1997: Achaea (opens in new tab)

I played this game on and off for about 16 years. One of the really cool differentiating aspects was that certain kinds of player automation were expected and somewhat encouraged. Basically you would use a client that had a built in Lua API so that you could use regex based logic to do "if so and so casts X spell, then send cast such and such heal spell". Rather than cheapen the combat system it made it far more rich (I thought anyway) because it freed the players to focus on other aspects of the battle.

Watching folks collaborate on building and setting up triggers in the OOP channels was partly what inspired me to learn to code in the first place

Anyway, I have fond memories of this game. The enforced role-playing makes it a very effective immersion experience. There are some truly talented writers among the player base. The community is very special.

MUDs are still alive[1], though there are a lot fewer very active MUDs than there used to be.

For anyone interested in giving them a try, I can recommend the Mudlet MUD client[2], which is heavily scriptable and configurable.

MUDs and programming are actually a match made in heaven. I personally really enjoyed automating map creation using Mudlet's generic mapper script.

So if you like automating stuff and don't mind mostly text interfaces instead of pretty eye-candy, you might like MUDs.

[1] - https://www.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?mode=tmc_bigli...

[2] - https://www.mudlet.org/

For a few months back in 2003 my friends and I were completely engrossed in this game. It was a cool experience. I was really impressed by how the world truly had things going on and players could have an actual impact on the story because they ran everything in the game world.

It was also very interesting how role-playing was actually enforced and you could get punished by the gods (moderators employed by the developers) for breaking character.

I played this game for years. It's essentially how I learned to touch-type. I definitely recommend checking it out if you've never played a MUD before.

I took a look at MUDs a while back. The limitless possibilities are attractive, though the learning curve may pose an obstacle for some.