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Comment by isamuel | Hacker News Reader

I spent an enormous amount of time on "Snow Crash", a MOO that I think was similar and was popular around the same time. This was in the middle or late 90s. The world was incredibly rich---everything in it was an object that was programmable if you had the right ownership permissions. I don't remember the language it used, or if it even was a standard one, but looking back it was unbelievably robust. I was able to make a "video recorder" that could be turned on, record all the events in a given place, and replay them later to make it all seem like it was happening again; a couple then used this to record their in-world wedding, which I only learned about months later.

I have DESPERATELY searched for years for any commentary on this community slash game, with no luck. I can even remember the telnet address: sapporo.sensemedia.net. Port 8888, maybe? Ah, alas.

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Sounds very much like LambdaMOO. Back in the day there were mirror sites you could use if your ping was absurdly high its possible that sapporo host was just a mirror. Snow Crash sounds familiar, but it reminds me of an area inside LambdaMOO. That world was huge, I remember several times ending up in brand new areas that I would spend hours exploring because I never knew how to get back -- I jumped out of a helicopter once, landed on a remote island that had a HUGE underground complex. Another was a party room in the clouds... the imagination could run wild there. I also remember things that could "playback" events (like you could look into a mirror and see who used to be in that room)

This sounds entirely right. Because I also have a recollection of that party room in the clouds. Actually, it's further refreshing my recollection---I think the main area was called "the Sprawl" or something like that? Maybe it WAS just a mirror, and the reason I haven't ever been able to find anyone else talk about it is that I was under a teenage misimpression about the name.

EDIT: AHA. Sensemedia apparently had a virtual community consisting of MANY themed MOOs, termed "The Sprawl," of which Snow was one; ChibaMOO was I guess the famous one, and was based on Neuromancer. This is more progress than I have made on this in years, so thanks!

What blows my mind is that all of this existed almost 30 years ago and nothing quite like it exists today (maybe second life... maybe).

I remember snow crash but I don’t remember much about it. I spent virtually my entire dialup childhood on lambdamoo. Lambda was a giant mansion and you would start in a closet. One of the bottom floors of the mansion had a mirror which replayed things that recently happened in the room. The mansion was huge but I would constantly leave and explore the street. That’s how you ended up in crazy places like a helicopter or random ass island. Still don’t remember how I ended up in someone’s self built house. All I remember is they were having a party and it was freaking awesome reading through everything at 4am hoping my parents wouldn’t barge in and yell at me lol. Good memories :)

If anyone with the handle “dags” sees this, hello from your helicopter buddy

Check out Sindome: https://www.sindome.org/ it's a cyberpunk MOO been online since '97 and is running a modified LambdaMOO.

I remember the Snow Crash MOO! I spent a while there around 1996-1997: it was (despite the name) sort of William Gibson themed - I vaguely remember it being distributed across multiple hosts, and being impressed at the time that it was running on an SGI box. I think the language was standard MOO.

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