My Time With MUDs (Multi User Dungeons)

1. What Are MUDs?

MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were text-based multiplayer games that emerged in the early 1980s. Think Zork or any Infocom game, but with other players. You'd see room descriptions, type commands like "pick up sword" or "attack monster," and suddenly "Bob enters the room" — another real person to adventure with. Early MUDs supported a few dozen players; later ones scaled to hundreds or thousands. Some puzzles required cooperation between multiple players.

2. Winter Mute: Cain's First MUD

In late 1988 or early 1989, while working on his PhD at UC Irvine, Cain discovered MUDs through the early internet (then called ARPANET, connecting mostly universities). A friend grabbed an LP MUD package — created by Lars Pensjö — and they set up their own MUD called Winter Mute (named after a character from Roger Zelazny's second Amber series, the Merlin quintology).

The LP MUD system had a progression: reach Level 20 as a player, get promoted to Wizard, and then you could build new areas by coding them in a C-like language — perfect for Cain, who already knew C.

2.1. Castle Fred

Cain's wizard character was named Fred. As a Wizard, you received an "inflatable castle" to place in the world and design. He created Castle Fred atop Fred Mountain (self-deprecating about his naming skills even then). The castle featured:

• Dungeons beneath it leading to other dimensions
• An Evil Fred duplicate — players would encounter "Fred" in an alternate dimension who attacked them, causing them to shout "The wizard Fred is attacking me!" across the zone

2.2. The Post-Apocalyptic World

Cain created a nuclear weapon item. If you pressed the button, it told you it was only activatable in the Town Square. He built an entire duplicate of the starting zone with all descriptions rewritten as post-apocalyptic: the pub burned, the church in ruins, the jail bars melted.

When players detonated the bomb in the Town Square, they'd see a massive explosion and mushroom cloud, then "miraculously you survived" — but they were now in the ruined duplicate. Inevitably, players would shout "I'm sorry, I destroyed the starting village!" while everyone else laughed, knowing it was a separate area.

This was years before Fallout.

2.3. The Ronco Monster Suck-O-Matic

One of Cain's signature creations was the Ronco Monster Suck-O-Matic — a device with two settings: suck and spew. You could vacuum up a monster before it attacked, carry it somewhere else, and release it. The monster would emerge angry and attack everyone in the room.

Players immediately found the most dangerous monsters — including a Terminator (built by another wizard) that walked around saying "Are you Sarah Connor?" before shooting you — and started releasing them in the newbie pub. Cain eventually added room properties that could block the device from working.

3. Darker Realms and the Road to Interplay

After about six months, Cain moved on from Winter Mute. Two wizards from a Texas university — Raceland and Lucifer — had been playing on Winter Mute and started their own LP MUD called Darker Realms. Cain let them take Castle Fred, which apparently still floats around in some MUDs today.

3.1. Trolling Lucifer

Cain used the Monster Suck-O-Matic to leave surprises in Lucifer's wizard workroom — the Terminator, herds of snow cows (from another wizard's glacial plateau area, where cows would occasionally say "Moo moo, I say"). Lucifer eventually banned Cain from his workroom entirely.

3.2. The Negative Healing Exploit

Cain discovered that while the MUD code protected wizards from the damage function, the heal function accepted a signed integer and wasn't protected. He created a Wand of Negative Healing and demonstrated it to Raceland by healing his wizard to death. This got him in trouble, and they patched the healing function.

3.3. Hiring Raceland (John Price)

Raceland — real name John Price — was an excellent coder. Cain was finishing Rags to Riches and building his own engines. When Interplay needed a programmer for Starfleet Academy, Cain recommended Price. Jay Patel (technical director) did a phone interview; Price flew out, and Cain met him at John Wayne Airport with a sign reading "Raceland" — their first in-person meeting.

Price was hired as the programmer on Starfleet Academy. His 3D engine was superior to Cain's — which is why Fallout became a sprite-based game while Starfleet Academy went 3D. Price also wrote a scripting language for Starfleet that was later used in Fallout.

4. The Brahmin Easter Egg

Cain and Price shared their MUD stories at Interplay. Chris Taylor, Fallout's lead designer, found the snow cow story hilarious. Since Fallout already had Brahmin (mutant two-headed cows), they added an easter egg: somewhere in the game, a Brahmin in a herd will say "Moo, I say" — a direct callback to the snow cows of LP MUD days.

5. On Creativity and Work-Life Balance

Cain closes with a broader point: creativity comes from everywhere — graduate studies, late-night MUD sessions, tabletop games, anywhere. He spent hours every night playing MUDs even during busy PhD work.

While he supports efforts to improve work-life balance for game developers, he doesn't believe any creative profession — artist, writer, game designer — can be confined to 9-to-5 hours. Ideas arrive on their own schedule. Any producer who thinks they can schedule creative ideas "is going to be unhappy."

6. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lerxozozis