The World of text MMOs / MUDs - An Interview with Matt Mihaly, CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment

Matt Mihaly – Behind the text MMO Curtain
An Interview between Matt Mihaly, CEO, Iron Realms Entertainment, and Steven Davis, CEO, SecurePlay

When most people think of Massively Multi-Player Online Games (MMOs), World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lineage, and Eve Online spring to mind. Most seasoned players are certainly aware of text-based MUDs and MUSHs… but they are typically considered a historic waypoint in the evolution to the graphically sophisticated, multi-million player MMOs of today, lingering only as hardcore hobbyists’ obsessions.

The reality is that text MMOs are alive and well - a thriving, if modest, industry. Just as movies haven’t replaced books, graphical MMOs haven’t replaced text MMOs – they are different creatures entirely. Though there are many hobbyist and free text MMOs, there are also companies, like Iron Realms Entertainment, that do a respectable business supporting thousands of customers, keeping a reasonable number of employees working, and earning (probably modest) millions of dollars per year.

The computer game industry press and blogosphere is full of endless discussions about the death of independent game companies and the stagnation of the industry as a whole. The text MMO industry may show another way. The success of Iron Realms clearly demonstrates that it is possible to make a viable business as an independent and deliver a quality product to satisfied customers and critics.

To understand a bit about the business of text MMOs, I interviewed Matt Mihaly, CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment. In addition to running Iron Realms, Mr. Mihaly is an active participant in the vigorous, and often incestuous, online debates about MMOs. He is a pioneer for moving online games away from a subscription-based model to virtual asset purchases, has used project-based financing, and the successful publisher and operator of 4 text MMOs with 2 more in development.

The interview that follows took place in Achaea, the first and oldest text MMO that Iron Realms operates. Tsaris, a new Jester played by Mr. Davis, met with Mr. Mihaly’s character, Sarapis, the Logos, one of the Gods of the game. Please note that the interview has been condensed from the raw logs to remove prompts, digressions, and other extraneous information and, occasionally, reorder the discussion in order to preserve its flow. In order to maintain the feel of the in-game interview, multiple responses from Mr. Mihaly have been consolidated into a single paragraph which may appear stilted.

These choices and changes are the fault of the Interviewer and not Mr. Mihaly. It seemed better to err on the side of including more information since there is little literature on the inner workings of a game company.

Welcome to Achaea and Introductions

>You are transported by the power of the Divine.

A dingy cave.

A sigil in the shape of a small, rectangular monolith is on the ground. This cave shows evidence of a rudimentary sophistication at best. A few crude tools of wood and bone are scattered about, and some filthy animal skins are piled in one corner. An indentation in the stone near the centre of the cave looks to have been used as a fire pit. A rancid smell wafts from the rotting carcass of some half-eaten animal.

A large, handsome rooster struts about here.

A sigil in the shape of a small, rectangular monolith is on the ground.

Sarapis, the Logos stands here quietly in the background. He is a radiant Immortal and is clad in simple traveling clothes including sturdy leather sandals, loose brown pants, a simple grey shift and a dusty brown jacket. He is wearing a wide-brimmed hat with purple zebra stripes.

There are no obvious exits.

Tsaris: So, this is Achaea.

Sarapis, the Logos: Well, sort of. This room is not connected to the rest of the world. It is on a different plane, so other players can't see you or interact with you here.

Tsaris: How'd you get into gaming?

Sarapis, the Logos:I’d been playing video games since Pong; owned every major console in the US, etc. but I never considered going into games for a living. I did play some D&D; and some Avalon Hill games, but honestly, I read the books more than I played; I still have my old Advanced D&D; books and still read them sometimes.

I discovered text MUDs in 1991 and got hooked immediately. By 1994, I had gotten into a MUD called Avalon. Interestingly, Avalon had a system whereby you could pay 24 hours a day. You paid for the game by the hour, but if you chose to continue paying when not online, you'd advance your skills more quickly. Actually, I was their first internet customer. I don't like the word “addicted” as applied to MUDs, but I was very into it.

