Rivers of MUD was a Diku and Merc based multiuser dungeon.

After far-too-many-years, ROM vanished on 2006-04-01 at 1 second after midnight PST.

That is a good thing: like wine, things spoil after a time. Some might even say that it had gone on too long: that the code had been neglected for years; that the days of text-based MUDs are ending and it's just not the same game when there are only a handful of players around; that bickering and creating drama was becoming the real game that people were playing.

This is why the smarter TV shows end their runs at their peak; why smarter movies and games stop making sequels long before people learn to hate the franchise; and why the demise of ROM was long overdue.

Yes, there were lots of good things in ROM. A few of them may have managed to survive until the last second. But the direction was downwards: remember it for what it once was, not what it was well on it way to becoming.

Download the most recent public release of ROM source code.