Slashdot Mirror
Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era
harrymcc writes "Long before the Web came along, people were playing online games — on BBSes, on services such as Prodigy and CompuServe, and elsewhere. Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a dozen RPGs, MUDs, and other fascinating curiosities from the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s — and the cool part is: they're all playable on the Web today."
What old games were good enough for you to watch them scroll by on your 300 baud modem?
If I could get the hours lost back from Barren Realms Elite, I'd be young again. It was just an evolution of a game called Hamurabi for the IBM Model 5150 I learned to write machine code, Basic and APL on, but the addition of online opponents and leagues made it cool. We also had a Star Trek game, and football with random-generated game events and leagues and computer generated text play-by-play.
And then there was LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars, and the other door games.
Ah, old times. Kids these days think games began with Quake.
/onion, belt, off my lawn and so on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It was probably more during the 9600 baud days than 300 baud, but oh how I remember staying up at night just to take advantage of the next day's activity in Legend of the Red Dragon. I don't remember altogether HOW they game was played (I'm kind of thinking it was EAMON except online) but the player vs player activities really meant that you had to watch out for the other guy about to jump you.
My BBS multi-player game of choice was Galactic Empire, consumer of many lines on Major BBS systems. Open Source today. I have Telix scripts for that game somewhere... what we would today call an aimbot. :)
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Heh, I remember getting into MUSH's and MUD's back when 2400 bps was a good speed. Spent more time on those games then a full time job. Folks said I had no life, but they were wrong. I had a lot of them. So what if they were all virtual? These days I can't spend as much time on them, but I still play a few MU*s. To me it's like reading a book rather then seeing a movie. I don't need some one to show flashy graphics. My mind can fill that in on it's own from a bit of text. Heh, I feel like I should be making a comment about how we had to use raw telnet, up hill, both ways, and we liked it. Heh. Gods, I'm getting old... And get off my lawn...
Question reality.
I remember spending hours on Barren Realms Elite, Lord and my favorite, MajorMud. It's sad that I use to be able to memorize a 200 direction path to get somewhere based on N,E,S,W...
I ran a BBS in the Chicago area in the 90's called "Throwing Copper", and Legend Of The Red Dragon was my addiction. Sometimes I think I set up that BBS just so I could play it without dialing in. This brings me back, The Whammy Bar, Disallusioned Society, and a bunch that are on the tip of my tongue.
Someone should make a gritty reboot of LORD. I'd play it.
My whole purpose for digging through the libraries computers was to play on MUDS. I found little tricks, jump boxes and a hord of other little things to get through my playtime. The librarians were quite familiar with me and didn't bother me much because I would hide my session and free the terminal if too many were in use. This meant I could hord as much time as I wanted because I was using only spare cycles. Eventually I did get my own PC and it didn't take too long to destroy, rebuild, destroy, and rebuild again.
A lovely byproduct of the era is the fqdn is burned into my mind and I will probably never forget it. While I no longer remember the list I kept there was a time when I memorized every open gopher server I could find. This would essentially allow me to jump from host to host to hide my origin or employ the use of multiple accounts. Good times!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The civilization of yesteryear. Oh nukes, how do I love thee ;-)
... I lost so much time to that game...
playing across the Internet between colleges of London University
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Hmm...
/dev/null/network.
First off, since when is Nethack "forgotten"? Most people I know who still play it, do so on a centralized server like alt.org (mentioned in the article). There are even annual tournaments over at
Also, where is the MUD/MMORPG GemStone? (Gemstone II came out in 1988, though Gemstone III gained big popularity in the mid 90's.) Gemstone II predates The Realm, mentioned in the article as "one of the Internet's first MMORPG's", by nearly a decade.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
or they will be "lost" again: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/10/02/013231
Table-ized A.I.
Then the Academy Awards would be held and if your movie did or was cast well, you could win an Oscar and make more money (and then the whole game started over with you being able to hire better actors, spend more money, etc). A bit different than the usual fare.
Honestly, I (and 99.999999999% of the population) completely forgot about that game until I read this article.
Chris
P.S. Was also a big Galactic Empire fan too!
Since Furcadia came out the same year as The Realm, maybe it qualifies. On the other hand, it's still quite popular, so it might not count as a "lost" or "forgotten" game.
