Richard Bartle did something historians dream about: he kept the paperwork.
Visit Richard Bartle’s MUD archive
Bartle, who created the original MUD with Roy Trubshaw at the University of Essex, built a personal website around an unusually deep collection of material from the beginning of multi-user online worlds. The archive contains papers, magazine articles, Usenet postings, reports, technical explanations, and historical documents stretching back to the era when a multiplayer online world was still a strange research-and-hobby experiment.
One of the most useful pages is his collection of formal texts. Bartle explains that his MUD documents go back to the beginning of the field and that he kept essentially everything he saw written about the subject. The point of putting it online was not nostalgia. It was access.
That decision aged very well.
Before MMOs had a vocabulary
The archive includes material from a period when people were still deciding what these systems were.
Bartle preserves his 1983 Practical Computing article, which he describes as the first published article about MUDs. There are early reports on multiplayer computer games, technical descriptions of parsers, Usenet posts, and the 1996 paper “Players Who Suit MUDs,” which became influential for its attempt to classify player motivations.
His pages also preserve corrections that would be easy to lose in second-hand histories. In one note, Bartle explains that an often-repeated date for the first MUD version was wrong: Roy Trubshaw wrote the first version in autumn 1978, while a later version followed in 1979.
That kind of correction is exactly why first-hand personal archives matter.
The site itself is also an artifact of the period it documents. Many pages carry dates from 1999. The design is basic, the navigation is mostly text, and the material is presented with the assumption that a reader came to actually read documents rather than scroll through a feed.
The result is more useful than a polished retrospective because it contains source material from people who were there.
Modern online games inherited enormous pieces of the MUD idea: persistent worlds, player identities, social spaces, virtual economies, role-playing, communities, moderation problems, and the eternal discovery that strangers connected to a network will immediately invent behavior the designers did not anticipate.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes old personal research sites because sometimes the person who made the thing also quietly built its best museum.
Bartle’s site is one of those cases.