I was also heavily involved in another MUD called Batmud before Avalon. In both cases, I ended up becoming an admin on the game.

Tsaris: What is an admin? An in-game god or what?

Sarapis, the Logos: Batmud's admins were not 'in role' so to speak. Avalon's were. Batmud was from the LP MUD family and has a reasonably powerful and permissive scripting system. As an admin, I built a few areas, etc. sort of like a D&D; Dungeon Master, but it’s not a perfect parallel. While a Batmud admin I did something that I’m not proud of, I got bored and built a room that trapped all the higher level admins in a room as soon as they logged on, and disabled all their commands. They had to physically go down to the server to sort it out. Of course, they kicked me off immediately and banned my name from being used for years.

In Avalon, being a god was completely different. I became a god by winning a contest that they held every couple of years. There, I became Lazarus, the God of Pain. I spent my time influencing the events of the game by manipulating the players whose game characters worshipped me. The gods in Avalon were similar to those of Greece - complete with faults, etc. For our games, we used the idea of in-role Gods straight from Avalon, and then expanded on it.

The Birth of Iron Realms and Achaea

Tsaris: How did you start Iron Realms?

Sarapis, the Logos: I had some money built up from trading stocks and other work during college. While playing Avalon and Batmud heavily, decided that if these guys can do it, there is no reason I couldn't. Eventually, I decided to start my own company and licensed the Avalon engine, Hourglass.

Tsaris: When did you start the business?

Sarapis, the Logos: I think I licensed Hourglass in 1995, but I mainly spent 1995 playing Avalon, so nothing got done at all until 1996. Achaea went online in September, 1997, the same month Ultima Online launched.

Unfortunately, we had to get rid of Hourglass. In the fall of 1997, we discovered that its developer built a back door into engine that allowed him to listen to all player input coming into the game.

To preserve our work on the game, I licensed an engine called Vortex which was a Linux translation of Hourglass. The conversion was not easy as it was supposed to be and we spent months porting the game code.

Tsaris: So your game was live before you were on the Vortex engine? That transition must have been difficult.

Sarapis, the Logos: It was horrendous. We spent four months rewriting tons of code to make it work with Vortex's evolved syntax. And during that time, any bug fixes, any additions, had to be made to both versions. Obviously, very little else got done.

Tsaris: How many players did you start with?

Sarapis, the Logos: Just a few who came from Avalon. Understand though, that although we were open in 1997. At first, our text MMO Achaea simply was not good.

I was just tired of working alone in a little cave of a room. I had to have player feedback so that I could feel like my work was being appreciated by someone. We launched, but I wouldn't even call the game alpha-ready. For example, if your character got paralyzed in the game, you had to wait for me or one of another couple admins to come on and cure you by hand because we hadn’t written the cure yet.

Tsaris: Did you have a reasonable number of players?

Sarapis, the Logos: I think we were getting close to 100 simultaneous players on Vortex. This sounds really small and, of course, it is. But in the text MMO world, few MUDs ever break 100 simultaneous players.

Eventually we bought Vortex outright, and then wrote our current engine, Rapture in late 2001 or 2002. We needed an engine that would scale. Our CTO, Chris Kohnert, who had started as a player, wrote Rapture in return for a piece of the company.

The text MMO world has always thrived on volunteerism and a community spirit. I had a partner who had helped with things, David Kaye, back in the late 90s. But I was the only one being regularly paid a salary by the company until 2001.

Virtual Assets Happen

Tsaris: What was the business model when you launched?

Sarapis, the Logos: There was no business model, originally. We knew we weren't ready to charge people money. In late 1997, we started selling credits that you could use to help raise your skills. This took a while to grow because initially a lot of the skills were broken. Then, in the summer of 1998, we held our first auction for virtual items. We had intended to do metered service (where players pay by the hour) when we were in the planning stages. But, AOL changed to flat-rate pricing. Hourly charges instantly became a non-starter for every one in the industry.

