A MUME History

Ainulindalë (The Music of the Ainur)

In September 1990 a dark mist shadowed the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. A band of students discovered the Gift in a corner of the Internet, much less “in vogue” than nowadays. After years of paper and pen roleplaying games (from AD&D through RuneQuest to Chivalery and Sorcery) it was finally possible to play online!

The mud was Sejnet in Sweden. May its positronic ashes rest forever in peace!

One of us, Philippe Rochat (later known on MUME as Eru), decided in the fall of ’91 to take a DikuMud I engine and tried to make it run. Of course, since he did not know C at that time, he failed. But he was stubborn and finally managed to make it choke. He then proceeded on his first Herculean Work: adding a new functionality to this basic engine, the no-echo on password entrance - that took him one month but MUME I, Multi-Users in Middle-earth, was born.

Seeing that Eru did manage to do something of the code, Claude Indermitte (CryHavoc), Pier Donini (Manwë) and a few others that didn’t stay long (among which was Eric Moreau who stressed on building a consistent geographical world), then joined him on the project. We all learned C on the back of this poor MUD engine…

The main goal was clear since the beginning: we wanted a simulation of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, just before the War of The Ring and only that. This meant that we could import no areas from other muds and that we should have a consistent mapping for our zones. We then proceeded to build from Bree (which was at first very Midgaard-like) towards the Old Forest. An interesting question was also raised: “How to add The Ring and what to do with It?” The answer has not yet come.

Sejnet died in the winter of ’91, but, maybe one month before its fall, MUME even if not officially opened (it did open in January ’92), was fairly stable (i.e., it did not crash just after the reboot). We then tricked some Sejnet players to test our game; we just had to purge the Green Dragon that was buggingly loading in Bree Central Square at every reboot ;-)

Anyway, our original player file was (and still is; no player wipes ever were made) composed of Sejnet’s refugees.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then… Eru moved to other projects at the end of MUME II (see below for a brief chronology) while David Gay (Nada), the only one to have a real clue on programming languages in general and in C hacks in particular, was lured on MUME.

As a last note we would like to thank all the people that helped and help us to build MUME.

Valaquenta (Account of the Valar)

• MUME IX, December 2022
  • Rebuild of Breelands from Bree to Fornost, including Bree itself
  • Rebuild of the southern half of Ancient Broken Road
  • Introduced the three Dwarven Houses Firebeards, Broadbeams, and Longbeards
  • Introduced the Uruk-Morruhk tribe
  • Added subrace features to most subraces
  • Added a new spell to Orc Shamans
  • See also the MUME IX page
• MUME VIII, January 2002
  • A third side of the war
  • Beorning shapechangers
  • See also the MUME VIII page
• MUME VII, April 1999
  • Chosen Statistics
  • Easy Char Generation
  • Dynamic Classes
  • Continuous Regeneration
  • Subraces
  • Support the ISO-8859-1 character set in addition to ASCII
  • See also the MUME VII page
• MUME VI, March 1996
  • New practice system
  • ANSI colours
  • New zones allowing more than 100 rooms
  • Perception
  • New hide/sneak/backstab system
  • MUME was hosted at pvv.org in Norway starting in January 1998 (until May 2009).
  • The third arm (holding the lantern) was amputated
  • New focus system
• MUME V, August 1994
  • War points.
  • MUME is ported to x86/Linux from SPARC/Solaris
  • Servers are created to reduce MUME bandwidth usage
  • MUME moves from the Database lab to the Math department
  • Critical hits
  • Orc Shamans
  • Tracking system
  • Line of Sight
• MUME IV, February 1994
  • End of the special procedure system (all was converted in mudlle)
  • New Istari
  • Mounts
  • Mudlle compiler for SPARC (was interpreted earlier)
  • Black Númenórean race
• MUME III, February 1993
  • Mudlle, MUME’s online programming language
  • Weather system
  • Shops
  • 1–100 playable levels (after level 25 there is little gain in power)
  • MUME Protocol for clients (allowing remote editing).
  • Diseases
  • Justice system
  • Troll race
  • Travel points
• MUME II, June 1992
  • Special procedure system (that predates mudlle, awful hacks that allowed some “inline” behaviour of mobs) and the non AD&D fight system.
  • Foci and Istari
  • Orc race. The War between the Red Eye and the Free People of Arda begins.
• MUME I, January 1992
  • Starting point at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Database lab.
  • Lost tales (we didn’t keep track of the modifications). Among them, Trophy system and Cross class practicing.

At the same time that the MUME core has been coded in C, dozen of mudllers contributed to the coding of quests, mobile and object behaviour, etc.

Also, around 70 builders have added “known” locations (and the zones in between) in Eriador; like the Grey Havens, Fornost, Tharbad, the Old Forest, the Goblin Gate in the Misty Mountains and Moria (which is 1,400 rooms by itself!).