Alter Aeon
Alter Aeon's terminal emulator login screen
One of Skoal's incarnations was as a warrior on Alter Aeon, a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), unlike any other insofar as it was written entirely from scratch by dentin, the creator of Alter Aeon.
How big is Alter Aeon?
Alter Aeon is HUGE. As of this writing, Alter Aeon has over 200 areas spread across over 30,000 distinctly different rooms. In those areas are 13,000 different types of objects, and 8,000 different types of interactive 'monsters' or 'mobs' for short.
For objects and monsters, there may be several of each type in the game at once, so there is never a shortage of things to do or items to collect.
Just like the scene in Ratatouille when the overly stern food critic is instantly softened when he takes the first bite of a dish that reminds him of his happy childhood, so it was with me when I entered my first command on Alter Aeon, reminiscent of the hours I spent playing Zork first on my TI 99/4A and then my Apple IIe. The difference here being that Alter Aeon is a real-time, multi-user virtual world that is constantly being expanded and modified, much like new worlds on World of Warcraft.
Alter Aeon's Homepage
One of the things users enjoy most about this MUD is its sense of community. While I certainly enjoyed striking out on my own and exploring the many facets of this engrossing world, many players interact with each other and band together for a fulfilling group experience.
Is Alter Aeon multiplayer?
Yes. Alter Aeon has an active userbase and has been around for 14+ years.
A lot of the appeal of the game is found in the interactions you have with other players, whether by grouping, socializing, trading or exploring together. We have a full featured chat system that helps support communications, including private tells, user created channels and an internal email system.
The game is entirely free to play, with no advertising anywhere in the game. It is entirely internally supported, with hosting and bandwidth being subsidized through donations and auctions.
A downloadable client written specifically for Alter Aeon
As the game has expanded and grown these past few years, we've recently created a user forum to further connect the users and create an out-of-game base for questions and camaraderie. In this day and age of SLI graphics cards and crazy-expensive High-Def 3D rendered gaming computers, you know there's something special when a text-based game is still drawing a crowd, and that my friends is something you can never replace with special-effects: Gameplay.
The all-new Alter Aeon user forum