An open letter, from the same keyboard as always
I have spent tens of thousands of hours
in worlds that existed only in words.
My name is Jose. Since I was fourteen — when the modem sang like
someone clearing their throat before a long story — I have lived inside
MUDs: worlds made of text, imagination, friends, and late nights. Now
that life has granted me the time I didn't have back then, I want to
give something back. Build a new one.
Accessible, beautiful, and open to anyone who wants to tell stories with me.
Discover Genesis MUD
The story
The first tens of thousands of hours
Before there were videos explaining everything, before photorealistic
graphics and dubbed voices, there was a blinking prompt on a green
screen. A prompt, and a decision: which way to walk. That was enough
for an entire world to take shape.
My first real friendships — the kind where you learn each other's names
outside the game — were born inside a MUD. We swapped battle plans on
clan channels, but also how the exam had gone, or that one girl at
school who looked at us funny. I learned to read fast because the next
room had a monster in it. I learned to write slowly because a friend
needed me to spell out the route without a mistake.
Years passed. MUDs changed, servers changed, people changed. Some are
no longer with us — died young, emigrated, or simply faded away. But
they are with me still, every time I close my eyes and hear the murmur
of an imaginary tavern where someone asks whether anybody's alive out
there. Somebody always is.
For a long time I thought MUDs were a bridge between childhood and
something else, something you leave behind. I was wrong. A MUD is a
summerhouse that never burns down: you come back, and the chair is
still there. So is the laughter.
Today I work with software all day. For years I have built serious
systems — billing, banking, infrastructure —, all of them earnest, all
of them functional, all of them far from those nights when I typed
look north and pictured the forest. Finally, I have the
time to close the loop: I am going to write my own MUD,
and I want to do it right.
I want a world that fits everyone who always fit in MUDs — including
the people that modern clients have left behind, by oversight or by
haste.
Because a MUD, done well, is one of the few interactive art forms that
is naturally accessible: the text is the engine. A screen reader reads
a MUD the way it reads a book. Someone with limited mobility plays as
well as anyone, because nobody is running. Imagination does the rest.
But modern clients — obsessed with colour, maps, and shortcuts — often
wreck that. I want that not to happen. I want Enter to be
enough.
This site — web.blamethebeast.com — is the chronicle of
that journey. Here I will share how Genesis MUD grows, the philosophy
that guides it, and how anyone can join to tell their own stories.