From "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud…", first printed in Micro Adventurer, Sept 1984
https://mud.co.uk/richard/masep84.htm
>ONE OF the features of MUD is that if you type LOG at it, it copies all output to a file so you can peruse it later at your leisure. Hours of endless amusement can be had by looking at other people's LOG files which they have left lying around.
>Consider the plight of two of our very first externals, who played from the USA back in 1980. One of them had been in before, but his friend hadn't, and fortunatdy for us thought you had to LOG into the game to play. This meant all his activities were recorded for posterity, unbeknown to him.
>Also in the game was Niatram, one of the system operators (who can't spell his name backwards). He decided to loom up on this second character, follow him around a bit, then kill him. This he repeated several times, gaining plenty of points in the process. Finally, the newcomer was at his wits' end.
>"Who's this Niatram character?" he asked his friend. "He keeps following me around and killing me!". "Yes, he's done that to me before", came the reply, "I think he may be dungeon generated!" At this point Niatram appeared, and out of despair his victim quit, rather than be killed yet again by this "artificial person". Truly, a milestone of gamer history. Also
>And, of course, you WILL be able to play on your micro, although not the same way as you do at present. In the current arrangement, you buy (a likely story!) your cassette and run the software on your own machine; when MUD goes commercial you won't be able to get a copy anywhere in the shops. What you will be able to get is some sort of package explaining to you all you ever wanted to know about the game, and access details on how to contact the host computer over some network. You follow these instructions and there you are, in a game with 100 other people, who are also sitting at home playing on the mainframe via their own micros. The only cost is that for the network (telephone, cable or whatever) and around a pound an hour peak times for the game itself. Wow, playing a game with a hundred other people, over the telephone, from the comfort of your own home! Can you even imagine?