The MMO granddaddy you've never heard of is celebrating its 35th anniversary, and it still pulls in 'a few thousand active players' and needs a staff of over 40 to run: 'We want to be able to survive for another 35 years'

If any one thing can claim responsibility for sending me down the dark, dark path of writing for a living, it's probably MUDs—text-based MMOs from an era before 3D graphics that somehow still endure today. It wasn't school, it wasn't uni, it wasn't a mentor's encouragement or some precocious childhood proclivity. I just spent most of my adolescence typing a lot and it just kind of kept happening as I approached adulthood.

And one of the granddaddies of MUDs as a genre is GemStone IV, currently marking its 35th anniversary. It's bigger than you might think: after starting "on the early ISPs—Genie, Prodigy, AOL" all the way back in 1990 and finally moving to the web proper in 1997, it still manages to pull in "a few thousand active players" in the modern era, per product manager Wyrom.

Which might not sound like a lot to anyone used to a few million active players in MMOs like WoW, but trust me, it's plenty for a MUD. I was never a GemStone player, but my MUDs of choice—in their heyday—only ever pulled in perhaps 300 players at peak operating hours. These days, they're lucky to hit 100.

In addition to a few thousand players, Wyrom oversees "over 40 gamemasters" who work as contractors, and whose focus ranges "anywhere from creative work to actual development of game systems. So we have storytelling gamemasters, [and] some that help us with customer service."

To help him handle all those direct reports, he has four assistants, with the entire operation divided into four teams: production, development, events, and player experience. Together they coordinate and run events like the currently ongoing Duskruin PvE arena challenge, coincidentally enjoying its own tenth anniversary alongside GemStone's 35th.

All of which I mention only because MUDs, to me, represent one of the last remaining embers of the old internet: that rambling wild west of the '90s and early '00s where entire worlds—with all their lore and drama and vast intricate workings—could exist almost invisibly in some nook of the world wide web, separate from the petty mortal concerns of the Earth at large. In our modern, consolidated and corporatised internet, it's quite nice to still be able to turn over a rock and find an entire civilisation proceeding according to its own inscrutable laws.

Which isn't to say GemStone—or MUDs in general—are the last place uncorrupted by capitalism (my MUD of choice, Achaea, was an early pioneer of microtransactions). "When we went to the web, we eventually had a basic subscription, a premium subscription, and then in 1999, we have a platinum subscription." A standard sub, in 2025, runs $15 a month, while a platinum would set you back $50 a month.

In 2013, the game got microtransactions, and regularly runs "pay events" that players buy into. "There were always prickly pieces to it all, prices, obviously, being one of them—people wanting it the way it was. Any time we've done updates, it seems like there's always someone who would want it the way it used to be."

But for the most part, Wyrom reckons things are going well. "We've just been cranking out content lately," he says. "We see about, I would say, one to two very new users, probably, a month," a number that gets bigger if you broaden it to encompass old hands returning to the game.

"We do get that pressure [for growth] from the company side. We want to, obviously, grow. We want to be able to survive another 35 years. So yeah, we have that constant need to try to push the boundaries a little bit, but we also want to create a good experience for our players.

"I do think we have kind of a resurgence in retro gaming… and I think that has kind of helped us, in the space, just say 'Oh, we don't need to look like the latest, greatest game. I like this classic look.' … I feel like we're kind of in charge of our own destiny. I feel like the game's got a lot of life in it… But yeah, I see this era of gaming surviving as long as there's an active community that is driving us to create content. As long as there's players out there hungry to play, we're going to be here to provide a game."

I don't know if I'm ready to pour another few thousand hours into a MUD like I did when I was teenager, but I'm certainly glad someone is.

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