About Meat MUD Classic
A quick note: Meat MUD Classic is officially in BETA testing mode. This is a playable but also unfinished MUD. Please bear in mind that this means some things will not work the way you expect or want them to. We appreciate your feedback in this area and we will be glad to try to accomodate any and all reasonable requests. Please see the TODO section of this site if you are curious as to what is planned, and leave a comment if you have suggestions of your own.
The original Meat MUD was first established as Chase MUD in 1993, based on MERC 1.0 source code. Initially implemented by Guido, it was later adopted by Jazz and renamed to Meat MUD in the same year. Jazz was aided in programming and administration by Eldred and Seuss, and over time the MUD grew from a handful of regular players to scores of fifty or more connected to the game at any given time. Its popularity grew to the point where the University of Texas in Austin (where the MUD was hosted) required Jazz to establish limits on the number of players who could be connected to the MUD at any given time, and during busy periods of the day anxious players would have to wait in a virtual line for connected players to quit before being allowed into the game.
Upon graduation Jazz passed the mantle of MUD ownership to Eldred and Seuss, who transferred the location of the MUD to UMR (University of Missouri at Rolla), and completely redesigned Meat MUD into an amazingly complicated and vastly more interesting version of itself, retaining only traces of the original MERC 1.0 design. Unfortunately this version of Meat MUD was designed to run on a old and rare SPARC server, and upon the server's demise in November of 2000, the MUD was no more.
For months, players anxiously awaited Meat MUD's rebirth. Unfortunately, due to the amount of work necessary to port the project to another server and the lack of free time available to the only two programmers capable of doing so, it was simply not meant to be. Years passed, and the Meat MUD web-site was taken down, but not before it was preserved by a former immortal named Bloomer, who has archived the site to this very day.
More years passed, and one day in January, 2007, a former player and immortal of Meat MUD found himself wishing that he could at least have the opportunity to play on that original Meat MUD of long ago, all the way back to when he first joined the game in October of 1993. That player was Yaddoshi, and with a little bit of research he found that MERC 1.0 had been revised to version 2.2 before the project had been discontinued. He further found that developers from the MERC project had founded a new MUD based on the MERC source code, and had named the new project Envy. Envy MUD had also been released to version 2.2, and Yaddoshi wasted no time downloading and compiling this find.
His first few steps through MUD school brought back all the old memories. Yet something was missing - other players. A bit more research and time yielded amazing results - a decomissioned Pentium III workstation was put into service as a LAMP server with more than enough power to run a public text MUD. Help provided by the tech support of his ISP enabled him to reconfigure his DSL modem, router and establish dynamic IP hosting to make the MUD accessible to the outside world. Reestablishing contact with his friend SiFu gave the newly born Meat MUD Classic a talented programmer and debugger, and with a bit of work, some public listings, a notice by Bloomer on the Meat MUD archive and also word of mouth, new and old players started to sign into the game.
Currently Meat MUD Classic is based on the GreedMUD 1.0 GOLD source. SiFu and Yaddoshi chose to use this source instead of the stock Envy 2.2 because it already had most of the features that were planned to be added to the game. The name Meat MUD Classic was chosen because this incarnation is similar to the Meat MUD of 1993-1995 before it was completely rewritten and redesigned. SiFu and Yaddoshi are attempting to preserve and build on top of the stock MUD system without sacrificing the features and fun of the game. There is still a lot of work to be done - many improvements are still to come. See the Change Log section of this website for more information.