strongly from its D&D-based lore, but it was already a phenomenon by then.
- Contrary to popular belief, the concept of raiding was not invented by Everquest. This had existed for a long time on Sojourn. At the time it was called "zoning"--I don't know why that was the term, but that's what it was called when numerous groups went to a particularly difficult place where only such a force could do anything, and killed legendary enemies. Examples include all manner of named giants and Tiamat, Queen of Dragons.
- All manner of little things that we associate with Everquest were invented here. Ressurection sickness, hell levels, re-memorizing spells (i.e. meditating) during combat, frankly even the concept of an actual tank, and several items themselves--I recall 'Diamondine Earring' being a +strength +health earpiece on Sojourn. While there are obvious mechanical differences between a wholly text-based game and Everquest, it's also very clear that the developers borrowed heavily from it.
Now, when talk of Everquest came about, the old guard of SojournMUD were none too pleased. They were very worried that this newfangled graphical MMORPG would steal away their playerbase. There was much consternation and outright hostility toward those who talked of jumping ship. I don't suppose that any threads from the 1997-98 period still remain available on the internet, but it was very much a concern for the game at the time. And sure enough, when Everquest began to materialize into something real, panic ensued. Sojourn rebranded itself as TorilMUD (it had split off once before into a game called DurisMUD) and was never the same again. Those with a taste for that type of gameplay simply moved to EQ.
TorilMUD is still operational to this day, but it is a faint shadow of its former self. What was once a thriving online community has dwindled to two or three dozen players at peak, and there is of course no bright future in store for it. But it's very interesting that this is what led to Everquest. Not only did the late Brad McQuaid play there, he borrowed so heavily from this game that if it had not been bound by the DIKU rules to make no money and claim no commercial rights, they would absolutely have been able to sue him for plagiarism. Everquest really is the graphical version of that MUD in almost all aspects.
Back in what must have been 1996 and a few years on, I played on a MUD called SojournMUD. Now, a MUD was a text-based roleplaying game. It was all text. There were no graphics. It might tell you that you stood in a forest, and then present you with a paragraph of text that described the appearance of this forest, along with the directions you could move into--typically the cardinal directions of north, east, south and west. The same was the case if you went into town or anywhere else. In that day we lived in the grid of N E S W. It would also tell you who/what was in the current "room" -- rooms were squares on the NESW grid.
Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. This was basically the standard fare of MUDs. Much debate amongst grumpy old cunts can be had about the true origin of this platform, but the fact remains that the codebase upon which most of the succesful MUDs were built had its genesis in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark (where I grew up!). Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet (DIKU; or the Institute of Dataology at Copenhagen University) is where the first easily adaptable MUD codebase was written. When DIKU was published, MUDs went from some obscure thing run in local unversity servers to something everyone could launch as an actual game. This coincided rather conveniently with the advent of domestic internet.
There were many more MUD codebases than just DIKU. I won't go into details here because anyone who gives a shit probably already knows about it, and anyone who doesn't won't care. Suffice to say that DIKU was to MUDs what EQEMU has been to private Everquest servers, more or less. It was a way to bring what had once been very isolated pockets of online gaming into the mainstream, and from there sprung many branches of what would eventually become the entire tree of wildly varied MUD codebases.
Now, on to something that you fuckers will care about. There was this here game called Sojourn (later renamed TorilMUD) which had its root in the DIKU codebase, but heavily modified, as was any MUD worth its salt in that time. This game was based around the Forgotten Realms which was the most mainstream D&D universe of its time. In its heyday (I would say 1996-1999) thsi game featured about two hundred players online on a good evening. It was regarded as one of the most popular MUDs. Online gaming was, after all, in its infancy. This is where MMORPGs were born, after all.
And on this MUD called Sojourn, the late and much venerated Brad McQuaid played. He played a ranger called Aradune. That was his "main." I'm sure he probably had other characters as well, just as anyone who has played Everquest for years has surely made a number of alts, but Aradune was his primary handle. I was rather young back then so I had no real relationship with him; he was one of those big-name players who the youngins and newbies looked up to. Much like the bigshots of any Everquest server.
Then one day - and I can't claim any sort of involvement - Brad McQuaid apparently decided to make a game for himself. A game with actual graphics. He was no doubt inspired by early MMORPGs such as Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, and the promising income from monthly subscriptions. Why, one could have a hundred thousand dollars each month if one built a game that enough people would want to play! Wouldn't that be neat?
I was never friends with "Aradune." I was like fourteen years old when he was already on the path to bigger and better things, so it would be dishonest if I claimed I knew him. I didn't know him any more than your average casual player on P99 knows the guild leader of the top raiding guild of the year. But his status was legendary beyond anyhing that we have here on this server, and he went on to create what we've spent a decade enjoying.
Here's a little bit of overly wordy trivia. I do not possess the skill of brevity, I'll admit, so if you're still reading, you're very patient indeed. Let's start with some simple stuff:
- Noone at the time had even the slightest notion that Everquest would become as popular as it became. The blokes who built this game came from MUDs that had maybe a couple hundred players online at a time, and even though they may have thought that they would attract more than that with a graphical engine, they had never in their wildest imaginations supposed that this would turn into tens or hundreds of thousands. This is why Everquest's servers were barely functional for the first month or so. They were totally unprepared.