Tsaris: Could you describe how you got to your current business model?

Sarapis, the Logos: Frankly, the way we came up with our current model was that I needed some money. We came up with the idea of an item auction. At first, it was intended to be a one-time thing where I sold some unique items that I had created. I can’t remember everything, but one item I auctioned off was a custom-built tower. The tower could have some number of rooms and a reasonable amount of customized features that I would write for the winner. The winner bought it for several hundred dollars. The features he wanted were some things like having a balcony that he could leap from to get outside quickly, a bar with a bartender who would server drinks, and a butler that would spy on conversations taking place in the bar, those kind of things.

The auction was a roaring success. It was a revelation, I think I raised about $5000.

At the time, I was having a hard time even paying rent. Even buying food was starting to become dicey. Later, my parents told me they were pretty worried about me.

We had another auction about five months later with similar success. We continued having auctions for quite awhile. We played around with the auction. For example, we'd auction off multiple copies of one thing. We’d originally thought that if we auctioned off five artifact swords, the price for each one would go down. But generally, the reverse happened. It makes sense now, but I was surprised to see it at the time. We also didn't tell players how many copies we were going to auction. So they never knew if the current action item was going to be the last one of that type or not.

Eventually we ran into a bit of a problem. Unless we held auctions frequently, people started complaining. They felt it was unfair that other players had items they had no chance to get, simply because they hadn't been playing long enough, or couldn't make the auction, or didn't have the money at the time, etc. So we started selling a few core items in in-game stores – which players really liked.
Now, we only have auctions occasionally and most of the business is from buying credits and items.

Credits, Gold, and Dollars

Sarapis, the Logos: Here's how the economy in our games work: A player purchases 100 credits from our website. She now has 100 'unbound' credits. Unbound credits can be transferred to other people freely. They can also be put for sale on the credit market.

Tsaris brings up the current credit market report by entering :
Credits currently available for purchase:
10 credits at 5574 gold per credit.
29 credits at 5575 gold per credit.
16 credits at 5580 gold per credit.
4 credits at 5599 gold per credit.
450 credits at 5600 gold per credit.
17 credits at 5700 gold per credit.
6 credits at 5797 gold per credit.
63 credits at 5799 gold per credit.
7 credits at 5800 gold per credit.
3 credits at 5900 gold per credit.
Total credits for sale: 605 shown (2648 total) (Average sale price: 5540)

Use CREDITS BUY AT to purchase.

So, the player now has 100 unbound credits. In order to use them, the player converts them to bound credits. These credits, and the items purchased with them, are forever bound to that character. Bound credits can be used for a bunch of things. They can be used for Lessons to raise skills, purchase artifacts (the generic name for our virtual items), build custom housing, and they can be used to purchase a 'licenses'. A tailor's license, for example, which lets you create custom clothing.

It is important to note that you can play the game without purchasing credits at all. Credits speed progress and allow a player to customize their game play experience more quickly.

Before we added the credit market, the problem was that if a player didn't pay, she couldn’t get anywhere in the game unless they had some really generous friends. Now, with the credit market, unbound credits and in-game gold are traded at fluctuating exchange rates. Gold is earned as you would imagine in a fantasy game: killing monsters, doing quests, arbitraging, selling tradeskill items, etc. Unbound credits can either be purchased or bought with gold in the credit market. To progress in the game, a player really needs both credits and gold.

There are some players who never buy credits and play the game for free, while others buy a lot of credits.

A Picture costs thousands and thousands of Words

Tsaris: In addition to credits and gold, your games have three kinds of virtual assets: those that are bought at your stores, those that a player can create and sell, and custom items purchased from you directly or at auction?

