I came to the MU* scene a bit later than I might have. It was 1995, I was 24 years old, and the internet was just taking off in Korea. Learning HTML was quite a bit of fun. I had a home page set up at Geocities and I was constantly looking for new things to do. Then one day I stumbled across Elendor, a MUSH set in Tolkein’s Middle Earth and built on PennMUSH. I was hooked.
I’ve not done any sort of regular MUSHing in a while, though I do drop in to different MUSHes now and again. But since I first learned of PennMUSH, I’ve followed its development. I check in every now and then on the community site to see the latest news. It’s been over a month since I last checked up on it, so when I visited today I was pleasantly surprised.
Last year, Alan “Javelin” Schwartz, the maintainer of PennMUSH (a position he long ago inherited from Lydia “Amberyl” Leong) announced that he was retiring from the project. In the MUSH world, that’s huge. That’s like David Letterman leaving the Late Show. Javelin was synonymous with PennMUSH for years. But he hasn’t vanished altogether and now has an interesting new project.
Javelin maintains a blog at the PennMUSH community site. Recently, he’s started a podcast series called Tinytalk (an obvious nod at TinyMUD and TinyMUSH, the code base from which PennMUSH originally was derived). He describes the series as being about “MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds, and the players who play them.” To date, there are two episodes.
It’s really nice to know that text-based virtual worlds have not gone the way of the dinosaur. I’ve long wanted to develop and run my own. Perhaps I one day might. If you have any interest in the world of MU*s, there’s surely something for you in Tinytalk.
Technorati Tags: game programming, MUD, MUSH, PennMUSH, TinyMUSH, virtual world, text-based games
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