Richard Bartle Part 1

16 Dec 2008 at 11:50:00 by

Recently Dr. Richard Bartle; widely recognised for co-writing the first MMO, Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), has been criticised for his alleged negativity of all videogames.  We decided to give Bartle a call, especially after our very own MMO Weekly reported his dissapointment in a WoW quest from the new expansion, in order to respond to various claims. In this, the first part of our interview, Bartle talks about how he got into videogame design. 

Can you just put in context why you’re considered the authority on MMOs?  And how does it make you feel when people state you claim you’re the authority on MMOs?  Evidence suggests that you have never claimed you are the authority on MMOs and it must be quite frustrating when you comment rather innocently and you get picked up on it.

The outside world see me as an authority whether I like it or not.  If you’re a journalist [for example] and you want to find somebody who knows what they’re talking about, you are going to look at the history and find someone.  It’s for that reason the outside world picks me just because I so happened to have co-written MUD.


Now you’ve said co-written, reiterating that you weren’t the creator as such.  Some people claim that you take full credit for MUD.

Yes they do, and I don’t know where it comes from, but there are many things that are written, even in books, which are wrong [about me].  You would have thought that editors would have checked claims like that, but no. 
I always make a point of correcting people when they say that I wrote it.  If you were to say who wrote the first line of code it would be Roy Trubshaw.


How long had Roy been on the project before you joined then?  From what I can see it was two years before you joined.

No, I took over two years after he’d started, but we did work together on it before then.  I approached him a week or two after he’d started it, and written the very first test version.  It was still in 1978 when I joined.


So, within reason, you were there pretty much right from the start?

Yes, pretty much, but I didn’t invent it.  What happened was that Roy had this idea, he discovered this new technique where you could write something which was shareable and have many users communicating with each other.  He decided to use that to write a game.  He’d only just done a viability test on the code he was going to use, the special trick that he’d found.  I came across him, introduced myself and told him about my games background which he was interested in.  We got on well and we started work on the game proper and I helped add things to the game after his first tests, so yes, I was there pretty much right from the start.


So what’s this number of you writing 75% of the code all about then?

No, that’s 75% of the code for MUD1, but from my point of view, Roy’s 25% was the most important and my code was to support what he’d written by providing content for the game, but his code was the mechanic of the game.


Is it fair to say that this was the birth of MMOs?

Yes it is, because what happened is that people played MUD and thought “Gawd, that’s good, but I could do better.”  Of course they went off and wrote their own.  Some of them were better, and some of them weren’t better.  Some were better in some ways, but worse in others.  And this process evolved, and we always knew we were going to get graphics so that was helpful.  Then the internet went commercial and spread all over the place, which meant we were able to get more people playing, which mean that there was a lot larger income, which in turn meant we could develop a bigger and better game.  The concept of virtual worldliness can be tracked back to MUD for virtually every MMO game.

Almost all MMOs today are indeed direct descendants of MUD, but there are exceptions - WAR
is perhaps the most visible one, as its ultimate ancestor is a game called Aradath that Mark Jacobs wrote before he ever heard of MUD.  The concept of virtual worlds has been invented independently at least seven times, and it's just luck that led to MUD being their primogenitor rather than one of the other ones. In other words, we would still have got MMOs even if Roy and I hadn't written MUD.

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