Richard A. Bartle: Interviews

Interviews

On-line interviews of which I have copies. These have all appeared in MUD-related on-line magazines. Other articles on this site may have resulted from interviews with me, but the ones shown here are of the transcript variety.

	1988 interview for for Wabit's Waffle, which was a magazine for the VAX MUD2. It appeared in several consecutive issues of the magazine, but is reproduced here in its entirety because it was a single interview (live in the game). WABIT asked the questions, and followed up four years later with his May, 1992 interview.
	May, 1992 interview for for Wabit's Waffle, which was a magazine initially for the VAX MUD2 that was later resurrected for DRAGON MUD2. Questions came from (you guessed!) WABIT. This interview was conducted live in the game, and was printed as a continuation of the 1988 interview which had appeared in the first manifestation of Wabit's Waffle.
	September, 1993 interview for On-Line News, the magazine for users of the ONLINE network. The interview was conducted over the telephone (I think) by Michael Hodges, but only the first of two parts ever reached me (hence its brevity here).
	September, 1994 interview for players of British Legends. This was conducted live in the MPGames forum, and I was questioned by many of the people present. VALARYIA presided.
	March, 1995 interview which appeared in The MUD2 Herald (the magazine for SONET MUD2) and The Dragon Times (the magazine for IOL MUD2). Questions came from ASTERIX and TAFF.
	June, 1996 interview for RHOAAAUUUAURRRRGGGGGGHGHHHGHHHH, which was the magazine for IPLAY MUD2. Questions came from ASTERIX. This interview was conducted by email.
	March, 1997 interview for The BL Rag. Questions came from RANDOM, live and without advanced notice of what would be asked. Although dated March, it was actually done mid-January, shortly after I had returned from a working trip to Singapore.
	May, 1997 interview for Admiral Bombow's Chronicles. VIKTOR asked the questions, via email (hence the longer answers). We both would have preferred a live interview, but there wasn't time between my coming back from a second Singapore trip and the publication deadline of 1st June to arrange it.
	March, 1998 interview for the Muddy site. GDN and WDI asked the questions live in the game, across 2 resets; the resultant text has therefore been heavily edited to remove vast amounts of superfluous material (SNOOPs etc.). It has also had major spelling and punctuation errors corrected, and some of the text has been re-ordered so as to make better sense (partial questions and answers were interleaved in many cases).
	August, 1998 interview for Dominions MOO. This was an unusual interview in that it was not conducted by people concerned with any of MUSE's MUDs. Instead, I was invited to be "honoured" in a MOO I had never even played before, in my capacity of co-creator of the genre. I accepted, with a few conditions relating to how much publicity was generated by it; I didn't want it to be some kind of scam to attract new players (but it turned out to be genuine anyway). I was greatly embarrassed by the award of course, but agreed to accept it on behalf of all the players of MUDs, who, after all, are the ones who really deserve any praise. The ceremony was conducted live; the text reproduced here is an HTMLised log (hence the MOOish addition of spurious adverbs to emotion commands). Yes, the players do seem a nice bunch of people, which is just as well given that they had to tolerate my non-functioning backspace key... A number of other "senior figures" were approached to be honoured, but apparently only I was conceited enough to reply.
	April, 2000 interview for Spank magazine. This was conducted in the game by KARYA the witch, who edited it together from two parts following a FETCH error (ah, those were the days!) and a scheduled reset. It also appeared as a Wireplay news story. If the opening seems a bit stilted, it's because KARYA had some standard questions given her to ask by these people, so she got them out of the way early. There are a few glitches, for example I would never start a statement with the words, "Such as" unless I was answering the question, "Such as?", but on the whole it's fine.
	May, 2000 interview for ERIC's MUD2 site. This was a by-email interview where he sent me a series of questions, I answered them, then he sent me some supplemental questions to follow up my replies. These were then combined with the original answers to make it appear that I was talking more sense than I really was.
	January, 2001 interview for GameSpy. This was one of a series of interviews with different people conducted by email to form an extended article on the history of MUDs. I've only reproduced my bit here; the central attraction of the complete article is a rare interview with Roy Trubshaw, which is well worth reading.