I miss Mushing

TheCamelPope

Spaceman
I know it wasn't everyones cup of tea but I today I find myself really missing Wing Commander Red Horizons...ahh to be young and 1999 again.
 
When I was a lad, it was called MUD (Multi-User Dungeon).

But then, Don Johnson was getting away with wearing baby blue sports jackets at that time...
 
Yes I'm sitting bored in a middle of no where 3rd world country (Sorta) and still have three weeks here. This is the kind of thing that goes through my head. I tried other mushes after the game ended but nothing I found ever had the same hook RH did for me. Prolly had somethign to do with being familier with the source material. Even if RH storylines did go off on a crazy Tangent from time to time..ie the game runner having my character being attacked by zombies whenever I was alone on a certian Planet...EVERY TIME..and then no one in the game beliving me ICly.
 
I don't think i would classify freaking INDIA as a "middle of nowhere third world country" :-p.

Anyway, I was on Red Horizon MUSH for three years. Had a great time. Loved it because of the roleplay and combination of the HSpace engine that actually took skill and practice to learn - it was actually challenging to become a pilot on that MUSH and in the sometimes rather massive fleet actions I participated in you were always pitted against other live enemy pilots. I remember my first character lasted six IC years. Started out as a rookie Confed pilot, made a lot of good friends, saw a lot of craziness... the involvement was such that to this day I can still pretty much vividly recall all the people I "flew with" on there and every battle/campaign. Anyway, ended up leaving Confed (after bad things happened) and leading my own elite squadron that finally ended up being decimated (and my char being wounded so badly he had to retire heh) in a really important but messy scrap. Basically ended up having to make a classic last stand (or as close to one as there can be in space) and got slaughtered mercilessly. I'm surprised I never developed post-traumatic stress.

Short of it is I really enjoyed the ol' Wing Commander MUSH. There was always a lot of people playing for both Confed and the Kats and the Border Worlds or being civilian merchants or pirates or whatever, and lots of good RP, we really had a good enough playerbase to have a great time. Shame when it ended but all good things must I suppose. I think a lot of the Wingnuts here would have loved it. The in-game storyline diverged from the canon after a while, since the in-game Kilrathi were a lot more skilled than their canonical counterparts, but it absolutely had the WC universe feel I grew up with.

And yea I never got into another MUSH again after, and I think the familiarity with the source material that Red Horizon had was a lot of its draw to me. The closest I ever came was when I briefly played on a Star Wars MUSH but it just lacked RH's epicness. I remember I was one of only three other Imperial pilots in the whole game. On RH I we easily and habitually were fielding squadrons of a dozen pilots each. I remember towards the end of the game when the in-game war was getting desperate they started conscripting civilian merchants into the space force and I had like a month to train 10 - 15 complete newbies in basic hspace combat to supplement our regular squadrons and then we got drawn into a pretty massive fleet action in Kat space and they all got blown up, haha. Good times.
 
And who would have thought we would end up leading the final campaign against the Kilrathi.

Swear to god I tried to make the Frank King character a passifist..then things went a little nuts.
 
Ah, I was on that cusp -- first I MUDded, then I MUSHed. Now I occasionally MOO.

I occasionally think fondly of RH. 'Course, I occasionally spit and snarl at the thought of RH too. It was what it was -- which was fun, for some time.

It'd be interesting to see something similar tried, with a bit more engine packed in -- perhaps something crossing Prophecy Multiplayer for the starfighter bits, and a bit more robust economic engine (or just pitching the blasted thing entirely)...
 
I hear ya pip there are some days that I care not to think back to some of the crap that went on back then. That said, the overall fondness for the players and the game itself always seems to win out.
 
Falcon? J.T. Falcon?

So yeah, been snooping around the net lately, trying once more to find a game that had the draw, the appeal, and all the emotions that were wrapped up in the old Wing Commander RH series today... It's sad really.

I mean, I've grown up a lot over the years. Been in the Army going on 8 years now, got married, we even had a kid (great marriage too, despite the deployments). I sit here quite often wishing I could get back into the glory days that was Horizons and later Wing Commander: Red Horizons. I hate wishing. I feel like making this happen.

If there are people out there who are serious about getting a good ole Wing Commander game going through PennMUSH/TinyMUSH/ETC and are serious about it, give me a shout either through here or via ryanbusbyalt@gmail.com. I am very interested in hosting the site and doing whatever recruiting I need to in order to see if I can visit an old flame so to speak. If I can get even 1 or 2 people interested, I'll work on recruiting pitch that is coherent enough to be worth looking in to (for staff/coders right now). I'll even see about finding one of the guys who has all the source code if I -really- need to.

BTW Falc: It's Me, Seether Mk I. If you're J.T. I trained you! :) If it's anyone else, oops but glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks back on those days on occasion.
 
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