MAD (MUD)
In 1984, on BITNET, a cooperative worldwide university network founded in 1981, two French students from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, Bruno Chabrier and Vincent Lextrait developed and operated a global MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Domain) named MAD (for "Multi Access Dungeon"). It ran on the BITNET node of their school (FREMP11). Quickly, through a viral word of the mouth, a meaningful part of BITNET nodes in the world were playing on the central MAD server, until BITNET administrators, frightened by the adoption of the game, asked the École des Mines to stop it. It had operated slightly less than two years. MAD has been installed on several other nodes in the world, until it was completely banned, as a consequence of its success, which had led BITNET several times to complete saturation. MAD was text-based and entirely written in REXX, a script language proposed on VIM/370. MAD ran on the IBM 4341 of the École des Mines de Paris. It made use of a listening utility called "wakeup" developed by one of the BITNET aficionados. It proposed initially only one, then several multi-story labyrinths populated by mobile and communicating robots (refered to as "NPC"s - Non-Player Characters). These bots irreverently wore ENSMP professor names (which was highly appreciated by the players, including, surprisingly, the foreign ones - see below). Bots would typically shout a Vogon-like "I am a foul monster!". MAD offered in addition the possibility for other people accross the Earth to chat with each other, which soon became more important to the players than the actual game.
The log attached here shows the very high frequency of connections, and their worldwide origin such as the University of Maine (New England Commonwealth), University of Southern Portland (Northwest Commonwealth), Queens College (Eastern Commonwealth), École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (France), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and the HEC School of Management (France), as well as many others. Hundreds of BITNET nodes have played the game.