History

Origins (1990–1992)

In September 1990, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) discovered online gaming through Sejnet, a MUD running in Sweden. After years of tabletop roleplaying, they had found something new: a living world you could share across the internet.

Philippe Rochat — later known in-game as Eru — decided in the fall of 1991 to fork a DikuMUD I engine and build their own world set in Tolkien's Middle-earth. It was his first C project. After considerable struggle he got it running, and MUME I (Multi-Users in Middle-earth) officially opened in January 1992.

Claude Indermitte (CryHavoc), Pier Donini (Manwë), and David Gay (Nada) joined the project early on. The team's goal was clear from the start: a faithful simulation of Middle-earth, set just before The Hobbit, built entirely from scratch — no imported zones from other MUDs, all mapped to a consistent scale using gridded hard-copy maps.

When Sejnet shut down in the winter of 1991, its refugee player base migrated to MUME. That original player file has never been wiped.

Version Timeline

Each major version introduced significant new systems. Click any version for full details.

Version	Date	Highlights
MUME I	Jan 1992	DikuMUD base, password no-echo, trophy system
MUME II	Jun 1992	Orc race, special procedure system, The War begins
MUME III	Feb 1993	Mudlle scripting language, weather, shops, justice system, Trolls
MUME IV	Feb 1994	Mounts, Black Númenórean race, Mudlle compiler for SPARC
MUME V	Aug 1994	War points, Linux port, tracking, line of sight
MUME VI	Mar 1996	ANSI colors, moved to FIRE server in Norway (Jan 1998)
MUME VII	Apr 1999	Chosen stats, dynamic classes, subraces
MUME VIII	Jan 2002	Beorning shapechangers, third war faction
MUME IX	2022	Bree-land rebuild, 10 new areas, subraces expanded

See A Short History of MUME for the full annotated changelog and founding narrative.

Technical Foundation

MUME is built on the DikuMUD I engine, written in C/C++. To support the ongoing development of quests, mob behaviour, and world scripting, the team developed Mudlle — originally named MUD Language for Little Extensions, though the volume of code eventually made that a misnomer. Mudlle was written by David Gay (Nada) and later extended by Gustav Hållberg.

Unlike typical MUD scripting languages, Mudlle is a compiled language (to interpreted bytecode, or to native machine code on SPARC and later x86). This lets developers write and reload code without crashing or slowing down the live game.

Codebase growth over time:

Year	Mudlle	C/C++
1998	~3 MB	~3 MB
2017	380,470 lines	165,444 lines

Infrastructure timeline:

Date	Event
1991	EPFL Database Lab, Lausanne — founding home
1994	Moved to EPFL Math Department
Jan 1998	Moved to pvv.org FIRE server, Norway — first time open 24 hours a day
Mar 2004	New machine funded by player donations
Nov 2011	Migrated to another new machine (193.134.218.99)
Nov 2017	Migrated to another new machine (193.134.218.98)
post-2017	Moved back to Switzerland; now runs on a virtual machine

The codebase was ported from 32-bit SPARC Solaris to 32-bit x86 Linux, then to 64-bit x86 Linux. Game data files are now versioned in git. Modern protocol support was added including TLS-encrypted connections, UTF-8, XML output mode (for mapper integration), and GMCP/MCCP2/MNES/MSSP telnet extensions.

World scale has grown steadily:

Year	Rooms	Zones	Notes
1998	14,500+	150+	Mud of the Month interview
2002	~20,000	—	MUME VIII launch
2017	26,921	256	1,410 object types, 1,401 mobile types
2022	~28,000	—	MUME IX launch (+40% since 2002)

In 2017 the player base numbered 2,965 registered accounts with 23,185 characters.

Development Philosophy

In the 1998 Mud of the Month interview, co-founder Pier Donini (Manwë) described the project's guiding approach:

"We have attempted, and I hope will continue, to code an engine whose mechanisms are always closer to those of the virtual reality we want our players to live in. Said shortly, and half kiddingly, we hope that our successive iterations of MUME are asymptotic towards the perfect simulation of Tolkien's Middle-earth."

He also credited the project's longevity to having a stable three-person core development team who knew each other in real life before the project began — helping the game survive personality clashes and real-life disruptions, and ensuring no single vision could dominate unchecked.

Mapper Client History

From the beginning, players built tools to help navigate MUME's sprawling world. The following timeline traces the evolution of mapper clients, drawn from the MMapper project history:

Early era (1992–1999)

TinTin — the original generic MUD client used by early players
Cancan — the first MUME-directed client, authored by Yorick, Vivriel, Thuzzle, Ilie, and Owl, inspired by TinTin
CS, Powwow, Cancan95 — successive client iterations

Growth phase (2001–2006)

PowTTY — combined Powwow-style scripting with a new interface
MUME Online Mapper — the first publicly available mapper for MUME
CheeseLab — community mapper experiment
MMapper1 — first version of the MMapper line
Expandora — the first 3D mapper for MUME
MMapper2 (2006) — collaborative rewrite by Caligor, Alve, and Kovis

Modern era (2008–present)

PandoraMapper (2008) — alternative mapper client
MMapper — the current actively maintained mapper

Reception

April 1998 — Selected as The Mud Connector's Mud of the Month
September 2000 — Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online and chief creative officer of EverQuest II, cited MUME as one of the games that influenced him as a designer, praising it for "doing such interesting things with player conflict"
TotalBiscuit called MUME his favorite MUD and described its PvP as "harder than Dark Souls" with "crazy... absolutely insane" PvP
November 2017 — Co-founder Pier Donini was invited to join the discussion panel on MUDs for Roguelike Radio Episode 141

History ​

Origins (1990–1992) ​

Version Timeline ​

Technical Foundation ​

Development Philosophy ​

Mapper Client History ​

Reception ​

Further Reading ​