I still wish to see a remake of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. The scripted missions were great, more varied and more involving than any other space/flight sim I've come across. One really got a feel for different ships, such as the clunkyness of a Y-Wing compared to a TIE-Interceptor or A-Wing.
The problem was that the internet wasn't fast enough. Even with direct dial-up, lag was bad. Basically the game came out a a couple of years too early.
I think an XvT2 would actually do quite alright now. With broadband there'd be very little lag, and with modern computers battles could be truly huge.
What I'd like to see is something like XvT, but where some players can control capital ships (several players serving different roles on a ship) and a few players even serving as admirals. Flight groups could be populated by a mix of players and NPCs. Anyone interested in making something like that?
Anyway, I miss XvT. But I don't think it will run on modern platforms.
Best game from the bbs era.
Sadly the author (Amit Patel) didn't have a second backup of his data. So when he went to get it from backup and the floppy wouldn't read, it was all over but the crying. Never remade since the last version in 1994.
Though he did have Barren Realms Elite too. Good but not as good.
The Realm is from the mid 90s and still going.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I seriously spent a good 2 years and 5-10 hours a day depending on whether I was on vacation or not on those servers.
I'd love nothing more than an MMO with Mechs.
Unless you have the game name in your handle :)
Judging by the lack of any other response citing this game, it may have been more of a local thing but I do recall at least 2 or 3 BBSes that had this in my area... Of course, I was 8-10 years old so this was right up my alley. No matter what you decided, you always ended up killing Barney somehow. I guess I'm not totally legit either, we had a 2400 baud modem -- way too high tech, I'm sure, by many of your standards.
Even though the web of today offers so much more I still sometimes miss the times of BBSes.. My old Laser Turbo XT was great "online" with its CGA color screen,st-225 HD, and 2400bps Hayes modem. Beautiful 80x24 ANSI art..
I used to play Falcons Eye, Planets TEOS, and BRE.. I never really got in to LoRD.
I forget which game it was but one of them used to reset your turns at 12am so it was a rush at midnight to be the 1st one in on the single line BBS to get a jump on everyone else. One of them (I think BRE?) used to pit BBS vs BBS. The game would dial the other systems at night to sync up all the moves and data.
I have to return some videotapes...
This should have been called "Extremely Popular Games from 1996, and some general archetypes I heard about from people that played them for real."
Meridian 59 had thousands of subs initially, as did the Realm (once it got outa beta) these subs were mostly short lived because the companies that were running these games did a horrible job initially. So much so you could say their history is like a "DO not do this" playbook.
In fact, the realm is a huge shame because Sierra had just gotten a chunk of change from their sale of THE SIERRA NETWORK (AKA The Imagination Network) to AT&T.
AT&T took what could have been a marginally profitable service, with thousands of users connected online playing games, and dismantled the service following strict supply side economics. Some games as diverse as card games like Hearts (very popular) to MMORPGs (before they had a name) like The Shadow of Yserbius (very Eye of the Beholder meets multiplayer Wizardry) and laggy as crap action games such as Red Baron all saw great success leading up to AT&T's slow murder of the service.
AT&T first took away all availability of "Unlimited" access plans. Since INN relied on a large system of non-toll POPs AT&T presumably was able to leverage their domestic backbones to decrease aggregate costs that Sierra was having to offset at a much larger percentage of their operating expenses. By cutting the unlmited subscription option they lost the majority of their most die hard fans and advocates. Shortly therafter they increased the hourly overage (because you bought time in 25-50 hour blocks) by over a dollar an hour (from 1.99 to 3.49.) And lowered the available hours to the lowest plan from 30 to 20 and scaled back all other plans while leaving their pricing schedule alone.
Shortly therafter the number of online users plumetted, and it can only be assumed so did subscription rates. AOL closed up shop in 1998 and sold the venture to AOL who immediately closed the service, users who tried logging in before the last day of service recieved an in game mail from the support team and AOL thanking them for their patronage and requesting they join AOL to continue such great gaming. AOL never transitioned any of the games to their platform, and until 2007 INN was a black hole.
Some hobbyists picked up the old client, reverse engineered the server protocol and packaged up INN in a Dosbox emulator, breathing life back to a service that many thought gone forever.
