Lofp

Legends of Future Past

**[Play it now — free forever — at lofp.metavert.io](https://lofp.metavert.io)**

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I'm [Jon Radoff](https://metavert.io), and I created *Legends of Future Past* in 1992. It was a text-based online multiplayer game — what we called a MUD — that ran for seven years on dial-up terminals, CompuServe, and packet-switching networks like Tymnet. The original engine was written in fully reentrant C, running on a heavily modified [The Major BBS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS) platform — a single Pentium PC with 16MB of RAM serving dozens of simultaneous players.

The game shut down on December 31, 1999. The source code is lost.

In 2026, I brought it back. A game that originally took me six months to code, with a team of Game Masters building the world over years, came back to life in a weekend of agentic engineering. I wrote about the full story in [Resurrecting a 1992 MUD with Agentic AI](https://meditations.metavert.io/p/resurrecting-a-1992-mud-with-agentic).

What Was Legends of Future Past?

*Legends* was one of the earliest commercial online multiplayer games. *Computer Gaming World* gave it a Special Award for Artistic Excellence in 1993 and called it "a rich, dynamic and lovingly supervised world of the imagination." It introduced one of the first crafting systems in an online game, had a skill-based character system with no class restrictions and no level caps, and featured paid Game Masters who ran live events years before that became standard in the MMO industry.

The game is set in the Shattered Realms of Andor — a world blending fantasy and ancient technology, with eight playable races, five schools of magic, a psionic combat system, and over two thousand rooms to explore. Some of the people who built and ran *Legends* went on to work on *