The Glad codebase was written by Richard Woolcock (aka KaVir), but it takes inspiration from many different sources. In April 2000 Erwin Andreasen held the 16K mud competition (http://www.andreasen.org/16k.shtml), which finally encouraged me to write my own codebase. My entry was called Gladiator Pits, a bare-bones mud in which players could challenge each other to automated bouts of combat. The primary inspiration for Gladiator Pits came from Dan Elrod's play-by-email game "Wardawgs", in which each player controlled a small team of gladiators who could be trained in various weapons and fighting styles. When I decided to turn Gladiator Pits into a proper codebase, my first objective was to redesign the combat to make it more interesting and enjoyable. For this I drew inspiration from yet another play-by-email game, Firetop Mountain (http://www.gamerz.net/~fm/). The other features were added after much play testing with Matthew Chaplain (Kastagaar), Chris Clutton (Rotain), Steve Read (Shimian) and several others. I also received feedback from a handful of people who had taken an interest in my 16K competition entry. I decided that the codebase needed a more compact name, so I called it "Glad". It is assumed that Gladiator Pits was Glad 1.0, with the various minor revisions I made to it being Glad 1.1, 1.2, etc. Thus this major rewrite is called Glad 2.0.