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Confidential was the name by which the house magazine of
the Special Reserve/Official Secrets
mail-order games club was known. It was
a little amateurish at times, but nowhere near as bad as
Comms Plus!. From April/May 1989 to
April/May 1991, it ran a series of MUD-related articles by Pip
Cordrey, owner of the MirrorWorld (later IOWA)
system. These are mainly puff pieces which extol either the virtues of the
games available on IOWA or the contributions made by Cordrey
himself to the MUD scene. They're reasonably honest, though, and, to be
fair, these are the games that Cordrey knew best.
Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of the first of these
articles, which described the MirrorWorld MUD itself; the
rest, however, are reproduced here. The series didn't appear in every issue of
Confidential, but was fairly regular nonetheless. It ended when
Confidential underwent a redesign along with the rest of
Special Reserve.
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MOSAIC
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, pages 20 and 21,
June/July, 1989.
A description of the MOSAIC
project. This was conceived by Cordrey as
the next great step in MUD design, and,
although it seems a good idea at first
glance, it has quite a few holes. The
co-ordinate system it espouses would have
made a good basis for a neat graphical MUD, but Cordrey always
preferred text. Given that, his insistance
on building a MUD out of 1m cubes (voxels,
anyone?) while not accepting that a
co-ordinate system was topologically
equivalent to a rigid network of traditional
"node" rooms, was rather
infuriating... Still, the MOSAIC
approach won its fair share of enthusiasts,
and elements of it can be detected in MUDs
which exist to this day (most notably
Avalon).
Footnote: the worthy board game about the
environment which the article mentions was
actually unplayably bad.
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Adventure 89
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 22,
December, 1989/January, 1990.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, a series of annual
conventions were held for players and writers of
adventure games. They became a focal point for
players of MUDs, too, and the bigger MUDs began
to take stands at them. Their original home was
Sutton Library in South London, but for 1989 this
venue was unavailable. Pip Cordrey offered to run
it in the garden of his (not inconsiderable!) home,
Tilgates, instead. It was a massive
success, despite the relative inaccessability of the
place. It also marked the end of the pre-Internet
period of MUD development. Around 20 different
MUDs were represented, almost all of which had
their own, unique server code. The variety and
invention was staggering. Sadly, Cordrey could not
be persuaded to organise an Adventure 90,
and attempts by others to organise an
Adventure 91 never really got going.
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 22,
February/March, 1990.
An introduction to MUDs (or "Mugs",
as these articles prefer). It's OK, and
exhibits only a little of Pippin's tendency
to describe features of his own stable of
games as if they were the industry standard.
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 28,
June/July, 1990.
Another idea for which Pippin clearly sees
himself responsible is that of allowing
players to add objects to MUDs. These
"MUPEGs" are described as having
many exciting features, but it's pretty
obvious that the ones listed are hypothetical
rather than actually implemented - they're
very much wishful thinking. The piece of
prose quoted as an example "origination
sequence" highlights splendidly the
reason why players should not be
given a free rein to write significant parts of
the games they play - it's truly dreadful!
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 14,
August/September, 1990.
This is a review of Empyrion,
a game on the IOWA system.
It has an interesting SF premise, although the
"city under the sea" idea is not
especially original. The game itself did
attract a few enthusiasts, despite its being
prone to crashes, however it died (along with
the rest of IOWA) when charging
was introduced and the players deserted as
one: it was good, but not that good..!
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 25,
August/September, 1990.
Although in the MugScan spot, nowhere does it
actually say that Pippin wrote this article,
and the fact that it is about a non-IOWA
game, Trash, suggests that perhaps he
didn't. The MUD it describes has a nice enough
idea behind it, but in practice its "humour"
was relentlessly unfunny. The game was not a great
success, which was doubly disappointing given its
direct accessability from Prestel.
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 23,
December, 1990/January, 1991.
This is a review of the game Parody
on the IOWA system, although it
reads like more of an extract from a help command...
There are a number of typographical
errors, some of which I have corrected but others
of which are beyond redemption. The article
contains the usual confident assertions of
pre-eminence without much evidence to back them
up.
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 26,
February/March, 1991.
A discussion of some of the design decisions
which make a MUD good; it's actually quite
useful, in this respect. A few of the things
mentioned are a little arbitrary (eg. number of
rooms per puzzle), and there's a definite
IOWA-biased idea of what makes a
game hauntingly good, but the overall material
is strong enough to stand such minor flaws.
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MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 26,
April/May, 1991.
Pippin always argued enthusiastically in
favour of what he called "autosets",
but which are normally referred to nowadays
as "rolling resets". In this
article, he describes the concept, and how
it is applied in various (IOWA)
MUDs. Of these, the premiss for the game
Spacers is really rather good;
it makes the other systems mentioned look
decidedley second-rate by comparison.
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