Pretty much the same story for me, even down to CircleMUD :). I created a widely used MCCP (zlib compression for telnet streams) patch for it and also added lua

Pretty much the same story for me, even down to CircleMUD :). I created a widely used MCCP (zlib compression for telnet streams) patch for it and also added lua scripting support. I was better at C programming than most of my university professors after spending countless hours coding MUDs! And it grew my love for programming. Of course many hours wasted playing them too.