Meridian 59 on the other hand, who's history is fought back and forth in Wikipedia entries has come back to the beginning.
Initially it was a game developed by the Kirmses brothers and backed by limited funding by an independent shop. The story goes: 3do loved it, bought their studio and brought them to their team. The game had a great launch, and had thousands of subs. The game was not turning an incredible profit, trying to sell media for a game that *required* the update to play was a fruitless venture. Eventually because of lackluster sales, and an inefficient support model for the quantity of subscriptions Trip Hawkins aimed 3do's success straight at the ground and followed in AT&T's footsteps, cancelling all unlimited subs and creating time based pay model. Effectively the cost to play was trippled in one month, and the number of players plummetted in half. But, because of supply side economics... well it was more profitable to support fewer users paying more. It cost less in support staff, so they cut in game paid support almost completely, and they had fewer load issues so they scrimped on server refreshes. They let most of the developers go, leaving a small staff to continue developing content releases and game patches.
What happened after that is the sad story many games see, the critical mass required to make Meridian 59 "fun" for most peo
Barren Realms Elite & Falcon's Eye (BRE & FE) were two quite popular BBS games in Sweden in the 90's. //SysOp at Bright Shadow BBS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon%27s_Eye_%28BBS_door%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon%27s_Eye_%28BBS_door%29
You can even still BUY them today: http://johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/
I was sysop at a BBS in Stockholm that won the largest FE league once... those were the days... users stacking up on redial at midnight to perform the new turns of the day. Now as then - the charm is to get together, build something together and summon forces to hit a human opponent somewhere out there....
It was so good! I remember buying it at some gas station or something when we were on vacation out west as a little kid. They had a buncha Apogee-era 3.5" disk packs and I remember thinking the packaging looked awesome. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bash
... the 2010 IF Competition games have just been posted. Go play them.
....but played it way more than was good for me. That was in the 90's. Then I played it some more via Telnet, a couple of years ago, but I must admit, a lot of the charm had disappeared. I realized too clearly that it was just primitive virtual point collection. Now I wish I had that time back, but perhaps it was a valuable lesson for the times ahead, and helped me to avoid MMOs and other destructive time-wasters.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Yeah, the old FORTRAN game played on the decsystem10.
I remember staring at the source code, trying to figure out the database to work out the map. It was rather convoluted, as all code designed to run on a computer with hardly any core had to be.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
"You are now ready to start accepting calls." Damn, I miss the feeling of sneaking out of my room at 12:05am to log on to every local board I could--just to get my turns in for Virtual Sysop. What a great door game. Sadly, most sysops, (at least in the Atlanta area), would selectively edit the game files in order to (re)balance things more to their liking. Good times nonetheless.
Don't be silly, we ALL played Commander Keen and Myst and Descent. Can't stand when you old fart's try to be hip by dropping the names of all these new games like "Quake" and "Doom"
Geez, what is this kind of garbage TFA is? Terrible.
No wonder people don't RTFA most of the time, it's crap like this and the comments are more interesting to read.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Tried them both briefly, but can't say that either had any games that hooked me.. and money was even tighter for me back then, than today.. and you had to watch your usage like a hawk.. I dropped them, and my Apple IIC, and built my first PC and about a year and a half after that I was on the net with Windows 3.1 , Trumpet Winsock, and Netscape.. But once again back to watching minutes like a hawk.. Thank god for Earthlink, and "all you can eat Internet".. I seriously think that the Internet would have been about as successful as the Source if not for Earthlink.. To those of you that had the cash to enjoy Compuserve, the Source, Prodigy, Genie, and the old AOL .. well I salute you.. I just couldn't enjoy (afford to enjoy) their content at the time.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
We used to play BRE, over the modem of course. Some people had call waiting (the one that beeps at you if someone calls when you're already on the phone). Unfortunately this would cause the modem to hang up. So it became part of the strategy to try to anticipate if someone else was getting their turns in before you. You would then call them, causing their connection to drop. You'd then dial in and try to play your turns before them (it's already been noted above that BRE was particularly sensitive to this in terms of gaining advantage). It became all a bit too much (definitely favoured those who didn't have call-waiting enabled!)