Sarapis, the Logos: Unique items require a god with the appropriate privileges. For example, a player recently commissioned a custom cherry pie for role-playing reasons (http://forge.ironrealms.com/2006/08/11/cherry-pies-and-virtual-asset-sales/
). Our Gods scripting skills are akin to using the world building tool in a graphical game. Players can also learn skills and purchase licenses to allow them to craft and sell items to other players. Scripting is also used to create new Non-Player Characters, attacks, rooms, etc.

Tsaris: Do you have a Configuration Management (CM) process to manage these changes or is it purely privilege & trust based?

Sarapis, the Logos: Everything goes through approval processes before it's released into the wild. A rogue God could mess around, but he'd quickly be shut down. To get the power to really hurt anything badly though you have to volunteer for about 500-1000 hours with us. And that's only if you are accepted as a volunteer. We only accept about 10% of applicants. There's a whole hierarchy of power and responsibility among the gods and the Celani (player immortals who are volunteering until they've proven they're able to handle playing a God).

Tsaris: You don't want anyone to do what you did in Batmud!

Sarapis, the Logos: It's more than just that. Our Gods also have in-game roles. We ensure that the people who play the Gods won't just flake out immediately. Once we introduce a new active God into the game, players get very excited. Some of them become formal worshippers of the God.

Tsaris: So you have volunteers, gods, admins, and employees.

Sarapis, the Logos: There are both volunteer and paid Gods, but most are volunteers. I'm a God, for instance. My character is the Creator God in the game’s mythology. The evolution is from Mortal (regular player) to Celani and then to God. There is also a hierarchy of Gods - I am God level 501, for instance. Even for our Gods, it's all very “old-school” Role Playing. We used to only have about five god levels, but we found that just like players, Gods like that tangible feedback that comes from 'leveling up' too.

From Achaea to text MMO Empire

Tsaris: You were basically growing Achaea from 1999 to 2001 as you evolved your current business model. When was the business really self-sustaining?

Sarapis, the Logos: The game was self-sustaining by the middle half of 1999. I think the credit market started 2001… which was also when we launched our second game, Aetolia. It was also when we switched to our internally developed Rapture engine. The new engine actually didn't mean much to the players. The change was important so that we'd be able to grow. We had learned a lot – the transition was much easier. Rapture was specifically written to be absolutely as backwards compatible with Vortex as possible. It used the same syntax, but was extended quite a bit. It just allowed us to do more things. Rapture added a MySQL interface, for instance. We still use flat files for frequently-used data and then MySQL for less frequently used, but much larger, data.

Tsaris: Could you describe your games’ growth?

Sarapis, the Logos: Achaea has basically grown steadily over the years though it has leveled-off. Aetolia, Imperian, and Lusternia all opened really big, and then contracted in size before starting to slowly grow. We found that the new games were initially very popular because our existing players of our other games would flock in to check the new games out, but then a lot of the players would go back to their 'home' game). Imperian opened in April of 2003 and Lusternia in October of 2004, the same month as World of Warcraft, actually.



Tsaris: Do players leave one game and go to another (from a paying perspective)? Do you partially cannibalize your own customer base?

Sarapis, the Logos: Yes, players do that. Aetolia and Imperian were partially cannibalized by Lusternia’s opening. Both have more than rebounded back now, and Lusternia continues to grow. Achaea didn't seem to suffer this very much, for whatever reason.

Tsaris: After you got your first game, Achaea, running smoothly, you've released 3 additional games with about 18 months between each launch. Graphical MMOs cost at least $10 M and take 3 or more years to build. How much does a text MMO cost to create?

Sarapis, the Logos: For a text MMO, you can afford to be patient and have iterative, longer term growth. As far as for how many people and how much time to build one, it is hard to say. Text MMOs are also built with the help of volunteers who are put in variable amounts of time. Unlike 3D graphics, more people can write content and script enough of an MMO to create a viable world.

In our games we’ve used project funding. We have a lead volunteer who is compensated with partial ownership the game and a job helping run it. Each game is in a different company, but Iron Realms owns the majority of all of them. Our outside project funding has come from player investors, in every single case. We have never needed to raise very much. There was about $40,000 invested in Achaea - $30,000 of that from one person who I have never met or talked to on the phone!

