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Deadly Weapons

THIS is the Rec Room!!!!

This large, darkened room has no obvious exits. A crowd relaxes on pillows in front of a giant screen TV, and there is a fully stocked fridge and a bar.

Those words welcomed visitors to TinyMUD, an online virtual world contained in a beige computer the size of a minifridge squatting on the floor of a Pittsburgh graduate student's office. In 1990, hundreds of people from around the globe projected into the world over the Internet. Max, now a freshman at Boise State University, was one of them.

The Internet was seven years old then, and about three million people had access through a measly three hundred thousand host computers at defense contractors, military sites, and, increasingly, colleges and universities. In academia, the Net was once seen as too important to expose directly to undergraduates, but that was changing, and now any decent U.S. college allowed students online. MUDs—"multi-user dungeons"—became a favorite hangout.

Like most everything else on the pre-Web Internet, a MUD was a purely textual experience—a universe defined entirely by prose and navigated by simple commands like "north" and "south." TinyMUD was distinct as the first online world to shrug off the Dungeons and Dragons–inspired rules that had shackled earlier MUDs. Instead of limiting the power of creation to select administrators and "wizards," for example, TinyMUD granted all