Wishbone: Ah, the good old days, where you painstakingly mapped out entire worlds on pieces of checkered paper, taping them together when you reached the edges. It may have been awkward, but you got a real sense of accomplishment and felt like a true explorer, as you watched your map grow :-)
JudasIscariot: I have played games without making maps. I just relied on my memory to get me through. I think playing those old dungeon crawlers with no map is what gave me the somewhat good memory I have today hehe.
Try doing that in a game like Planetfall, where you get progressively more hungry and thirsty, there is only one food/drink dispenser and you can carry only one meal and one drink. You really needed your map in that game.
But yes, I used to play the Valheru MUD, and never tried to map it. I had huge chunks of that world committed to memory. As well as paths from one place to another. Anyone else remember typing, at a furious speed, stuff like "s,w,n,n,e,e,e,e,e,e,e,e,s,e,s,e,e,n,e,n,e,e,e"? That is, as far as I can recall, the path from inside the lumberjack's cabin in Haon-Dor Forest, to just inside the Midgaard city gates :-D