In 1989, a freshman in college, I was introduced to the world of TinyMUDs. The creator, Jim Aspnes, was at Carnegie-Mellon at the time; he whipped up a server codebase basically from scratch over a weekend, and spun it up on his desktop NeXTstation. Before he knew it, there were up to 64 concurrent players and the thing was eating all his physical RAM space.

His famous quote was: "It was a weekend hack that got out of hand!" and with hindsight, that motto ruled the lives of many MUD hackers. Whether or not we stayed in college, for better or worse, we took on coding projects as weekend hacks, and they took over our lives!