Jiggity
So, who remembers Trade Wars 2002? I bet a lot of people reading this article do... it was probably the most popular of the door games. I played it way back when, when BBSes were all the rage amongst nerds, and again when it was played heavily by a group of dedicated players online (through TelNet-based BBS software) - I even participated in the big yearly tournament once, although I can't remember for the life of me what it was called, and still have a registered copy of SWATH (Strategic Weapons and Automagic Tradewars Helper).
Interestingly enough, it's recently been re-imagined and re-released with a very slick web interface (I didn't like it at first, but I'm a big fan now.)
For anyone who's interested, you can check the new one out here:
http://www.tradewarsrising.com/
Or, if you're feeling generous, I also have an affiliate link:
http://www.tradewarsrising.com/?creator=Dorque
Another old door game that's taken an interesting twist is Improbable Island, a very tongue-in-cheek mod of the original LoRD, which uses (with full permission) the LoGD code. It's full of clever humour in a very British style, reminiscent of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett:
http://www.improbableisland.com/
Or again, I have a referral link if you're feeling particularly nice:
http://www.improbableisland.com/home.php?r=Artificer
Both are great revivals of the classics, in my opinion... and of course are a lot of fun. A lot more so than many modern games, come to it... and definitely make you think a bit more.
I haven't played TWR lately, but I might get back into it if I could find a few partners. I happen to have a lot of residual skills from years of TW2002 competition. ;)
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
Correspondence chess.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I'm missing The Exploration Of Space in that list :(
There's still quite a few of us who live in the past, and still run BBSes. SynchroNet BBS Software makes it fairly simple, and is still (very) actively developed.
My BBS (listed in my signature!) runs on Linux, gets a few callers a month, and has the old door games that everyone loved. It's primary purpose is for me to make fun of all the conspiracy-theorist nut-jobs in FidoNet. (Yes, FidoNet still exists!)
Chess.
I am anarch of all I survey.
The Island of Kesmai (shut down by EA in 1999)
Megawars III (CompuServe)/Stellar Emperor (GEnie)
Air Warrior, Air Warrior II, Air Warrior III...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
List is missing quite possible the best one. Materia Magica, (http://www.materiamagica.com) formernly Moongate, a text based game with new additions been rolled out all the time, played through a client such as Zmud, Cmud, Mush, Portal, simply just Telnet, or even the games own custom built Java client.
"Online for over fourteen years, MATERIA MAGICA is one of the longest-running, continually-developed games available, with a vast game world, detailed environments, intelligent monsters and other denizens, and many, many thrilling quests - you'll never run out of things to do." - Game login.
The login hardly does it justice, so I'll name a few of the features that you can expect:
*Multiclass - There are 12 races to choose from, each with its own perks and pitfalls, each race has access to a pool of classes, from the 4 fighter, 4 mage, 4 cleric and 2 thief, every 60 levels you can multiclass info one of the pools you don't have yet (help multiclass) can explain it in more depth should you choose to give it a try.
*Archon system - Hit level 240? Ready for a challenge? Then go attempt the Domain of Arbaces, 9 floors of some of the most challenging creatures around for your level, and topped off a tricky little doll to help home. Archon's are rewarded with a massive stat and vitals boost that they can train, as well as new spells and skills. How ever becoming an Archon is not all benefit, for your troubles you will be hounded across the face of Alyria by the Ithrix, a race of extra-dimensional beings who will create rifts through time and space as they hunt down Archons to kill, are you prepared?
*Clans and Alliances - Join a Clan, get together with like minded people, have access to a clan hall to recall to, slay enemies you could not on your own with them, have access to extra help when you need it. Some Clans are even in Alliances which gets you even more backup, in addition to this you can partake in alliance invasions; defend your home town as waves of foes descend upon it to earn passive rewards and points to spend.
*Religion system - Find a clergy of a power and dedicate yourself to it, gain access to that deity's spells, help your power out by partaking in player vs player religion battles as you assault other religions shrines to make your god more benevolent towards you.
*Character development - 7 quest masters with several thousand quests to do for rewards to better your character. There are also alternate ways to better your character, a treasure hunting quest, a body part collecting, various collecting of random scatters to build up items to improve yourself to name a few ways.
