The Anvil

Iron Realms Entertainment is considering making some substantial enhancements to the Nexus and Flash clients over the next few months. I am looking for a little feedback on an idea we are currently batting around.

As stated in previous posts, our game interface has remained relatively unchanged for years. With the exception of powerful clients that allow users to create triggers, aliases, and other settings, it can almost be argued our games have not seen any major interface innovation in over 10 years. The game can only be viewed and played as scrolling text. Continue reading

I recently interviewed Nick Gammon of MUSHClient as part of an ongoing series of interviews for our blog. Nick is the creator of MUSHClient, a popular program for playing MUD games and is packed with tons of features that allow you to enhance your gaming experience with Iron Realms Entertainment.

Jeremy: Would you relate your first experience or introduction to MUDs?

Nick: When I was somewhat younger (ie. about 30 years ago) I was working as a programmer for a company in Melbourne (Australia). Around that time the Original Adventure by Crowther and Woods came out (just called Adventure then, of course). At lunch time my fellow programmers and I would fire up Adventure on our terminals and play together. It wasn’t technically a multi-player game, but with us all sitting side-by-side we did our game chat “in real life”. Like, “hey, you get past the bear by feeding it!”. Continue reading

I was recently able to catch Mike Potter (Zugg) of Zuggsoft Software, the creator of zMUD and CMUD and tie him down long enough to answer a few questions for our players about his history with MUDs, his MUD clients, and his future plans for his products.

So without further ado!

Me: Would you relate your first experience or introduction to MUDs?

Mike: In the summer of 1995 I was depressed from the divorce from my first wife.  I discovered MUDs to escape from the “real world” and was hooked!  I didn’t like any of the PC MUD clients available at that time, so I started writing my own.  My clan-mates on Dark Castle started using it and told me that I should make it Shareware and sell it to other MUD players.  A year later I formed Zugg Software and started selling zMUD .  Zugg was my old pen/paper D&D character name, and the name I was using on the Dark Castle MUD.  I no longer play any MUD using the name of “Zugg”, so if you see somebody using that name, they are an imposter.  In 1997, the income from zMUD was enough that I was able to quit my day job and work on zMUD fulltime.  Today, almost 15 years later, Zugg Software is the last remaining full-time business selling and supporting MUD client software. Continue reading

I recently had a chance to ask the lead developers of Mudlet, Heiko Kohen and Vadim Peretokin, a few questions about their product and future plans.

The supplied some great insights into what we can expect, and if you are an avid player of any IRE game, I am sure you will find the interview very enlightening.

Read on!

Continue reading