Although the origins of the great game of Mornington Crescent are well understood, its history as an online pursuit is more obscure. The main thing that got in the way of international and intercontinental (if not incontinent) play was waiting for the invention of the World Wide Web itself. When this launched itself onto an unsuspecting public in 1993, the most common response was that this was "a solution looking for a problem," except for those in a small island community who had been grappling with the farkle paradox and had to wait a minimum of eight days for each of their proposed resolutions to reach their local IMCS office to learn of their inevitable rejection. They realised immediately the potential that a global network of communication devices could offer to make headway with such an urgent unsolved problem. The search began for someone who had both the knowhow and access to the required hardware to develop the infrastructure to support this grand endeavour. It turned out there was just one qualified candidate, that being a postgraduate research physicist at York University, UK, called Rob. It is thus often said that the World Wide Web is the second most important spin-off from physics research.
Most will remember Rob's server simply as York, and will have a fondness for its simple, text-heavy and feature-light design which facilitated fast rapid-fire play. This alone is responsible for solutions being found to nine of the Ten Most Vexing Problems in Contemporary MC. However, it created many new problems of its own, most notoriously under the guise of Bad HTML games, with dispute as to whether these constitute gross indecency or performance art continuing to this day. Such was Rob's talent that he solved the whole of physics, resulting in graduation, the closure of York, and the server being looked after by jim until close to the end of the last millennium, whereupon a mysterious Y2K bug sent both code and data into outer space.
Alongside York ran a competitor server called Delphi, hosted by Yoz. Your historian knows nothing about this, although other chroniclers seem better informed. Most likely your narrator of indeterminate reliability could never get the darned thing to load. A successor to Delphi, Pants MC, hosted by the titular Mr Wild Pants, is also something of a mystery.
The period where most of the world was arguing about how many ls and ns there are in the word "millennium" spawned what is now regarded as the heyday of online Crescenteering. It is unclear exactly what led to a profusion of new servers, but the most boring (and therefore quite likely) explanation is that web hosting with CGI scripting enabled became available to those who didn't own a telcoms business. The two behemoths of this era are Mornington Crescent in Outer Space (MCiOS) and Orange MC, created by titans Dan and Dunx, less respectively and more interchangeably than either would have liked.
MCiOS is the longest-running extant (-ish, more of which anon) server, an sort-of-homage to York with possibly Delphish influences, but importantly so well-crafted it provided a stable and fluid experience over its nearly 27 continuous years of uptime. A trawl through its archives will reveal how the game followed the fashions and trends of the times, its cool swagger reflecting very much that of its honourable custodian. For his services to the community, Dan has been awarded the freedom to drive sheep through Camden Lock, although it remains yet to be exercised.
Whereas other servers may have felt like they were tied together by post-office twine and paper adhesive that long lost its stick, Orange MC was a monument to the kind of over-engineering upon which global empires were built (unfashionable as it may be to say so in these more enlightened times - think of this parenthetical remark as your contextual plaque). With more options than the by-election for the disgraced former IMCS General Secretary following the incident in Mudchute, Orange MC was the ultimate in customisable experiences (as long as that customisation included the colour orange somewhere). Dunx is also renowned for what detractors have dubbed "prankster capitalism," annually dumping dozens of games into an otherwise tightly regulated market, and sitting back while the mayhem unfurled, if that's what mayhems do.
Even these antics proved too staid for some, and the world was graced with indy-punk alternatives, Beer Powered Mornington Crescent Frenzy and Yet Another Mornington Crescent Server, courtesy of Rich and Huxley, respectively. Although your historian is very much in favour of beer, he was never sober at the same time that BPMCF experienced one of its brief moments of lucidity. Similar, albeit distinct legal restrictions prevent any further discussion of YAMCS.
Against this backdrop, there really was no reason for this site, briefly called More Crescent, and then, more simply, mc5, to exist. However, your historian also happens to be its host, rab, so in principle ought to be able to offer an explanation. The reason is almost the dullest imaginable, which is that rab likes to keep his coding skills reasonably up to date, and wanted to get to grips with PHP and MariaDB (previously MySQL), which were the cool-ish kids on the block at the time. A Crescent Server seemed like a nice little laboratory project for this purpose, and then it escaped onto the wilds of the internet. Innovation is not really rab's thing, but he did aim to offer the smoothest playing experience, with as much taken care of behind the scenes as possible. In practice, this resulted in the notorious HTML rewriter, whose sole mission was to banish Bad HTML to the outer reaches of the universe, not giving a damn who or what got hurt in the way, or how. It is now mostly forgiven that a cluster of minor diplomatic incidents resulted from a single unclosed <b> tag in the Furcation Game (although the many unsavoury consequences of the furcations themselves still leave their scars).
And now, like a seaside town in a country that thinks sunshine is over-rated, we find ourselves in a period of faded grandeur. BPMCF lurched erratically from pillar to post before falling tragically from a cliff. Pants fell down in mysterious, and for the avoidance of doubt, non-hilarious circumstances. YAMCS experienced a nominative determinate redundancy. Then Orange MC was raided by a gang of youths, covering it in graffiti before a discarded herbal cigarette set the place on fire. MCiOS and mc5 staggered on, only to be thwarted by that darkest of forces, a piece of legislation officially authored by the UK Government but one suspects a covert op by a militant wing of IMCS. And so it is that these sites have closed, although the Crescent flame still burns at a place called, appropriately enough given the game's chequered and often fractious past, Discord. In keeping with rab's efforts to keep down with the kids, this archive has been migrated to a Python-driven Flask app, using SQLite as its backend, and responsive mobile goodness provided by tailwindcss.
Contact information - If you need to contact the admin for any reason, for example, to correct inaccuracies in the above, you can email them by noting their name is rab and they live at the same domain that this site is hosted.