Shades is a mud, but also a text game. It's unlike any text game I've ever played, because events can be displayed to the screen while the player is considering his or her next move.

(I recall that Infocom's Border Zone did this. I've never played it, however.)

Three or four moves in there is a wall with some graffiti on it. As it turns out, the "graffiti" is messages that players have left for each other.

It currently reads:

[quote]read walls
The graffiti reads....

stop writing on this wall
Are you a player?
.....yes
Anyone know a good way to download mp3 files these days?
No Bittorrent, Napster, Bareware, Shareware, Mirc
I feel ooseless
Tried Google ?
Branny's wtomorrow 8pm on Void
Branwell's Wake, tomorrow 8pm on Void
I am so sorry to hear of Branwells death..he was a fine man
Hello World
Hello Wuzzles
[/quote]

When were these messages left? More importantly, who was Branwell? It seems like he was, perhaps, a former player? A member of their community? Tempted as I am to add to the wall, it feels like it would be damaging a historical artifact at this point...

There is a another page with Shades info that I am reading slowly. For no reason other than the background page for it is a loud, Geocities-style starry fields and impossible to make sense of without doing a Cntl-A on the page. But on this page are links of "meet-ups." Which makes sense -- my understanding is that Shades was a very United Kingdom thing. Certainly having a meetup in London would be convenient for much of the userbase.

I am still searching, exploring and learning in the most fascinating virtual world I have ever known.

Yeah, it's just that most MUDs' idea of a puzzle consists of figuring out which axe is best for killing that troll. Still, yeah, crazy that it is still around in some form after all of these years.

Well, I mean, I guess there is a game there. I am gonna try to play the game that is on the mud.

What is frustrating is that it times you out if you are inactive. I... wish it wouldn't do that. That's gonna make it impossible to chat with people who might login there.

I tried this:

[quote]There is also a mailing list to support Shades, and provide a means for players to communicate outside the game, to join mail shades-request@games.world.co.uk with the single word 'SUBSCRIBE' on the first line of the message.[/quote]

But the mail bounced. :( Oh, Shades.

Sounds cool. I don't actually have faith that I'd enjoy it, though, so I hope your post has a bunch of excerpts from it making it sound as cool as possible so I can enjoy it vicariously.

I may be doing a blog post on the mud called Shades. I wanted to put some information down as I find it, however.

Shades is the mud that inspired the game Knight Orc. What is Knight Orc? There's a link to the Knight Orc Home Page at the main page of JC. (Knight Orc is a text game that... well... simulates being in a mud. So it's kind of circular.)

The important information is how to telnet into Shades. The address is here: games.world.co.uk and the port is 23. (I just use putty.exe, and telnet to get in, not ssh.)

It appears the main FAQ or website is here:

http://games.world.co.uk/shades/getting_started.html