q: old dial-up MUD-like commercial game?

From: Lawrence LeMay <lemay_at_cs.umn.edu>
Date: Fri Dec 8 15:31:28 2000

> Just having a moment of nostalgia here..
>
> Anyone remember having a multi-player D&D/MUD like game dial-up
> service in their city? I'm thinking around 1985 or earlier... it was
> some sort of a timeshare system with 8/16/24 ports that people could
> dial in to at an hourly rate and play. As I recall it was some sort of
> franchise and we had one here in Milwaukee (414 area code) that was
> quite popular- I believe it was called Sceptre, but I'm not sure if that
> was the name of the game/world/town, etc.

The Sceptre of Goth. I forget its original name, but it was originally
written in BASIC with additional assembly language pieces. originally
written on and for the MECC computer (Minnesota Educational Computer
Consortium, or something like that) which was a Control Data Cyber
system that was connected to remote terminals in various High Schools
across the state of Minnesota. there were MANY games written on that
system, many of which were multi-user.

The program was running well before 1981 when I started attending classes
at the University of Minnesota (which had its own Cybers of course, but
word gets around...). later the game was commercialized in several cities.
if i recall correctly, it was written by Alan Klietz? To add new castles
(areas) the game had to be taken down and recompiled.

Of course, at the U of Minnesota, the game of choice was Karnath, a HUGE
3D cube of rooms, multi-user, the maze being randomly generated when the
person who ran the game decided to start a new game.

And for the lucky devils who worked downtown at CDC headquarters, the
game of choice was probably Archon (?) or whatever it was called, it
used line drawing plato terminals to visually show a 3D maze, and you
could talk with other players at other sites, etc.

-Lawrence LeMay

>
> Just wondering what kind of hardware & software was hosting this game;
> it was quite addictive (or perhaps I was mesmerized by trying to use an
> 80-column terminal on a C64).
>
> Thanks,
>
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Received on Fri Dec 08 2000 - 15:31:28 GMT