Tag: 1994

Happy 20th Anniversary, Realms of Despair!!

by Tharius

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Realms of Despair.  In the coming weeks I will be sharing some retrospectives from current and past players.  If you want to submit a story just drop me a mudmail or email tharius@realmsofdespair.info

 

To set the stage, I thought we’d look back at 1994 … some of these events are already forgotten or have become memes and many have no clue why!  I was finishing high school and was still on dial up running Aces High BBS.

  • Tonya Harding hires someone to hit Nancy Kerrigan in the knee (the original in the knee joke)
  • Bill Clinton delivered his first State of the Union address
  • Green day released Dookie (owch!!)
  • Winter Olympics in Lillehammer
  • China gets connected to the Internet (probably to farm gold in RoD!!! 🙂
  • Kurt Cobain is found dead in his home
  • Richard Nixon also died, some people wave using all five fingers
  • Rodney King is awarded almost $4m to settle his civil rights suit
  • The Chunnel between England and France opens
  • Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa’s president
  • Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman are murdered and the O.J. trials
  • The Rangers win the Stanley Cup and riots break out in Vancouver
  • The Lion King is released
  • Microsoft discontinues sales of MS-DOS
  • Realms of Despair opens to the public!!!!
  • Brazil wins the World Cup
  • Fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter in a spectacular display
  • Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace signed
  • Major League Baseball goes on strike
  • Jeffrey Dahmer is beaten to death in prison
  • Boris Yeltin orders the invasion of Chechnya
  • Netscape Navigator 1.0 is released
  • AOL begins offering gateway service to the World Wide Web
  • Justin Beiber was born …
  • … John Candy died and Canadian celebrity has been whacky ever since! 🙂
  • … and much much more …

 

So this sets the stage.  Most people at this time were not connected to the internet or if they were it was normally text based.  MUDs offered multiplayer in a way that dial up BBS systems could not because only the largest commercial BBSes could afford many multiple phone lines but even they could not keep up with telnet sessions over the internet.  We went from having 4 people on a BBS together being “cool” to several hundred on a MUD.

Cheers!