When FurryMUCK Was New

Before Telegram and Twitter, before FurAffinity, before AIM (America Online Instant Messaging? Anyone?), and even before common use of the World Wide Web, there was FurryMUCK. Inspired by multiplayer text adventures known as MUDs, FurryMUCK was — and is; you can still play today! — a text-based social world where furries could create characters, navigate through locations, and hang out with other animal people wandering the server. Fire up Telnet and log in to FurryMUCK, and you’ll be greeted by an iconic sight:

These days, when technology like VRChat allows furries to form 3D avatars of themselves and traverse innumerable colorful worlds, it might be hard to understand just how important FurryMUCK was. It’s equally hard to overstate that importance. When FurryMUCK went public in mid-October, 1990 (Jahangiri, “1990”), the internet as we know it did not yet exist. Up to this point, furries’ means of social connection were mostly limited to parties at sci-fi cons or ConFurence (which was only two years old) or at the Prancing Skiltaire. Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), such as FurNet (not to be confused with FurNet Internet Relay Chat), allowed users to leave messages that could be read and responded to later. But the ability to become your sona online and to chat, in the moment, with others in a textual furry kingdom? As the writers of InFurNation, Confurence’s newsletter, put in their November 1991 newsletter: “[W]e have seen the future, and it is FurryMUCK!” Since writing this article involved interviewing many users of early FurryMUCK, I’ll let those users speak for themselves:

It was mind-blowing at the time, the equivalent of stepping outside your body, stepping into the body of your chosen character, and interacting with others. A theater of the mind. People would talk about ‘jacking in’ to the network, and almost physically being there. It was an incredible, liberating experience.

(Kage, interview)

I checked out a number of newsgroups on Usenet as well, but I favored social MU*s and participated on several – FM was my favorite. Finding the furry fandom felt like a homecoming. Like I had met my people, and I belonged. […] For a while, every furry convention that happened felt like part of the MUCK had gone missing – because they were off having fun in person rather than through the server!

(Siege, interview)

It was an ENVIRONMENT, and when the game elements were discarded or ignored, it became a totally social one, and that was the key.

(Axiom, interview)

I have been active online in one form or another since 1982, and had been roleplaying as a unicorn online for years before I had even heard of Furry fandom. When I found out there was not only a MUCK based around furries, but an entire fandom devoted to them, I was hooked.

(Xydexx, interview)

FurryMUCK is a database of digital objects, each with a description. That means that as you travel from place to place, room to room, you’ll encounter a fully realized world that you can look at and interact with. Through the 90s, FurryMUCK’s database grew in tandem with its influence as a major social hub for furries. In 1994, FM surpassed 100,000 objects in its database (Jahangiri, “1994”). According to Fred Patten, by 1996 FM had “more than two thousand users worldwide, with two hundred to three hundred log-ons per evening” (Patten). On February 9th, 1998, FM recorded 500 simultaneous users, with over 180,000 objects in its database, including 8764 players (Jahangiri, “1998”). To put that in perspective, according to Gale’s “Furry Conventions Thru the Years” article, the first in-person con to surpass 8000 attendees was MFF 2017! By the year 2000, when Tina “Jahangiri” Smith wrote the first history of FurryMUCK, FM was – and remains to this day – “the longest standing MUCK on the internet to date” (“FurryMUCK SM”).

So foundational was FM that it was often just called “Furry”–and for a long time it was the Furry Fandom’s hub. Let’s dive into the world for ourselves, shall we?

I. Forming FurryMUCK

If you create a new character in FurryMUCK, you’ll wake up “Under the Bandstand”-– the default starting location. But you’ll soon find your way to one of the MUCK’s most frequented locations, West Corner of the Park (WCOTP), once dubbed “Center of the Furryverse” and even inspiring a weekly comic of the same name by Jim Groat (Wikifur, “West Corner of the Park”).

From there, the world is your oyster: pick a direction, wander afield, and you never know what you’ll discover and whom you’ll meet.

