The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at University of Wales, Aberystwyth for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987.
[1][2] The gameplay was heavily influenced by MUD1, created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex, which Alan Cox had played.
[3] In late 1988, AberMUD was ported to C by Alan Cox so it could run on Unix at Southampton University's Maths machines.
In January 1989 Michael Lawrie sent a licensed copy of AberMUD3 to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner, both American Essex MIST players.
[7] AberMUD3 was renamed AberMUD II by Rich Salz in February 1989 after he cleaned up the source code and ported it to UNIX.