Alhazi Invasion (often just "Alhazi" or AI) was a Diku-derived hack and slash MUD. Loosely based on medieval fantasy, it offered an extended character class system with sub classes, 80 mortal levels, player killing, and a clan system with clan halls and clan-owned areas, among other features. The game world contained over 10000 rooms in over 100 areas of varying quality. The player base was mostly Singaporean and North American. The highest player peak ever experienced was probably about 40–45 characters online simultaneously, but usually there were considerably less people around. It has recently been restarted, see external links.
Alhazi Invasion was largely a game for "power mudders", the main goal being to become as powerful as possible, equipment and statistics wise. Player killing was a considerable part of the game. It was relatively common to repeatedly hunt down certain players in order to get them leave a particular clan or just because you didn't like them. Powerful transportation spells made killing easy for high-level spellcasters, since they were able to teleport to their victims quickly with the spells. The player killing in Alhazi, however, was "soft" in that the victims didn't usually leave a lootable corpse when killed by a player: they just temporarily lost their hit, mana, move etc. points and were transferred to their home position (usually a clan hall or a safe room in one of the cities). The game also provided a couple of special "newbie" clans for low-level characters that basically protected them from being assaulted by the higher level player killers.
History
Alhazi Invasion was opened in December 1998 as a successor to or a descendant of another MUD called The Realm of Myrradel. Myrradel was (and is) a U.S. based game running the UltraEnvy derivative of the popular Merc branch of DikuMUDs. It was probably heavily inspired by Dark Castle MUD, once a pretty popular Diku.
In December 1998, Myrradel had just been closed (it was reopened a few months later), and at that time Alhazi was largely just Myrradel renamed with some additions and modifications. At first it was running on dryn.kharduin.net for a few months. A majority of the gods of the game were North American at that time. Later in 1999, the game switched sites for 2–3 times, finally settling at mudhost.com, port 6000 (where it was hosted pretty much for the rest of its existence). This era spanning from the latter part of 1999 to the first few months of 2001, when the game was under the control of the head implementor "Katala", was perhaps what many former Alhazi players would consider the "best days" of Alhazi.
In August 2001, Alhazi was shut down. There was an attempt to merge it with Myrradel, but eventually it didn't quite succeed. A few months later the game was brought online again. It was under development, and the staff was now mostly Singaporean. The game was officially reopened in September 2002. Various changes had been made and new features and areas added. There were also some attempts to bring some roleplaying elements to the game. During the year 2003, the interest in the game, however, largely waned, and Alhazi was eventually closed in February 2004.
External links
- The unofficial Alhazi Invasion page
- Alhazi Invasion, has been added to Kallindor.org mud, kallindor.com port 5800