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Dust, a game run using the MARE server (Multi-User Adventure Role-Playing Epic) was conceived in 1995 by a few disgruntled players of the game called Winds : Frost, Decebalus, Koldun and Estraven. Being somewhat dismayed at the crumbling state of WindsMARE, which at its height in 1993-1994 had been the greatest game of all time (if you disagree with this and wish to be enlightened as to your ignorance, mail me), they decided to create a MARE of their own. Having just learned to program, and being chock-full of enthusiasm and woefully unwarranted confidence, these young punks set out to write a MARE-like service of their own, from scratch. This intention was doomed to failure. Koldun pushed the notion to the back burner, took up residence in the online game Castle D'Fromage, and set out to earn his millions, so that when he retired to sipping cocktail drinks and yachting, he could have peons write MARE for him. Estraven took the idea to Lawrence with him, and corresponded occasionally with the famous Greg about ideas for some sort of Ravenloftesque MARE, but mostly did a lot of fencing and went to Africa. Decebalus... um... well I really don't know how to describe what his contributions were. About as important as those of his peers. Frost though, showing startlingly (ahem) "uncharacteristic" stubbornness, persevered with the project, even going to the extent of buying a computer directly for the purpose of experimenting with Linux, then the operating system of choice for MARE-running folks.
At this point, the creator of MARE, Gandalf (or G) of Winds fame, came to
the aid of the ailing MARE-running pipe-dreams of Frost, and gave him a copy of the then
combat-free yet functional source to MARE. Though educational, tinkering with this proved to
be the mostly the cause of much frustration, who knew exactly squat about running a Linux box and the MARE server. Eventually, with the help of several persons, including Seth of MAD PuppeT and the self-styled hacker and acknowledged system administration wiz awyeah, as well as a sort of look-other-way assist from a certain Hawken School administrator, the system was brought up at Hawken School at the address zimet.hawken.edu. At this point Frost tried to foist off a game by the name of Night on the world. This fortunately did not come to pass. (NightMARE, gag-choke-expire) (ok it seemed like a good idea at the time) Much struggling with the system ensued, and eventually with a good deal of help from G himself, the game DustMARE was finally brought to an up-and-running state on a Michigan dorm net connection in December 1998.
The building began on a small scale, with two wizards, Ash and Frost of
Winds notoriety, cranking away at building a large city. With the addition of Seth to the
team,
Dust really began to take off. Eventually, stirred to renewed enthusiasm by the overwhelming success of the hardcore Dust builders, co-daydreamers Koldun and Decebalus have come around for a second, though perhaps equally half-assed shot at the project - only time will tell. Today, the Dust database is over eight thousand objects in size, and has over two thousand different rooms. Thanks to the hard work and design genius of more than a few people, there is far more to Dust today than construction alone. This site should come tell you everything an admin would need to know about DustMARE, from storyline to geography to combat, so stick around and you just might see it happen - certainly I've rambled on here long enough.
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