Hello folks,

Not long ago, I was cleaning out my attic and found an ancient laptop -- easily fifteen years old. The laptop was toast. Power didn't work. Battery was out, motherboard had deep scratches from a mishap in an airport in Zimbabwe.

But I had a strong sense of curiosity and a deep-seated desire to recover my old emails (some of which were probably the first I'd ever sent). So I surfed some tech sites on the net. Bought some used hard drive repair equipment and downloaded from free data recovery software.

It was my challenge. And it took me about a week before I had the right combination of equipment and software to pull data from a corrupted 15-year old laptop harddrive. I recovered most of my old emails, letters to friends and family.

And I rediscovered Darkemud.

Man. What a fun time I had on this mud. This was going back to 1994-1996ish while I was working for a charity that sent me to all of these out-of-the way non-english-speaking countries.

I can't tell you how surprised I am to see some of the same names still dedicated to this complex and entertaining universe; still making improvements: MacTORG, Shadowraith, Nevin, even Dinty. Crazy.

As multiplayer graphic online games have risen in popularity, there are fewer and fewer muds out there. The text mud is dying. I suppose I can't blame them. Who wants to download and figure out a mud client and the arcane cryptic commands to connect to something that displays raw text when you can be hacking and slashing a giant three-dimensional beast in gorifying splendor?

Me. You.

Ours is an obsolete pasttime. We are the telegraph operators, the horse and buggy drivers, the VCR repairmen. But even if that's the case, it's still damned fun.

I'm going off on a tangent. Sorry about that. What I really mean to say is that I hope today's players are enjoying that dark world as much as I did.

And Hello!

-Garkin Gnoll, Chronicler, Retired Enchanter



Edited by Garkin (02/05/08 10:15 PM)