FurryMUCK (and MUCKs in general) came from MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons, a genre of multiplayer real-time adventure game dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s (Burka). According to Claire Benedikt (one of FM’s co-creators) and Dave Ciskowski, MUDs were divided between Combat MUDs and TinyMUDs –- the former featuring built-in combat, monsters, and quests, and the latter “almost always loosely structured virtual environments, where roleplaying (if there is any) is cooperative and social” (Benedikt and Ciskowski, 31). Created by Jim Aspenes in 1989, the original TinyMUD eventually gave rise to dozens of other social MUDs and MUCKs. Drew Maxwell, who came up with the idea of FurryMUCK and was its chief architect (Shaterri, interview; Lynx, interview), described what it was like to encounter MUDs and MUCKs in the late 80s:

It was an online roleplaying experience, and once I learned of it, I was enthralled by the idea. You could be anything you could write down, and people were actively interacting, storytelling, socializing… You could be a thousand miles away from the person you were talking to, and it didn’t matter; their response could be had in moments. Even this new concept of electronic mail—you know, email—often had at least a few minutes between responses; conversations were stilted and choppy, but this….this [was] the love-child of a telephone and a typewriter, and it was amazing.

(Maxwell, interview)

While MUDs tended to be more centered around adventure narratives, MUCKs were more social in nature. “As MUDs evolved, they lost the D&D edge they always carried–you didn’t connect to hack, slash, and chop monsters to bits, but more to interact with the other players. A MUCK is one of these evolved types of MUDs” (Maxwell, “thinking”). Maxwell explained some of the key guidelines that, building off earlier MU*, went into forming FM:

• Everything has an actual text description; nothing is left undescribed. You can look at anything and you should see something, even if it is as simple as “You see a rock.”
• There is directional continuity for all public areas; if you can go from A -> B with an exit, a matching exit should be present to go from B -> A.
• …and yes, those exits better have descriptions as well! When you look in a directional exit, you see where it leads.
• Everything is modestly realistic, and has a sense of consistency to its surrounding areas. No million-foot skyscrapers next door to flaming hell-pits.

One of those MUDs, which opened March 11, 1990, was Islandia (Burka). According to Jahangiri’s history, Islandia “allowed around 64 people on at one time and had somewhere around 150,000 objects” (Jahangiri). In the words of Conrad “Lynx” Wong, one of Islandia’s and FM’s builders and admins, Islandia “was intended as a more open, community-themed setting than the adventure-ish themed TinyMUD had been, populated by a wild confusion of people and creatures from all walks of life” (Lynx, interview). But like other MU*, Islandia started losing steam that same year. According to FM co-creator Shaterri, MUDs and MUCKs tended to have short half-lives since users often split their time across multiple MU* and since these MU* frequently suffered reliability issues. The other problem, of course, was that MUDs and MUCKs had to keep pace with a rapidly developing IT ecosystem.

Several [MU*] were probably spun up as experiments/curiosities and faded quickly as the people running them lost interest (or sometimes lost access — most access at the time was through universities.

(Shaterri, interview)

According to a post Lynx sent to the Usenet group rec.games.mud on November 5, 1990, Islandia went down for a few reasons: its large size and growth was outpacing the capabilities of the machine it ran on; it was showing “signs of age” including abandoned locations; and—a problem universal to the age of the internet—it was “experiencing the typical increase of annoying people” (Lynx, “Why Islandia is going down…”).

Furry has long been a sort of “e-tinerant” community, wandering from one digital home to another, and FM was no different—except that it was among the first places furries could even call a community all their own. Wikifur quotes one user from the Usenet group alt.fan.furry, who wrote that she “ended up in furry as a refugee when Islandia sank into the net” (qtd. on Wikifur, “Islandia”). According to Jahangiri’s history, “Drew wanted Furry[MUCK] to be the union of the ‘original’ Furry fandom, who had to deal with communicating via e-mail, snailmail, fanzines, and over the internet, stifling them; and the MUD crowd who understood high-speed role-play” (Jahangiri). Maxwell corroborated this story in response to my interview questions:

Islandia was one of the first MUDs to really take off and have the sort of popularity that meant people were regularly online and accessible, and people quickly found they liked both the social aspect as well as the roleplaying aspects of it. As they enjoyed this, they wanted more, more ideas, more interesting characters, more interesting worlds and environments in which they could have this real-time fantasy play out. […]

At this same time, I was becoming aware of another community, a community for which I did not even realize I was a member. I was a furry; I was someone who thought the idea of animals that stood upright and talked was cool, and wasn’t just for kids. […] These were people with amazing worlds, amazing characters, and incredible stories to tell. What soon became apparent as their greatest complaint was how slow it was to collaborate among themselves; they’d meet up at sci-fi conventions, and hang out in a room together, trading artwork and stories. These meet-ups were few and far between, but progress had been made in using dial-up BBSes to send short messages back and forth and play out some of their story ideas in only minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. They desperately wanted a way to interact with each other in a way that let them play out their stories together.