*Marks - Currently there are 274 marks in game, what are marks you ask? Feats of bravery, luck, exploration, *cough* evil doing, and others award a mark for your efforts, marks are a one time deal which offer great rewards, people will frequently ask which marks you have earned so far!
*Skill & spells - There is currently just shy of 300 skills and spells available, picking your classes will earn you access to the unique and fun spells and skills of those classes.
*Player homes - Build and customize your own home, pick a plot, create the rooms, doors, hidden rooms, dark, light, outside, player killing, safe, and many, many more flags for you to play with in creating your own private domain. You can even build one home per home zone and have access to safe recall points all over the globe.
*Massive world - Alyria is composed of an overhead virtual world approximately 2300 x 1600 rooms, richly featured with 10 main towns, and dozens of dungeons, villages, inns, keeps and more. Head underground and you will find yourself in the Great Alyrian Underground, yet more towns and isles with some of the deadliest creatures found. Also you can find your way to the Faerie Plane, where you can locate the seat of power for the Sidhe and Fey races, with more zones to explore. Topped off with the recent addition of the Sigil Underground, which has several zones to explore, and is the
Don't be silly, we ALL played Commander Keen and Myst and Descent. Can't stand when you old fart's try to be hip by dropping the names of all these new games like "Quake" and "Doom"
Come back and read that message when you turn fifty (when you're the "old fart"). I can't stand it when you young farts ... well ... act your age.
Haven't read all the replies yet, but, so far, I haven't seen Core Wars mentioned. We had a real active CW club on CompuServe Programmers' SIG/Forum in the early 1980's. Loads of fun for programmers. The play was mostly off-line (with downloaded warriors other people had written in Red Code -- the CW "machine language"), but the bragging wasn't!
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
The early web game Stellar Crisis is still going today. The web's first multiplayer strategy game!
http://homeserve.org/sc/sc.php
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Used to play Doom and Duke Nuke'em via 28.8k/56k modems back in the early 90's. There was one BBS (The Hole in the Wall) I'd log into that eventually became a Mom & Pop Internet provider. I was active on packet radio using e-mail and usenet, at a whopping 1200 baud! Ah, the good old days.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I must have played UU for like 16,000 hours on my BBS. I really miss it most days. I resurrected my copy on dosemu a decade ago, and it was fun, but it needs multiplayer. They're "working" on it; although I expect they'll never finish...
http://www.ultimate-universe.com/
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Sounds like someone who also was familiar with the WWIV BBS system, one of the few which you could get source too. A very interesting code base which spawned quite a few other BBS systems; telegard/renegade/etc. The best feature back then was WWIVNET which served messages and primitive e-mail between sites across the country, it was pretty seamless and a breeze for both operators to setup and users to make use of. Throw in the dearth of mods one could make to the later version's C source code and it was close to be a shared project, not quite open source (you had to buy it for less than $50 and you could not sell it yourself) but a beginning.
The earlier Pascal version was used the most by other writers, in the Pascal 3.0 days "door" games on it were not even complete programs, instead run by a feature native to Pascal 3.0 itself.
Of course I may be rambling and door games is a term used elsewhere, but during my BBS days I only saw it in one place.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, not really. The ones you listed are. Decwars/Megawars was my favorite game, see: http://hsnewman.freeshell.org/decwar.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decwar to learn about this historic game. It's not available on the web. I'm rewriting a similar game, called routerwars. See: http://routerwar.com/
I met my wife on a MOO (MUD, Object Oriented) long before meeting anyone online was fashionable. The funny thing was it wasn't anything romantic until we met in the real world. We just clicked mentally and she was coming up my way to Pittsburgh so we decided to get together. Two months later she moved in with me, two months after that we were married. Been happily married for well over a decade now.
Thank you, text-space.
By far and away one of the most influential computer games that I ever played was called simply COMBAT, a real-time mutliplayer computer game played on teletype terminals (yes... I played it originally on a printer originally designed for use in a news bureau and had yellow paper printing only capital letters and control codes like backspace had to be manually entered with the "control" key directly.... none of this sissy backspace key BS).
