Batmud

Batmud is an online adventure game that has been growing steadily in both popularity and complexity for more than fifteen years. You can play for free any time by telnetting to bat.org. It is likely that the telnet program that came with your operating system is not very useful, so you may wish to get an alternate client to improve your game experience. If you have java installed on your machine you might find Batmud's free custom client quite to your liking. Some other freely available telnet clients include PuTTY, SimpleMU, and TinyFugue. Novices will probably find SimpleMU the easiest to use. TinyFugue is very robust, but has a steep learning curve. PuTTY is small and efficient, but isn't very fully featured. zMUD is a popular client, but it is limited use shareware, not freeware.

Long before the rise of the hulking monstrosity of the so called MMORPGs (even the acronym is bloated) there existed the much smaller monstrosity of the MUD, or Multi User Database (Dungeon). While the chief aim of more modern online role-playing games is to cram as many angry adolescents together as possible and call it "Revolutionary", the text based MUDs only aspired to cram perhaps a few dozen angry adolescents together, where they cheerfully began thinking up new ways to insult each other's sexual habits.

Between insults, their characters slew monsters, went on quests, and slew each other. This may sound similar to the newer games, however, there is one key difference. In many MUDs, one could actually win. After many days of play, one could hope to advance to the rank of Immortal, Wizard, or whatever else the coders who developed the game were called. Upon assumption of this role, it became possible to craft new dungeons, artifacts, and smite puny mortals as one pleased. The key here is that the players could and did develop and contribute to the game they played. This is why so many MUDs are still around today, and have steadily matured over the years.

BatMUD, open since April 14, 1990, is where I spend much of my time. I was first introduced to it by Oscar Janicki, a classmate of mine at Bridgton Academy. While his sense of honor clashed with my sense of pure egotism, nerds will tend to stick together despite all the insults they come up with, and I was soon killing monsters with his character Siegfried. Although Oscar no longer plays, I myself still spend entirely too much time hunting monsters and trying to garner that elusive thing called love. Also power. Lots of power.

Batmud Help Files

When waiting for my friends to log on so I can party, I sometimes like to scribble out pages full of valuable information and useless trivia, all jumbled together in no particular order, full of broken html and bad grammar. These are my Help Files. All of these batmud related pages are hereby released to the public domain.

Guides:

Rough Drafts:

Last modified on: January 16 2008 01:11:34