And here is where I sit, at the crossroads of these two communities, watching one side hungry for stories, and another side craving a faster storytelling and roleplaying experience.

(Maxwell, interview)

While Drew came up with the idea for FM, actually building FurryMUCK is when he realized, “this was not a ‘me’ thing; this had to be a ‘we’ thing” (Maxwell, interview). So he reached out to locals in Pittsburgh who had been on Island, asking if they wanted help build FurryMUCK and make it a place that would reward exploration. “In the end, this resulted in the core crew that were the initial wizards of FurryMUCK. Each one was given an area to work on, and given instructions for interlinking areas so we had very solid continuity and a real sense of you-can-go-anywhere” (Maxwell, Interview).

Some of those Pittsburgh locals—Drew, Shaterri, Centaur, and Ashtoreth—lived in what has become known as the “Furry Home at Squirrel Hill”–like the Prancing Skiltaire, an early furry commune with lots of visitors coming through (Wikifur, “Furry Home at Squirrel Hill”). Fun fact: the house was actually christened “The Furry House O’ Sin”! (Maxwell, interview). The Pittsburgh locale also inspired some of the geography and locations in FM, including “Squirrel Hill” and “Furry Ave”—a play on “Murray Avenue,” which joins Squirrel Hill South and North IRL. Hang a right on US-376 and in minutes you’ll arrive at Anthrocon!

As for the actual FurryMUCK database, this was originally housed at North Carolina State University, but—to get back to the point about furry’s e-tinerancy—the database occasionally had to move because of bandwidth concerns and complaints from university administrators. Not furry university, real university. Shaterri mentioned that, at the time, universities were among the only public places with sufficient computing power and bandwidth to host a MU*, which often ran unnoticed on university servers—until they got too big and started to take up noticeable amounts of bandwidth (Shaterri, interview). In the span of its first few years, FurryMUCK would migrate from its home on a MicroVAX at NCSU (run by Bluemage) to a DECStation at U.C. Irvine (run by Siegfried) to an Omron Luna 88K at Carnegie Mellon (Jahangiri, “1990”).

The physical location of the database wasn’t the only thing that was changing about FurryMUCK; so too its internal architecture was growing, along with that hard-to-define yet powerful thing we call community. According to Jahangiri’s history, the original wizards were brought on board: “Drew, Ashtoreth, Erych, Abigail, Ryuuko, Shaterri, Centaur, and Bluemage”; in addition, “Lynx was also brought in to code the bank and the think program and Tugrik helped do some of the building, although neither was a wizard until later” (Jahangiri, “1990”). Lynx told me that “Islandia and FurryMUCK both drew greatly from Revar’s programming skills, along with many others” (Lynx, interview). Then, according to Maxwell, it was a matter of garnering interest:

FurryMUCK was opened in two stages, a “private” opening to allow people to connect and wander about the world, then a “public” opening to allow people to ask for characters to be made and have the ability to make objects, rooms, and exits. […] [F]olks from Islandia had heard of the evolved MUD called a MUCK (which included things like that ability to write programs internal to the world in a reduced version of Forth) for which my server was one of the initial ones to come out. Word-of-mouth did the rest.

