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Welcome to the MajorMUD wiki!
"MajorMUD - Realm of Legends" was the most popular and heroic text-based fantasy adventure game on the Web. With the promise of battling dragons and thieves and setting out on dangerous quests, the game had become an addiction for thousands of players on the Worldgroup and Major BBS platforms around the world.
The game takes place in a World or Realm, in which monsters, creatures and other heinous beings abound. Players try to navigate through this world, finding ways to become more powerful and able to do more heroic actions as they go on adventures and quests.
MajorMUD is the most popular of the MUD games, which are continuous text adventure games. MUDs let you to play the same game with different people at the same time.
Unique in the MUD world, MajorMUD has been touted by players and BBS Sysops alike as the best MUD available. The reason? Because the designers have taken special care to create a realm that gives each player an equal footing with their rival players in a world filled with dragons, monsters and thieves.
This unparalleled balance and fairness keeps many players glued to their computer screens, traveling through a world that is neither too hard nor too easy to navigate - even though treachery and intrigue awaits around each corner.
Players especially enjoy MajorMUD because the Realm enlarges with each Module that is released. As the world enlarges, new adventures and quests are introduced, and new powers are granted to player's characters.
There used to be vast resources available for MajorMUD, this sadly is not the case anymore but I have tried my best to put together an accurate representation of all the information that is still available. Getting started in MajorMUD can be a very daunting task, the fact that it is text-only alone is enough to scare away enough the most hardcore of gamers in this day and age. I beg you to reconsider however as this is one of the most involved and hardcore RPGs that I have ever laid my hands on. Hopefully with these tutorials and resources you can get started in the vast world of MajorMUD.
- mudinfo.net: Your source for MajorMUD information
MajorMUD was created by Lance Neumann (Coding), Michael Skupa (design), Craig Young (design), and Geoffrey Rosen in 1994. Collectively they were known as West Coast Creations, or WCC. Based in Canada, WCC ran a BBS called Dreamscape Online Entertainment Services (DSOE) that players and potential customers could use to try out their software. It was also one of the few places that players could go to ask questions directly of the designers. Prior to being called DreamScape it was called Nightline BBS, and development was originally started because Lance was unable get updates for TeleArena.
MajorMUD itself was initially offered as a separate game module for the Major BBS. Despite its significant price tag (nearly $1000 USD for a 256 user version), MajorMUD was noted by Logicomm to be one of the most wildly popular packages to Major BBS sysops. A total of 9 expansion modules, or "mods", were released over a period of several years, each in kind for an additional fee to the system owner.
MajorMUD went into Alpha testing on Nightline BBS on April 16, 1994. Then on June 4 MajorMUD was released to twenty other Major BBS Systems for Beta testing. MajorMUD was officially released on November 4, 1994.
The game itself was written in C and compiled with Borland C++ (as were all modules for Major BBS and Worldgroup.)
On October 9, 2009 the domain registration for the primary fan website (www.mudcentral.com) expired but has since been renewed.
On November 11, 1996, WCC released their first mod for MajorMUD - Dragon's Teeth Hills. Over the years, a total of 9 content modules were released (WCC released the first 6, while Metropolis released the last 3). These expansion modules added many new monsters, weapons, items, and places to explore to the base MajorMUD install. Module 1 also introduced the Reputation based "Quest Lines" - with quests for "Good", "Neutral", and "Evil" players.
| Module | Name | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dragon's Teeth | November 11, 1996 |
| 2 | The Cursed Ruins | June 21, 1997 |
| 3 | Strangers in the Night | October 4, 1997 |
| 4 | Terror from Below | January 2, 1998 |
| 5 | The Rising Dawn | May 6, 1998 |
| 6 | The Sands of Time | September 13, 1998 |
| 7 | Savage Lands | December 28, 1999 |
| 8 | A Call to Arms! | May 12, 2000 |
| 9 | Prophecy of Plague | November 30, 2001 |
| Plus | Entertainment Edition | ??? |
On May 25, 1999, WCC sold MajorMUD to Metropolis Gameport, a company based in Kansas, USA. Metropolis promised to continue the work done by WCC in an e-mail that was sent to owners and others on the mailing list maintained by WCC.
On April 10, 2008 Metropolis Gameport shut down and sold all 7 of their Worldgroup BBS Game Servers.
As of Dec, 2011, the future of MajorMUD is still uncertain. Metroplis continues to charge full price for MajorMUD despite the demise of the BBS; many speculate they continue to keep the price high because they are hoping to sell the MajorMUD intellectual property to an MMO company.
