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4:08pm on Friday, 17th February, 2017:

Bangor Spectacular

Anecdote

Old log files of MUD1 games are surprisingly rare, so I was pleased to be presented with several today from the instantiation that ran on the mainframe of what is now Bangor University. One set in particular stood out, dating from December 1984: they cover an event known as a spectacular (pronounced "spec-TACK-er-ler"), which is a winner-takes-all, fight-t0-the-permadeath, player-versus-player event that MUDs would occasionally run.

Logs are here, pretty well raw (in that local echo is on, so you see commands twice and some of them interrupt incoming text). Note that although Roy the archwizard is playing, that wasn't the original Roy: arch-wiz names were hard-wired into the code, so anyone wanting to run a MUD1 would either have to edit the code and recompile it (which required a BCPL compiler) or use an existing arch-wiz name (usually Roy).

The reason these files have survived, by the way, is because the person who graciously sent me them, Amanda (real name Rob), never ever deletes old files. That includes files on BBC model B discs.




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Copyright © 2017 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).