Monster

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Monster
Developed byRichard Skrenta
Initial releaseNovember 30, 1988 (1988-11-30)
Written inPascal
Operating systemVMS
LanguageEnglish
Development statusUnmaintained
Type of softwareMUD server
Software licensePublic domain
Websitehttp://www.skrenta.com/monster

Monster was a multi-user adventure game developed by Richard Skrenta at the Northwestern University in Illinois for the VAX and written in VMS Pascal. He publicly released the source code in November 1988.[1] Monster pioneered the approach of allowing players to edit the game world online and create new content.[2] Monster was disk-based and in order to play it each player had to run a copy of Monster which communicated with other copies through shared files.[3] This setup prevented Monster from gaining broad popularity, but it did inspire James Aspnes to create a stripped down version of Monster using the typical client-server model, which he named TinyMUD.[4]

Monster Helsinki was a derivative of Monster developed at the University of Helsinki in Finland. It was released on Usenet in June 1992 by Kari E. Hurtta, and added NPCs and scripting.[5]

[edit] References

  1. Richard Skrenta (1988). "monster - multiuser adventure game for VMS". "Monster was written in VMS Pascal under VMS 4.6."
  2. Richard Skrenta (1988). "An Introduction to Monster". "Monster allows players to do something that very few, if any, other games allow: the players themselves create the fantasy world as part of the game. Players can create objects, make locations, and set up puzzles for other players to solve."
  3. Richard Skrenta (1988). "An Introduction to Monster". "Each player who plays the Monster game runs a separate copy of the game. Each individual Monster process shares a database containing all of the information about the simulated world,"
  4. James Aspnes (1990). "Monster". "TinyMUD 1.0 was initially designed as a portable, stripped-down version of Monster (this was back in the days when TinyMUD was designed to be up and running in a week of coding and last for a month before everybody got bored of it.)"
  5. Kari E. Hurtta (1992). "Monster Helsinki V 1.04".