The MajorMUD website still lists Module 10 as a future update, however seeing as how there has been no news about this module since 2003, and since Module 9 was released in 2001, many now believe that Module 10 will never be released. On March 19, 2007, Metropolis announced that their current programmer had resigned to move on to another company. No replacement was announced, although it was stated that they would be interviewing for the position over the next one week to two weeks.
Major BBS (sometimes The Major BBS or MBBS) was bulletin board server developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user interface program named Worldgroup Client for Microsoft Windows. Originally DOS based, two of the versions were also available as Unix-based edition, and the last versions were also available for Windows NT-based servers.
| Year | Product | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | MajorBBS 1.0 | not released |
| 1986 | Major BBS 2.0 | shareware |
| 1987 | Major BBS 3.0 | commercial software |
| 1988 | Major BBS 5.0 | |
| 1989 | Major BBS 5.07 | |
| 1990 | Major BBS 5.2 | |
| 1991 | Major BBS 5.3 | includes Novell Netware support |
| 1992 | Major BBS 6.0 | included Phar Lap protected mode capability |
| 1993 | Major BBS 6.1 | multilingual |
| 1994 | Major BBS 6.25 | Internet Connection Option (ICO) TCP/IP, Unix version available |
| 1995 | Worldgroup 1.0 | introduced Microsoft Windows client; final Unix server version |
| 1996 | Worldgroup 2.0 | included plug-in for Netscape |
| 1997 | Worldgroup 3.0 | first server version for 32-bit Windows NT |
| 1999 | Galacticomm ends operations after failed initial public offering (IPO) | |
| 2002 | Galacticomm assets foreclosed upon by lender | |
| 2005 | Galacticomm assets sold by lender to a current ISV |
The Major BBS was developed by Tim Stryker and launched in 1986 by Stryker's company, Galacticomm, Inc., as a demonstration of the abilities of the Galacticomm Software Breakthrough Library (or GSBL). The GSBL was a powerful set of assembler routines written for IBM and compatible PCs that allowed up to 32 simultaneous serial port or dialup connections to a single software instance without the need for an external multitasker. It was licensed to developers for varied uses, such as communications systems, bank systems, and real estate systems. Eventually, The Major BBS was enhanced enough that it became a marketable product in its own right. By late 1987, Galacticomm was licensing more copies of The Major BBS than the GSBL by itself. The GSBL continued to be enhanced, expanding to 64 users by 1988, then 256 by 1992, with The Major BBS's line capacity expanding as a result.
Because it was one of the few multi-line bulletin board systems, MBBS software was known for fostering online communities and an interactive online experience where users were able to interact with each other via chat rooms and multiplayer games. This flexibility spawned a small industry of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) who began developing MBBS add-ons, which ranged from shopping malls (what would now be called shopping cart software) to online role playing games.
The Major BBS allowed incoming connections via modems on telephone lines, Internetwork Packet Exchange networks, and X.25 packet-switched networks. In the mid-1990s, the offering expanded to include TCP/IP by the ISV Vircom, a Canadian company that has since become well-known for its anti-spam/anti-virus software, shortly followed by Galacticomm's own TCP/IP add-on, the Internet Connection Option (ICO), which was derived from another ISV's offering.
Seeking to compete with America Online, Galacticomm extended The Major BBS software to communicate in a client-server model with a custom program. The MBBS software was renamed Worldgroup Server, and released in 1995 with the version number restarting at 1.0; the included user-side software was named Worldgroup Client and ran in Microsoft Windows.
As version 3.0 in 1997, the first 32-bit version of Worldgroup Server was released for Windows NT, and other versions were simultaneously continued. This release finally focused on an active HTML web community, after three years of concentrating on the original client-server strategy. The MS-DOS version of the server was discontinued with version 3.1.
- Initially, a system's line count depended on the user limit of the GSBL purchased with the BBS. The GSBL (and thus the BBS) was offered in 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 user editions. Later, with the release of version 6, the concept of user six-packs was introduced. System operators (Sysops) purchased as many packs as they needed to add additional lines, up to 256.
- Due to a limitation of the 16-bit architecture of MS-DOS, Major BBS was limited to a maximum of 255 incoming lines (plus one 'local console'). In practice, it was extremely difficult to scale to this level due to the 16MB ram memory limitation of the Phar Lap 286 memory extender in use, as well as the physical limitations on connecting 255 modems to a single computer.
- Developers were sold development kits that allowed add-ons to be written in C/C++
- All data files were stored using a Btrieve format.
- It was necessary for the system to go down for maintenance each evening in order to re-index data files as well as running the cleanup routines for the main system and its addons.