Unfortunately, the best reference I can find that talks about this game is Slashdot itself on this thread: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238223&cid=19477595
Porting this game to a modern system would be sort of pointless as there are now many other very excellent shoot-'em up multi-player computer games, but for what this did and the kind of user interface that it had was simply amazing for the era. It required a whole bunch of imagination as it was more like sitting in a mission control room for a 1960's era NASA mission that lacked a TV camera in terms of piloting your spacecraft. All of the controls had to be entered as text keyboard entries at a command prompt. Some people simply couldn't really figure out more than how to get onto the game and get wiped out, but there certainly were some very skilled players over the years and even some teams that formed which became very potent.
I don't know if this game was ported to other computer systems of the era (early 1970's before microcomputers) and it really didn't make the jump to the microcomputers in part because of its multi-player real time gameplay. Computer games of that nature didn't start to happen again until internet connections were pretty common.
Cause I remember fiddling with stuff like A M P back in the late '80s. hey I still remember its NUA: 023422020010700 (power of the young brain, I was 14 and pretty much everything I read tended to stick).
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
>>>we ALL played Commander Keen and Myst and Descent
Never 'erd of them. They must be new? I'm still trying to make my way through the Atari 800 and C=64's 10,000 program library. I'm sure I'll get around to the new 90s games someday...
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I can't be the only one here who scraped together the registration for VGAP3,
a turn-based multiplayer space conquest/economy game. I used to play by email
and upload turns via BBS door. Probably cost me a few points on my GPA
(both VGAP and DartMUD...).
Nice to see it still exists http://www.vgaplanets.com/
Federation II was a pretty big one on AOL back in the mid-late 1990s. A text-based space trading game, you could eventually move up to owning your own planet for other players to visit and trade at. Fun times. The company (ibgames) still exists and they've got a new version of the game going that's also called "Federation II," though I've never given it a shot.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
I don't remember the version number, but it was the last version before they fucked the game up by adding like 12 different places where you could put armor on your body.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
From the 2400baud days, Blue Wave was a store-and-forward e-mail system. BBSs were part of a network which would call each other a few times a day, and Blue Wave would pass mail packets back and forth. It also served as a mail reader, so you could log on, up/download your mail, and read at your leisure later.
From the mid-90s, I remember joining some E-mail games where some BBS hosted the game and 3-8 other people turned in moves. Operations was very similar to a D&D game master leading the people on a quest, following a game template, all by e-mail.
I think one was called Toonville or Toon Town (something like that) where you chose your character (literally anything), chose a few unique skills, and others provided by the game master. I was a radioactive fuel rod with a beret, beard, and electric Hupmobile. Another character was a constantly angry wheel of Cheddar cheese with a slingshot and a pet moray eel. Simply boarding the plane enroute to Banana Island took a dozen hilarious moves. "Welcome aboard Trans-Debris Airline! We try to fly, and it shows!"
Talk about adventure fiction -- Good days those...
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Back in the late '80s two friends of mine who were roommates in the same apartment complex that I lived in both ran BBSes. One funny story was when we were noticing that one particular game (I think it was called Barons or something) was only being played by one person, who logged in every day to do whatever.
It had a few paragraphs of really cheesy intro text (stuff like "you are now entering the land of the barons!"), so I made a backup copy of the exe, then hex-edited those paragraphs into a parody of their pompous crap. And changed nothing else.
A few minutes later he logs in. The guy noticed the changes immediately and went nuts about it. We were laughing so hard because he must have been reading that text every time he went in and taking it way too seriously.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The game that gave me the 10-key skills I have to this day.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
If it started in 1976, play by mail counts as online, right?
It's up there with Diplomacy.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Does anyone remember Star Drek? That was a game played from the perspective of the bridge monitor in 3D space. Everything was in ASCII graphics and real-time. A photon torpedo headed your way would be redrawn as a larger and larger group of maybe it was asterisks. There was a bug where you could indicate to use a large negative number for the amount of energy to spend on phasers, which would both let you use a powerful phaser blast and you wouldn't lose energy from your ship. The game had tractor beams, a planet called Blish and a Death Star, only it wasn't out and out called a Death Star. This was either in the late '70s or early '80s. When you created an account for the game (this was on unix, I think), you'd be asked various questions as though going through an application form ("Have you ever been arrested for a felony?") and if you said no, it'd proceed normally, but if you said yes, it'd ask how many times. If you gave some low number, it would tell you to be more careful next time. If you gave a high enough number, it'd say anyone stupid enough to be arrested that many times was too stupid to run a starship, or something like that.