Tsaris: There are three pieces of building your games - player funds, god volunteer -authors, and Iron Realms. Have your games been a good investment for the player funders?

Sarapis, the Logos: In the case of Aetolia, Imperian, and Lusternia, we didn't actually need any investment; we took it to help defray our risk. Our second game, Aetolia was the biggest concern. We weren't sure if opening a spin-off from Achaea was going to work or be a flaming disaster.

Our games have been a good investment for everybody and our first investors in Iron Realms back when it was founded have done very well.

Tsaris: I see this as an excellent system for your volunteers. It gives them a natural path to grow into the game as much as they would like.

Sarapis, the Logos: It's been great for us. Every single person, barring one, that works for us now started as a player…moved to a volunteer role, and was then hired.

Tsaris: Big question - Was this The Plan?

Sarapis, the Logos: No. This was an evolution. I never had a grand plan and looking back, I had no idea what I was doing when I started.

Tsaris: How many employees do you have now?

Sarapis, the Logos: There are eleven employees plus an outsourced art team. The art team is for Earth Eternal, our graphical game. Only three of us are actually working on Earth Eternal. And two of that three spend a bit of time working on the text side of things as well. We are never going to abandon the text market unless it abandons us.

Tsaris: In addition to the 8 full-time employees that support your 4 games. How many volunteers? Gods?

Sarapis, the Logos: Currently, there are about 25 players who play Romeo and Juliet. These characters are the in-game guides for new players. There are 15-20 active Gods and Celani. Also, there are 15 total player builders for Achaea.

Tsaris: How many players in Achaea?

Sarapis, the Logos: In the last 24 hours, we've had characters from 1623 different IP addresses log in. We regularly have peaks of around 425-450 simultaneous players and have gone as high as about 795 concurrent players. It is a more complicated question than it sounds because of the fact that creating a character is absolutely free and can be done as many times as you want. If we count everyone who creates a character, most quit in the first 5 minutes - about half drop out during our newbie introduction.

The real problem we have is something we cannot fundamentally change: Text is a difficult interface. We can make it easier, etc. But fundamentally, the player is going to be looking at scrolling text.

Additional Information about Iron Realms MMOs

The world of Achaea is divided into levels consisting of “rooms”. Essentially, everything in the game is a room that is abstractly connected. There is also a wilderness level. This level is presented a bit differently with an overhead character map view that would be familiar to anyone who plays Rogue.

Because of the abstract nature of text MMOs, they are not very resource intensive. Each of Iron Lore’s MMOs is hosted on a single, high-performance server. Achaea totals about 15 GBs of data (including the game engine, database, and scripts as well as player logs and essentially the entire history of the game):

- Hardware – 3.2 GHz Xeon processor with 2GB of RAM and 2X 70 GB high-speed hard drives configured in RAID 1. There are a total of 7 servers to support Iron Realms’s games, backup servers, web site, and e-commerce operations.

- The Rapture engine is written in C and C++.

- approximately 427,000 lines of Rapture script.

- 3469 individual scripts controlling various quests. Each script varies between as few as 15 lines to hundreds of lines.

- Lines of text - Lots. Text is spread out among many databases - millions of words.

Conclusion

The rapid transition from text MMOs to graphical ones has definitely stunted the evolution of this distinct form of gaming. This really is a pity. Text MMOs offer game creators and players a low-cost way to explore a much wider range of game experiences than is imaginable with graphical MMOs. These games are not an evolutionary dead-end, but a truly distinct form of game in their own right… and, I believe, there is even more opportunity for players and developers than the plodding literalism of 3D graphics.

Imagine the challenge for literature if movies had come along within a decade of the invention printing press - it is a tribute to the players, volunteers, and developers of these games that text MMOs have somehow managed to survive such a threat.