No paywall
Free since 2004, free forever
NarutoMUD has never charged to play and never will. No subscriptions, no premium tiers, no battle pass. The cost of running a small MUD is small. The cost of charging for one would be its soul.
about
An old MUD that still gets
patched on weeknights.
A free, text-based ninja RPG, continuously developed since December 1, 2004. Built by the same handful of people who started it; still running on a small droplet in NYC.
the story
How a 2004 side project kept getting committed to.
NarutoMUD opened to players on December 1, 2004. It was founded by Nicholas Jaross (Gatz in-game) as one of the first Naruto-themed MUDs anywhere. The codebase descends from SMAUG, a 1990s-era SMAUG/Merc/DikuMUD lineage that a generation of MUD authors hand-modified into their own games; ours has been hand-modified for twenty-two years.
Plenty of anime-themed MUDs spun up alongside us in the mid-2000s. Most of them are gone. The ones that remain are the ones whose maintainers kept showing up. We're one of those. Areas got built, jutsu got tuned, rare bugs got chased on weeknights between day jobs.
The game runs on a single droplet in New York. It has been continuously developed since the first build, by a small group of contributors who rotate in and out as life allows. The current version of the code traces back, line for line, to the C source compiled on a Linux box in 2004.
the team
A small staff. Long tenures.
NarutoMUD has been run by a handful of immortals across its life. Some have moved on; some are still here. The list below is the full roll, past and present, of people the project owes.
- Daizaburo
- Heizo
- Hikaru
- Hitoshi
- Kibachi
- Komatsu
- Nakamura
- Ponnampi
- Raos
- Seigen
- Taille
- Takeru
- Tiak
- Zetsuke
Players carry the rest of it. Coordinating raids on the Discord, mentoring Genin through their first chakra-mold, filing bug reports the staff actually reads. The line between "staff" and "regular" is thinner than on most games; that's by design.
why we do this
Not-for-profit, community-run, free forever.
No salary
Just enough to cover the droplet
The shop exists. Donations exist. They cover server costs. Nobody on the staff takes a salary. The droplet doesn't pay for itself, and that's about as commercial as we get.
Original lore
Cosmos Country, Hidden Time
We're inspired by the anime, but the world is ours. Cosmos Country, the Uchuukage, the Hidden Village of Time, the six origin villages and their borderlands; all built area by area, jutsu by jutsu, over twenty-two years of contributors adding to the same map.
the codebase
By the numbers.
Receipts pulled from the live tree. The same figures power the home stats card; this is where they came from.
243,728lines of C in src/, accumulated since the first build
1,869changelog entries written since 2004
50areas in the world, hand-built
15distinct contributors, across the years
291commits to main so far this year
Dec 1, 2004the day NarutoMUD opened. do the math.
get involved
Three doors in.
Play
The fastest way to understand NarutoMUD is to spend twenty minutes in it. The browser client needs no install and no signup.
Start
If you've never played a MUD, the new player guide walks you through movement, looking, talking, and your first jutsu.
Discord
Most of the off-server conversation happens on Discord. Raid coordination, screenshots, the staff answering questions in real time.