- Some of Everquest's original code may have been copied directly from DIKU. Now, the fundamental essence of DIKU(MUD) was that it could never be monetized. It was perhaps the world's first piece of opensource code: anyone could download it, work on it, modify it, and launch their own game--as long as they did not charge money. Then Everquest came along, charging money, and one thing stood out: the feedback to many of the game's built-in emotes were direct copies of what was in DIKU. Word for word, when you /smile or /grin or whatever in Everquest. There was even a threat of lawsuits at the time, but I don't believe anything ever came of this. Knowing quite a bit about MUD codebases, I don't think the inner workings of the game were really copied - there would just be too many things that needed changed in order to accomodate a graphical engine - but we do have relics of the DIKU legacy in the form of such things as the six-second "tick." That's MUD thing.
- While I've just said that I don't think Everquest plagiarized the DIKU code, I'm afraid that it did basically copy SojournMUD in almost every regard. Brad McQuaid was not some paragon of originality. Vast swaths of Norrah are lifted wholesale from the gameworld of SojournMUD. The races are basically the same - a direct copy, in fact, down to their general stats and everything - and the world itself also bears a striking resemblance to the MUD where Brad blazed his trails. Two human cities (Waterdeep with its rich port and and Baldur's Gate as a more rural region with large stretches of land around it--ring any bells?) and a swampy troll city, a neolithical-themed ogre city. Leuthilspar, the city of gnomish inventors. The dreamy elven forest city of... honestly, I can't remember the name. There was your frigid northern city of the barbarians, your stronghold of the dwarves deep in the mountains... really the only meaningful difference was that the dark elves actually lived in a subterranean area called the Underdark, which Brad McQuaid could not plagiarize without suffering legal action because Wizards of the Coast were making good money off of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt novels at the time.
- Even the classes of SojournMUD were remarkably similar to what we have in Everquest. You had the warrior, a class with very few skills beyond rescue (the MUD equivalent of taunt) and kick, bash and disarm. You had rogues who mostly just backstabbed, picked locks and disarmed traps. You had invokers, which are wizards in EQ but fill the same space: little more than direct damage spells. Conjurers became magicians: slightly worse damage spells than invokers but also the ability to summon elemental pets. Shamans, the masters of buffs and group heals (I guess that didn't carry over into EQ) with a spirit animal pet. Bards with their buff songs. Paladins and anti-paladins (shadowknights) who were basically watered-down warriors with some spells from the cleric and necromancer classes, respectively. The illusionist with its crowd control and defensive magics, much like enchanters. And hell, what do you know, ranger was regarded for years as the worst class on TorilMUD. The classes and races of that game were copied almost wholesale into Everquest.
- To put it briefly, each and every class and race in Everquest is a rather direct copy of their likeness on SojournMUD. I mean literally all of them. The whole lineup of classes and races, complete with their general roles and relative stats, simply simulated straight into Everquest. Wait, actually, Sojourn didn't have Erudites. That's the sole exception. Of course, then Kunark came out with its iksars and suddenly the game deviated strongly from its D&D-based lore, but it was already a phenomenon by then.
- Contrary to popular belief, the concept of raiding was not invented by Everquest. This had existed for a long time on Sojourn. At the time it was called "zoning"--I don't know why that was the term, but that's what it was called when numerous groups went to a particularly difficult place where only such a force could do anything, and killed legendary enemies. Examples include all manner of named giants and Tiamat, Queen of Dragons.
- All manner of little things that we associate with Everquest were invented here. Ressurection sickness, hell levels, re-memorizing spells (i.e. meditating) during combat, frankly even the concept of an actual tank, and several items themselves--I recall 'Diamondine Earring' being a +strength +health earpiece on Sojourn. While there are obvious mechanical differences between a wholly text-based game and Everquest, it's also very clear that the developers borrowed heavily from it.
Now, when talk of Everquest came about, the old guard of SojournMUD were none too pleased. They were very worried that this newfangled graphical MMORPG would steal away their playerbase. There was much consternation and outright hostility toward those who talked of jumping ship. I don't suppose that any threads from the 1997-98 period still remain available on the internet, but it was very much a concern for the game at the time. And sure enough, when Everquest began to materialize into something real, panic ensued. Sojourn rebranded itself as TorilMUD (it had split off once before into a game called DurisMUD) and was never the same again. Those with a taste for that type of gameplay simply moved to EQ.
TorilMUD is still operational to this day, but it is a faint shadow of its former self. What was once a thriving online community has dwindled to two or three dozen players at peak, and there is of course no bright future in store for it. But it's very interesting that this is what led to Everquest. Not only did the late Brad McQuaid play there, he borrowed so heavily from this game that if it had not been bound by the DIKU rules to make no money and claim no commercial rights, they would absolutely have been able to sue him for plagiarism. Everquest really is the graphical version of that MUD in almost all aspects.