Insomnia MUD started out of Coventry University in the UK in 1993, based on Nightmare 3 and MudOS. Originally conceived as a game that didn't take itself too seriously, by refugees from another popular UK University based MUD, Insomnia became quite popular by the mid 90's with commonly concurrent player numbers of around 100 and a player based of over 6000 active accounts. With an ironic sense of humour, some rather fruity language, and monty-python esque approach to how serious the whole game was setup, it developed quite a unique culture. Always being "developed on the fly" it wasn't always the most stable, yet by the 1996 had 9 active classes, multi-classes, castling across more than 10,000 unique rooms. In 2012 Insomnia shut down for good, having lost any sensible place to host itself and the code was lost through a combination of hard-drive crash, accidental deletion, divorce and equipment being thrown out of windows.

In 2023, the original developers, Vx & Mork managed to boot a copy of FluffOS on AWS, find a copy of vanilla Nightmare 3.3.1 and with a half a dozen files and a good memory, start recreating the original game.