Realms of Despair

The gameplay style of the great preponderance of DikuMUDs is hack and slash, which is seen proudly as emblematic of what DikuMUD stands for. Diku's source code was first released in 1990.

• Developer — Sebastian Hammer, Michael Seifert, Hans Henrik Stærfeldt, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe • Platforms — Unix-like • Released — 1 March 1991 • Genre — MUD • Modes — Multiplayer

DikuMUD was created by the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science among a group of student friends: Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. According to Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD, DikuMUD's developers sought to create a better version of AberMUD. Unlike TinyMUD and LPMUD, which encouraged live changes to the virtual world, DikuMUD hard-coded its virtual world. The making of DikuMUD was first announced on Usenet by Hans Henrik Stærfeldt March 27, 1990. At the time Madsen, Hammer, and Stærfeldt were the only developers, joined by Michael Seifert in June 1990. Stærfeldt stated that their intention was to create a MUD that was less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more like Dungeons & Dragons. The first DikuMUD was in working development as early as October 1990 and officially opened publicly running at freja.diku.dk port 4000 on February 3, 1991. A second DikuMUD appeared in January 1991, running at hayes.ims.alaska.edu. In March 1991, the first public version of DikuMUD, known as Diku Gamma, became available at beowulf.acc.stolaf.edu. Afterwards the DikuMUD at freja.diku.dk was shut down and the game and development moved to alfa.me.chalmers.se. Other Diku Gamma MUDs appeared in March 1991 running at eris.berkeley.edu, followed by a multiprocessor version running at sequent.berkeley.edu. By early April 1991, there were DikuMUDs running at spam.ua.oz.au, goldman.gnu.ai.mit.edu, bigboy.cis.temple.edu, and elof.iit.edu. Diku Alfa was released in July 1991 and the DikuMUD team hereafter continued with the development of DikuII. That version was however never released to the public but continues to run today under the name of Valhalla MUD. On June 21, 2020, Michael Seifert released DikuMUD III for HTML 5 with Websockets. This is now the last official release of DikuMUD.

• Italic Title — no • Title — MUME • Developer — Philippe "Eru" Rochat, Claude "CryHavoc" Indermitte, Pier "Manwë" Donini, David "Nada" Gay, Gustav "Dáin" Hållberg, project community • Engine — DikuMUD • Platforms — Platform independent • Released — 1992 • Genre — Middle-earth MUD • Modes — Multiplayer MUME, Multi-Users in Middle-earth, is one of the early offspring of DikuMUD, created in 1991 by Philippe "Eru" Rochat, who was soon joined by Claude "CryHavoc" Indermitte, Pier "Manwë" Donini, and David "Nada" Gay. The game was built as an homage to J. R. R. Tolkien's world as described in The Lord of the Rings. MUME has since released several new versions, incorporating new changes and areas that recreate Tolkien's world in text format. MUME enjoys a measure of popularity in the MUD world. MUME is included in The Historical DikuMUD List hosted on the official DikuMUD web site, marking it as one of the longest-running DikuMUDs. In a September 2000 interview Raph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online and the chief creative officer of EverQuest II, lists MUME as one of the games that influenced him as a game designer by "doing such interesting things with player conflict". In April 1998, MUME was named MUD of the Month at The Mud Connector.

MUME is based on DikuMUD. The core of MUME is written in C, while the mudlib (global critical code, such as game commands, justice system support and shop functionality) and game world (code for specific rooms, mobiles, and objects) are written in Mudlle. MUME makes the standalone version of its building and scripting language, Mudlle, publicly available. Mudlle was created by David "Nada" Gay and developed by him and Gustav "Dáin" Hållberg. MUME uses PowTTY, a client based upon Powwow (for unix) and PuTTY.