One of my all time favorite MUD’s of all time has to be “End of the Line” that was located at Stanford University. Also known as EOTL, or Revenge of End of the Line, this text based game kept my friends and I thrilled for many weeks over the course of a couple of years in high school and college.

This is Brutal

This MUD during its heyday was absolutely the most violent, best game out there. Constant danger came with the territory. One popular clan back in the earlier days was called “Wildboar”. They used to sit in the dead center of the main city just one room away from the starting room, here they would throw down banana peels and string tripwires all about, catching unsuspecting newer players like flies in a web. Wildboar members would then backstab them to death and pick through the newer players equipment for stuff to salvage. Definately not a MUD for the faint of heart.

Hundreds of Feelings

One great feature that EOTL had going for it was the huge amount of feelings or emotion commands that were available. Literally many hundreds of different feelings were available to be used alone or towards someone. I’m not talking about your average bow, kneel, sing, cry types of feelings. Some popular feelings I remembered were “aliens2″ where your character would yell “Game over man, Game over!”. Another popular one was I think called “swissboy” where you loudly proclaimed that so and so was a flappy swissboy. Of course who could forget the always popular “bogleg”.

Tankwars and Rocket Launchers

To add to the overall insanity of this MUD, the developers would routinely just drop tanks and rocket launchers into the middle of the main city. The lowliest of noobs could just walk up and pick up a rocket launcher and start killing people left and right. Going from one place to another was like running through a warzone. This was before the days of autorunning and such so we would save up our moves on paper and then type them in frantically to get from place to place without being asassinated or exploded in some way. Definately a good way to get the blood pumping.

End of an Era

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. My friend and I logged into the game recently and didnt really see that many people on. We didnt see Backspace, Xurbax, Purge, Dead, alot of the crazies from the old days. There was no constant danger. We went and sat in the “Heart” which is the exact center of the city and usually one of the most dangerous. We expected to be killed instantly. Nothing happened. We just sat there, no tripwires, no rocket launchers or anything. We started yelling, “Hey we are stupid noobs come kill us!”. No one came :(

Its alright though, we still jumped on and ran around for a couple of hours. Some of the old zones like Moetown are still in the game. It was alot of fun to take a stroll once again down memory lane. If you ever played this game before, you owe it to yourself to take some time and log back in and take a look around.