(Maxwell, interview)

II. Sociality and Sexuality

When FurryMUCK was new, there was a greater emphasis on roleplaying as such. Eventually you’d start to see indicators such as IC (in character), OOC (out of character) and RL (real life) (Benedikt and Ciskowski, 68). But roleplaying started to bleed into forms of identification. As Dralen Dragonfox told me, there were those who identified as “personal furries” (“you but as a furry”) vs. “RPers” (those who were always in character) vs. “Lifestylers” who “brought their character into the dreaded IRL” (Dralen, interview). Even from its earliest years, FurryMUCK was doing something that has come to be associated with furry more broadly as movement: giving users a fantastical space to better understand who they are in real life. As Maxwell put it in 1992, two years into the MUCK’s existence:

We have had up to 100 people connect into FurryMUCK to wander about, chat with others, and in general have a blast of a time. The attitude of FurryMUCK is very pro-alternate lifestyles…gay furries, bi furries, lesbian furries, even furries into SM […] they all are accepted easily, and freely. If anything, they are more the majority than the exception!

(Maxwell, “thinking”)

In my interviews with the original wizzes and early users, virtually everyone emphasized the importance of the social aspect of FM. “These were social interactions,” Uncle Kage said. “It wasn’t a game; it wasn’t one of the MUDs –- going in hacking and slashing. People formed genuine social bonds through the avatars they created. That is a very powerful thing. […] It became the community we were not able to find in this actual world of ours.” (Kage, interview)

Part of what galvanized that sense of community was the sense of place—actually being in a world where you could explore, stumble upon new locations, and hit up old haunts.

Some names that came up frequently include the Palace of Dragons, home of the Truth or Dare (T|D) Pools, and of course West Corner of the Park itself. Dralen Dragonfox confirmed for me that the T|D Pools did, indeed, involve playing games of truth or dare (Dralen, interview). Here’s what it was like, according to Benedikt and Ciskowski (81):

Truth or Dare, or TD as the furries say, is a social event. Roleplayers can take their characters to TD and find a dozen excuses to explain their backgrounds. Truth or Dare offers a framework that helps begin and perpetuate interesting discussions, from the philosophical to the risque. When the rating is high, TD provides a sexually-positive atmosphere where adult topics are explores.

It’s also one of the places that gets a shout-out in Matthew Ebel’s “In the MUCK”!

Now I don’t know but I hear it’s true

There’s a high-flyin’ palace with a swimming pool too.

Beware the dares and if it’s your Q be true

Down at the POD.

I said down at the POD.

Lynx told me about Art Ambushes that Blackears ran from Studio de l’Artiste, an artists’ haven that Lynx redubbed after taking over its predecessor, WeaselOak, from Silent_Red. For the Art Ambushes, “people just popped in to do quick sketches, which they usually uploaded somewhere.” Similarly, the Owlhaven operated by K’has “used to have regular short-short story nights for encouraging writers to be creative with very short (<200 words) stories” (Lynx interview). Ch’Marr, the administrator of the online furry art gallery VCL (which stood for “Velan Central Library” back then; now “Vixen Controlled Library”) since ~2000, also told me that there was a lot of cross-pollination between FurryMUCK and VCL (Ch’Marr, interview).

One place that came up more than any other in my conversations was the Purple Nurple, a nightclub open to all but “catering to gay, lesbian, and bisexual furries,” started by Cargo Weasel and Slinky Treecat and passed down to Rigel (Axiom, interview).

At fur cons, people advertise room parties by putting the room number on the poster; on FM, it was common to give stepwise directions to a location—usually beginning from the West Corner of the Park. For some, such as Xydexx Unicorn, the Purple Nurple was a place to hang out in throughout the day, and in some cases to spread important information:

We would have FurryMUCK running in the background in a Telnet window and chat with each other throughout the work day. I remember when 9/11 happened, many of us used FurryMUCK as a way to share information because the major news websites wouldn’t load due to the spike in web traffic.

(Xydexx, interview)

The Purple Nurple underscores a key point about FM’s history: that for many users, FM was the first place where they could explore gay and queer sexuality. Some came to FM from other gay-friendly MU*, such as LambdaMOO (Axiom, interview), and what really made FM special was that it gave users a chance to explore their sexual identities; in Axiom’s memorable words, it gave users “PERMISSION to FANTASIZE” (axiom, interview). Part of what made “TinySex”–-basically, the OG sexual chat roleplaying–-so powerful was precisely that it wasn’t burdened by the risks and anxieties of being physically present with someone else. Much of the normie shade thrown at FM in the 90s revolved around the suspicion that TinySex could never be real despite what its users said. For instance, “Johnny Manhattan Meets the FurryMUCKers,” an article rather canonized in the furry media coverage timeline, is generally TinySex-positive but nonetheless a) involves the writer asking suspicious questions like “Isn’t virtual sex kind of empty?” while b) making it seem like sex was the entire point of FM rather than one aspect (Quittner, internet).

Which is not to suggest that TinySex was without risk or conflict. “It is important to remember that sexual harassment can still occur online,” Benedikt wrote in a popular 1995 article, “TinySEX is Safe Sex.” But Benedikt’s key point is that TinySex gave you the power to alter or leave a bad situation: “If someone types “pushes you against the wall” I can respond with “and she transforms into a butterfly and flits away” or I can log out” (Benedikt, “TinySEX”). And as Uncle Kage described to me, this is part of what made FM, for many, “a safe space before safe spaces existed”:

Why would gay people be drawn to [FurryMUCK]? Is it because furries are gay? Gays are furry? No. This was a period in American history where a young person, upon realizing they were gay, was faced with the necessity of a life of absolute loneliness. You could NOT express yourself. You could NOT look for companionship. You’d risk getting beaten to death or risk getting an incurable infectious disease, and there was an equal chance of those versus actually finding a partner. Here we had a means by which you could have an idealized partner mentally materialize in the privacy of your home. That was a very very powerful attractant for people who felt desperate for companionship, and were agonizingly aware that they could never find it in real life.

(Kage, interview)

It all comes back to the maps that opened this article: “What was missing, what FM provided, was space” (Axiom, interview). Virtual space made queer exploration possible in a way it never had been before, and it’s no exaggeration to say that FurryMUCK was one of the founding virtual spaces where such exploration could happen. Other furry spaces–-most famously TapestriesMUCK or “Taps”, which debuted in October 1991 (don’t worry, I’ll write a whole article on Taps eventually!)–followed, but FM was “the granddaddy of all anthropomorphic furry” MU*s (Benedikt and Ciskowski, 219).

III. History Within FM

I mentioned earlier that finding a stable place to host FurryMUCK was perhaps the biggest challenge that FM faced in the real world. “Most our moves were involuntary and fairly short-notice,” Shaterri told me, “so there was always a little bit of a scramble; administrators would save databases as they could but there was definitely at least one occasion and I want to say a few where e.g. a week’s worth or so of building would get lost just because we had no way of getting the most recent saved database.” When Shaterri left CMU, FurryMUCK apparently ran “undisturbed on this machine sitting effectively forgotten in a broom closet somewhere” (Shaterri, interview)!

But as FM got up and running, it faced further challenges on the inside. One big problem was server limits. Only 63 players were allowed online at first, and FM quickly hit the limit (plus the aforementioned conflict with university IT folks). Another commonly-reported issue was lag, which spawned a fun new term:

[T]he poor server was slow as heck, often lagging so badly a conversation might as well have been a post on a BBS, for the 30 minutes it might take to get a response. Hence the “lag sandwich”: you could go make a sandwich between posts!

(Axiom, interview)

And, of course, there were issues with players. FM set up social rules early on, but that didn’t stop folks from trolling. Shaterri recalled one person who “wrote a script to create links from themselves to every database object on the MUCK,” causing the object count to spike. “It wasn’t a violation of any specific rules, but it was sufficiently egregious that we wound up banning the player in question” (Shaterri, Interview). A 1996 article called “Furry MUCKity-Muck” recounts the story of Vulpine, a furry who was banned from FM for lying about being 18+. What made this such a big deal was that in 1996 Bill Clinton signed into law the Communications Decency Act. Before being stripped of its most extreme provisions a year later, this early effort to regulate porn gave the Department of Justice broad (and ill-defined) authority to prosecute anyone who made sexually explicit content available to minors. FM responded by requiring users to report their age to the wizzes and gave some room-creators the power to exclude minors. When Vulpine was caught, he submitted an affidavit defending his actions. An alt.fan.furry thread from March 23, 1996, “Vulpine’s ACLU affidavit,” documents the debate between those who defended the wizzes’ decision to ban Vulpine and those (Vulpine included) who thought the wizzes were caving to the unfair law (“Vulpine’s ACLU affidavit”).

