Somebody Made A Text-Based MMO About Hacking

Hackmud, or h a c k m u d if you want to be technically accurate, isn’t exactly the kind of game with a mass appeal. It’s about hacking, entering scripts, interpreting programming logic and making sure people don’t stab you in the back.

So it’s basically the game for anybody who ever enjoyed Hacknet or Uplink.

The opening of hackmud more or less illustrates what kind of experience you’re in for. It’s more or less the equivalent of a giant terminal window, which is where you’ll spend the majority of your time:

The game’s mechanic relies around entering scripts, and using logic to figure out what scripts to enter. “I wanted to take [EVE Online] and I wanted to mix it with Uplink and I wanted to capture the nostalgia of my experiences playing MUDs as a kid,” creator Sean Gubelman said in a recent interview.

Once you’ve progressed through the three hour “tutorial”, which more or less teaches you the basic commands and mechanics, you’re then thrust into a randomly generated world. A new series of targets are procedurally generated every day, with a limit to encourage a bit of urgency among players.

If you’ve got any background in JavaScript, you’ll immediately feel at home. If you don’t, you should be able to pick things up easily enough provided you pay attention to the instructions. And once you add humans to all of this, and you’re hacking randomly generated targets for their money … well, it all becomes a little bit like the Dead Zone in The Division, except you’re all maniacal hackers.

Here’s another video showing a little of how the game plays out past the tutorial:

Hackmud’s an unusual beast, and if you have any interest in cyberpunk, hacking or coding-themed games you’ll want to check it out. The game’s currently having a few server issues right now, although they’re being worked on. And if you don’t mind spoiling some of the experience, have a read of the interview with Gubelman, which will further illuminate just what the hell is going on.