TinyMUD is released by Jim Aspnes. It ran on UNIX and was written in C. It was originally conceived as a front-end to IRC.
Galaxy I launches on GEnie.
A-Maze-ing , a 3D online shooter, launches on GEnie.
" A-Maze-ing was authored by Greg Corson and ran on the Macintosh only. Greg's an old friend of mine from South Bend, who taught me how to write a DDA line-drawing routine to do faster graphics back in 1981 or so. He started doing multiplayer online stuff in the 1970s at Purdue and is another PLATO guy from way back. He was later the lead engineer at Virtual World Entertainment (who made the Battletech centers with the sit-down cockpits linked together in groups of eight), worked at NEC coordinating the 3D chip stuff with Sega for the Dreamcast, and is now at Sony in San Francisco."
” Dr. Cat
Lars Penjske creates LPMud and opens Genesis .
"Having fun playing TinyMUD and AberMUD , Lars Penjske decides to write a server to combine the extensibility of TinyMUD with the adventures of AberMUD . Out of this inspiration, he designed LPC as a special MUD language to make extending the game simple. Lars says, ' I didn't think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this.' The first running code was developed in a week on Unix System V using IPC, not BSD sockets. Early object-oriented features only existed accidentally by way of the nature of MUDs manipulating objects. As Lars learned C++, he gradually extended those features. The result is that the whole LPMud was developed from a small prototype, gradually extended with features."
” George Reese's LPMud Timeline
Simutronics launches Orb Wars on GEnie. Darrin Hyrup was the lead programmer on it. Later that year, Hyrup leaves Simutronics for AUSI.
"It was a tactical multiplayer mage vs. mage combat game, top-down, with a windowed interface similar to the old Island of Kesmai ."
” Darrin Hyrup
Legends of the Red Dragon is written by Seth Robinson in TurboPascal.
"This was a multiplayer hack-n-slash adventure game that scaled up to eight to ten users. It ran as a BBS door game. It accomplished this on DOS through some kludgy software interrupt time-slicing. Anyway, I recall it had both PvP and PvCritter action. This game was wildly popular from its inception until the decline of BBSs. I remember redialing and waiting for hours to get into a slot on the BBSes that ran it."
