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Fig. 9.4. Dungeon crawling in a typical
MUD game.
written for the PDP-10 minicomputer, the authors recognized the potential of
text games for personal computers and founded Infocom in 1979. Several com-
mercial versions of Zork were released.
Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex in England, was in turn
inspired by Zork to create a multiuser version of an adventure game for his
university's PDP-10 computer. He called his game MUD ( Fig. 9.4 ), for “Multi-
User Dungeon,” and made the game available to the outside world through
a guest account accessible using the Internet. MUD was the first multiplayer
online role-playing game and spurred the development of many similar games.
The name MUD became used for a variety of multiplayer adventure games on
the Internet. In a typical game, players read descriptions of rooms, objects,
and other players, and interact with them by typing commands such as “hit
the troll with the Elvish sword.” The object of the game is to explore a fan-
tasy world, slaying monsters and completing quests along the way, and gaining
skills and special powers.
In the early 1970s, these games were mainly text based, using words rather
than graphics. Players used teletypes as computer terminals to play these games
on a university mainframe or minicomputer. In the mid-1970s, teletypes began
to be replaced by computer monitors with much faster output capabilities and
a much more flexible graphical user interface. With the advent of personal
computers, computer games became a main driver for innovation in computer-
generated graphics.
Arcade video games
B.9.4. Don Woods was a co-author
of the Colossal Cave Adventure
game. As a student at Stanford he
discovered an early version of the
Adventure. He was immediately
hooked by the game and decided to
extend it by adding new features.
Russell's Spacewar! was the inspiration for a coin-operated version called
Galaxy Game that was installed in a student union building on the Stanford
University campus in 1971. That same year, Nolan Bushnell ( B.9.5 ) and Ted
Dabney, founders of the Atari computer game company, produced another var-
iant of Spacewar! called Computer Space. This was the first computer arcade
video game, equipped with a coin-slot mechanism, but it was not a great
 
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