History of The Shadow Realms

   The Idea for a new MUD was floated around in October of 1995 by Jon Whitehouse (Ra & Beowolf), Tige Chastain (Allanon) and Scott Lee (Draven).  The first MUD they all played was called   "DirtyMUD", based on Egyptian mythology. They all felt that it had the best role-play they had ever seen but DirtyMUD closed down and they were left wondering what to do. So that's when the idea for The Shadow Realms was launched.

    The ideas brewed about for a few months and in December of 1995, Jon put up the first version of TSR on his schools server at Ball State University in Muncie Indiana. They also decided at this time they might need a couple more people to help and Jon asked his two friends from Aesir, Nikki and Jason Cook (Variant) to help. However, he did not tell the system administrators and was soon asked to take the MUD down. A week later TSR was looking for a new home. Soon Jon discovered a pay site called mat.net and decided he would host with them.

    It was at mat.net that Nikki developed the first version of a working ROM 2.4 OLC (On-Line Creation -aka building new areas while on the MUD) system. This was well before anything like Ivan's OLC came out.  ROM 2.4 was a wonderful codebase and the first version of TSR (aka TSR I) was a ton of fun. Jason had began the Mythos for TSR and it was unfolding nicely.

    However, TSR began to eat away at the resources that mat.net gave it. The MUD shot up from 5M of RAM to a whopping 15M!! With this massive amount of RAM being used the price of the site skyrocketed. Once again the future of TSR was uncertain. It was then that Nikki came to the rescue and put TSR up on her school server at acad.humberc.on.ca.

The new server was great for a while, however, there was a lot of lag and it was decided that something had to be done. Jon once again went back to the paysite mat.net. However, the site was still too expensive for his tastes. He continued looking for a site and that is when he discovered mudservices.com

It was with the help of support from both players and staff that TSR was able to pay for it's new home. It was at mudservices where the domain tsr.org was born and the site would remain. Most of the major changes done to the code were performed on this server.

    One year later in 1996, a new codebase was in the works. Jon was becoming a MUD legend with his site called "Darkoth's MUD Store", which was designed to help other MUD's. He was later approached by developers of a project called SMAUG and decided that it might be fun to work on this and soon TSR II was opened running off the SMAUG engine.

    SMAUG ran for another year and during this time Nikki, Tige and Scott decided to retire from the MUD. In 1997, Jon  was contacted by more friends who gave him the codebase for Eye of the Storm.  Soon TSR III was unveiled and also Jason decided to retire. TSR III was the biggest mess of bugs and bitchy players Jon had ever seen and decided almost immediately to try to work on a newer version of TSR. He decided to go back to ROM but wanted to start from scratch. In 1998, TSR IV opened it's doors. However it only ran for a short eight months or so and was closed.

    Jon had decided he wanted an Egyptian MUD and started working with SMAUG once more. TSR V was in the works but never made it to the open stage. Jon took a few months off the project and needed time to clear his head. It was then that he remembered how much fun TSR I used to be and decided to chance it and give the players a "vote" on which their favorite version was. Of course TSR I won the vote and was re-opened April of 1999.

    The MUD is still running on ROM 2.4b6 with a TON of TSR enhancements from ALL previous codebases. In Feb 2000 Jon retired from the MUD and handed it off to it's current owner, Matt (Greyman). It is the hope of the staff that you enjoy our game and find it to be one of the best experiences on the internet.