Kostner on MMOs and MUDs

It is such a shame if you claim to be a hardcore MMO gamer and not know Raph Kostner. Given that, we really don’t have to continue writing this when you really think about it. It would only mean that you don’t know the guy. But since we don’t want you guys left out, we’re sharing this with you anyway.

Kostner received his bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing back in 1992. At that same year, he also found his true calling as he became involved with MUDs or multi-user dungeons. In fact, the first title ever credited to him is the 1994 hit LegendMUD. Being the modest guy that he is, he explained:

I didn’t create LegendMUD, or certainly not by myself. A bunch of us all played a MUD called Worlds of Carnage. It went down for a period, and some of us went to try to start a different mud, and some others went to try to start LegendMUD. We all worked then on the game design and the content.

From then onwards, MUDs evolved and became what is known to us today as MMORPGs. He then became involved with hits Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest II. Despite these projects, Kostner mentioned that there are a lot of things MMOs haven’t picked up yet from MUDs. He lamented,

I still think some of the quests in Legend are better than anything I have played in the MMORPGs, and a lot of it is because text gave so much freedom for special effects. I did a quest in LegendMUD where you brought a jungle town back to life, and when you did a wave of color passed through the entire town, and ghostly inhabitants came back to life, and everything was restored.

Given those however, Kostner understands perfectly that there are some differences between MMOs and MUDs that just can’t be settled yet. MMOs, for one thing, involve a thousand or more players in one go while dungeons will just involve 10 probably. Kostner elaborated on this:

Legend has stuff like embedded baseball games, Shakespeare performances on the stage of the Old Globe, WWI trench warfare and blackjack in the back rooms of pubs on the London docks. That sort of variety happens because of two things: giving designers the ability to go nuts within a really broad theme, relatively easy tools, and the lack of graphics — which are a huge huge barrier to making cool stuff because they are so expensive and hard to make.

Currently, Raph Kostner is involved with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. In Kostner’s words, it is an organization that promotes the legitimacy of games as a medium. Lastly, he believes that MMOs, as great as they are already, still have a long way to go.

It is such a shame if you claim to be a hardcore MMO gamer and not know Raph Kostner. Given that, we really don’t have to continue writing this when you really think about it. It would only mean that you don’t know the guy. But since we don’t want you guys left out, we’re sharing this with you anyway.

Kostner received his bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing back in 1992. At that same year, he also found his true calling as he became involved with MUDs or multi-user dungeons. In fact, the first title ever credited to him is the 1994 hit LegendMUD. Being the modest guy that he is, he explained:

I didn’t create LegendMUD, or certainly not by myself. A bunch of us all played a MUD called Worlds of Carnage. It went down for a period, and some of us went to try to start a different mud, and some others went to try to start LegendMUD. We all worked then on the game design and the content.

From then onwards, MUDs evolved and became what is known to us today as MMORPGs. He then became involved with hits Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest II. Despite these projects, Kostner mentioned that there are a lot of things MMOs haven’t picked up yet from MUDs. He lamented,

I still think some of the quests in Legend are better than anything I have played in the MMORPGs, and a lot of it is because text gave so much freedom for special effects. I did a quest in LegendMUD where you brought a jungle town back to life, and when you did a wave of color passed through the entire town, and ghostly inhabitants came back to life, and everything was restored.

Given those however, Kostner understands perfectly that there are some differences between MMOs and MUDs that just can’t be settled yet. MMOs, for one thing, involve a thousand or more players in one go while dungeons will just involve 10 probably. Kostner elaborated on this:

Legend has stuff like embedded baseball games, Shakespeare performances on the stage of the Old Globe, WWI trench warfare and blackjack in the back rooms of pubs on the London docks. That sort of variety happens because of two things: giving designers the ability to go nuts within a really broad theme, relatively easy tools, and the lack of graphics — which are a huge huge barrier to making cool stuff because they are so expensive and hard to make.

Currently, Raph Kostner is involved with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. In Kostner’s words, it is an organization that promotes the legitimacy of games as a medium. Lastly, he believes that MMOs, as great as they are already, still have a long way to go.