Silent In-game Concerts: Text-Based Musical Performances inMUDs

In 2020, popular rapper Travis Scott's Fortnite in-game concert attracted (according to data provided by Epic Games) 12 million simultaneous players, gathering widespread attention from both gaming and music specialized media as well as fans (Brown, 2020).As this event happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time in which online forms of sociability were being put in the spotlight, there was a perception that music concerts placed inside gaming worlds were a brand-new development.This paper intends to argue that in-game concerts are a frequent and spontaneous form of musical self-expression from gamers, and that their origin can be traced to the first online gaming experiences: MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons).This affirmation is based on literature review and data collected by the author between 2023 and 2024 through semi-structured interviews conducted over Discord with one former gamer of MUDs (Druidsfire, she/her, USA) and one game developer (Axxa, he/him, Finland) of BatMUD (Balance Alternative Techniques, 1990); as well as e-mail correspondence with Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD1 (Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, 1978); and BatMUD's gaming records dating from 2001 provided by Axxa.