I just did a google search for it, and came up empty. But Mall Wars was fun, and silly. You were a teenaged kid with a skateboard in a mall, and you'd fight other skateboarders. You'd also try to steal from stores in the mall then get taken out by the mall security if you got caught.
I don't really know why I liked it, but I did. It was one of those games that were a perfect mix of stupid and cool.
I think I still have a copy on one of my backup stashes, I might need to look and see.
I had Trade Wars running on my BBS back in the day.
It was a version that I wrote from scratch in Turbo Pascal, since I wasn't able to locate an official copy. It was harder to find stuff back in the pre-web, pre-search-engine days...
I still have a copy in my archives.
The three games I played on the net heavily before the advent of www, were:
AberMud: Infinity of the Virual World Club of New Mexico
DikuMud: Dutch Mountains at the RuG
VGA-Planets: Play by e-mail strategy game.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I remember playing Star Trek on a Wang 2200 (http://www.wang2200.org/)... What Joy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game
How much of my youth was spent trying to figure out this stupid game. No modern equivalent.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
LORD and Trade Wars were my games of choice.
While I have to get my Trade Wars fix with an emulator, LORD lives on in spirit with a web-based version called Legend of the Green Dragon [www.lotgd.net].
Was my /s not implied strongly enough?
While old games can't hold a candle to modern games in terms of graphics, the really good ones trounce modern games in terms of gameplay. The stereotypical example is NetHack, mentioned in the article. Nothing compares to it in terms of how game elements interact with each other (for example, if your character touches a cockatrice, live or corpse, you die by turning to stone, but if you wear gloves, then you can wield the cockatrice corpse as a very nasty weapon, turning most things you meet into stone). And there were a variety of obscure features like the ability to win games without killing a single monster (the "pacifist" win) and other harder ways to play. But it's a rather ugly text-based game.
My personal favorite was Empire (the one named in the article), a real time, military strategy game. The traditional version started with primitive units like cavalry and moved on to things like nuclear bombs and modern weaponry. Not only were you fighting other players, but you were also trying to develop your resources and advance your technology. Captured enemy territory could help you win the game, if you could make it productive, fast enough. The one time I played a far different version where the technology had been frozen as Second World War technology and we fought massive sea battles. I lost readily (after having squandered some of my naval forces on badly executed force recons), but I still feel warm inside knowing that I forcibly saw a neighbor into the abyss first.
I played a few MUDs and saw someone play a MUSH. These were extremely varied. I think they explored to great detail not just possible game genres (like fantasy, sci fi, or horror), but also a lot of the play-style classifications that people think of today (like the split between player vs player and player vs environment) and social conventions (grouping, trade, spamming, etc).
I played hunt for a few times when I was an undergrad. The game didn't interest me that much, though it was a clever solution to concurrent real time play. The game progressed only when someone acted. So each time you did something, the game collectively moved a bit further along.
I just want to mention a few special games that while they probably wouldn't have made this list, are remarkable in their own right. One of my favorites was called "Conqueror" (yet another generic game name). This was a multiplayer, text-based Unix game. The world was Tolkien-like with several races, humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, and undead. You played a country of a particular race, alignment, and specialty (for example, I was an evil human pirate in my favorite game). The goals could be varied, but elimination of all foes was a common choice. You did the usual thing, take land, build stuff, and grow your armies. If released now with modern graphics, it probably would be rather sophisticated, but not outstanding. You could have a large number of players and the game play was slow, but comfortably so. For example, in my favorite game above, we had a new "turn" every day. That meant that the game progressed steadily, but not so fast that it burned out players.
Xtank was a nice, graphics-based armored shoot-em-up. You hopped into a tank that you customized yourself and piloted against other foes, human or computer. You had a variety of technologies that you could apply to your tank and modify it. You could also play some fun games like "ultimate frisbee" which was basically hockey with tanks. For a bonus, you could write your own programs and use those to steer the tank (BTW, crobots being the architype of that particular type of game). I understand this genre has been done better since (for example, Bolo which also was made in the late 80s).
When you turn fifty, you'll be able to answer that question for yourself. Trust me.
/.?" