Logging in
GateWay is free to play, and like most MUDs, was designed to be accessed over telnet. When MUDs were first created, telnet was a widely used protocol for connecting to remote servers over the internet, but it’s not used for much these days, mostly because it has no encryption.
Thus, you should always assume that anything you send to or receive from a MUD can be seen by someone else and act accordingly. Don’t send sensitive information, and for the love of whatever you hold dear, do not re-use a password that you use anywhere else.
GateWay is hosted on gatewaymud.org on port 6969. You can connect to it in the following ways:
Use a dedicated MUD client
The best way to play GateWay is to use a dedicated MUD client. You’ll get proper colour support, command history that’s easy to use, and usually some keybinding, scripting, and mapping functions that can make it easier to play.
See the link above for a more comprehensive list, but Mudlet looks like a good option since it’s still actively maintained (unlike a lot of MUD clients), it’s free, and it works on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
If you’re using Linux and you want a good command line client, TinyFugue is still a good choice
(apt install tf if you’re using a Debian/Ubuntu based distribution). If you have never used
TinyFugue before, look on our client page for some useful tips.
Whatever client you use, you will need to provide the hostname gatewaymud.org and the port 6969 in order to connect.
Connect using your web browser
If installing a dedicated client isn’t an option, you can connect using your web browser
with this
embedded client provided by mudportal.com:
It won’t be as nice as a dedicated client, but for a browser-based client it’s pretty good.
Old school telnet client
If you’re feeling especially retro, you can log in by using straight up telnet. On a Unix-like system (such as Linux or MacOS), you would open a terminal window and issue the command like this:
$ telnet gatewaymud.org 6969
It’s possible that telnet isn’t installed on your system. If that’s the case you may as well go ahead and install a dedicated MUD client - the experience will almost certainly be better.
Windows does still ship with a telnet client, but it isn’t enabled by default and isn’t really worth the bother.