Swords of Chaos

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Swords of Chaos is a computer game by Mark Peterson of the type called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). It can only be played in a telnet session over a bulletin board system.

1 History
2 Gameplay
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The program that would eventually evolve into Swords of Chaos began in 1984 with the name The Realm of Angmar and was first written in Pascal. It began as a clone of the existing MUD Sceptre of Goth.

It was then ported to Apple II assembly language, and renamed Angbar due to concern of legal action by Tolkien Enterprises over copyright infringement over the name. It was then ported to the C programming language, running on top of Xenix (a version of Unix). It was released to the public and had some popularity, but was a Unix game and so was not compatible with common bulletin board systems which were mostly run on DOS. By 1994, Mark Peterson had again rewritten the game to be compatible with DOS and renamed it to Swords of Chaos, again out of concern of legal action by Tolkien Enterprises. The game was distributed to BBSes around the world until the growing popularity of the Internet caused a die off among BBS systems. Rights to the game were sold to a Canadian company name Vircom, which later sold it to Metropolis Gameport which still sells the game today.

Mark Peterson also developed a game called 'The Mage Connection', which was a Magic: The Gathering type of game played over BBSes, and a game called Lords of Cyberspace.

[edit] Gameplay

Swords of Chaos is a game that is played in the medieval adventure cliché. The distinctive innovation of the game compared to others MUDs, was a real-life timer used during combat. So while killing monsters that were tough for your levels, you have to be quick on the keyboard and having created the in-game macros to type faster.

There is no real goal like saving a princess but exploring, killing monsters, collecting treasures, raising levels, chatting with other people online.

The game allows gameops (Game Operators) editing functions to create rooms, items and monsters, thus adding to the existing realm.