FurryMUCK had to make numerous difficult and controversial decisions through the years, but it successfully navigated the early internet and became part of early internet history. But it turns out that FM was making history in another way—inside its own virtual walls.

If you go onto the Bandstand, in the middle of the park, you can investigate a plaque that reads “The Park, designed and built by Ashtoreth, 8/90.” Memorials, plaques, and familiar names can be found around FurryMUCK. As Jahangiri notes, “Each street was named for famous furries. Cougar Boulevard for Ken Cougar, Sable Street for Sy Sable, and Fox Terrace, which was originally Celon Terrace, for Celon DeLosi.” (Jahangiri). There is also a very special memorial place you can go:

The Gardens of Remembrance contain dozens of memorials to furries who have passed. Funerals and wakes were sometimes held. One prudent furry recorded a log of the wake held for FM regular Mavra (capturing session logs was not uncommon), where almost 40 people showed up and several made speeches and everyone shared memories. When I asked what the FurryMUCK community was like, Uncle Kage answered with this story:

I can remember the first death on furryMUCK. A character named Shala. When you ask, was this a community, yes it was. When word got around, –- I don’t recall the cause of death –- it hit everybody really hard. There was a funeral online, on furryMUCK. Buried the character. There were others that followed (Del-thyuss), shiny snow-leopard, killed in a traffic accident in the mid-90s. It was a few days after my birthday. Last message I had from Del-thyuss was a happy birthday message. The community felt these because it was a small community back then.

(Kage, interview)

When FurryMUCK was new, furry itself was new, and FM brought to this blossoming fandom a kind of connection and intimacy it had never seen before. I think Axiom puts it beautifully:

For those of use who never got into the billion-polygon graphics, the virtual realities that never really look ‘right,’ who can swim in text and love its freedom…well. It’s like a drug, that freedom, that ability to be someone else, something else. And the fur (or feathers or scales or whatever) is to me at least a shared fiction, a metaphor, that dives right to the heart of intimacy/sex/otherness that perhaps ironically leads to a flowering of a sense of IDENTITY. The Fursona.

(Axiom, interview)

Thanks & Works Cited

While I authored this piece, I am far from its only writer. I benefited from the written and spoken reflections and memories of many FM creators and early users. A huge thank you to Drew, Shaterri, and Lynx, for answering my questions about the development of FM; and thank you also to the vigilant-of-memory early FM users who spoke with me: Axiom Fox, Ch’marr, Coyote Traveler, Dralen Dragonfox, Uncle Kage, Raphitex, Siege, Xydexx Unicorn, and several others. Thank you to Tremaine, Quill, and the ConFurence Archive for permission to use artistic works. This was truly a community-written piece!

Axiom Fox. Personal interview (Telegram). 14 April 2023.

Benedikt, Claire. “TinySEX is Safe Sex.” Infobahn Magazine: the Magazine of Internet Culture. June 1995. <link>

Benedikt, Claire and Dave Ciskowski. MUDs: Exploring Virtual Worlds on the Internet. Brady Games. 1995.

Burka, Lauren. The Mudline (The MUD Timeline). 1995. <link>

Ch’marr. Personal interview (Telegram). 13 April 2023.

Dralen Dragonfox. Personal interview (Telegram). 9 April 2023.

“FurryMUCK SM Home Page.” 8 October 2016. <link>

Maxwell, Drew. Personal interview (email). 22 April 2023.

—–. Post to “thinking about this de-muffining” thread. Soc.bi (Usenet group). 20 March 1992. <link>

Patten, Fred. “Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of the Furry Fandom, 1966-1996.” Flayrah. illustrated chronology. <link>

Uncle Kage. Personal interview (Discord). 13 April 2023.

“Vulpine’s ACLU affidavit.” alt.fan.furry (Usenet group). <link>

Siege. Personal interview (Telegram). 15 April 2023.

Smith, Tina (“Jahangiri”). “The History of FurryMUCK.” <link>

Stadnicki, Steve (“Shaterri”). Personal interview (Discord). 19 March 2023.

Wong, Conrad (“Lynx”). Personal interview (email). 10 April 2023.

—–. “Why Islandia is Going Down…” rec.games.mud (Usenet group). 5 November 1990. <link>

Xydexx Unicorn. Personal interview (Telegram). 9 April 2023.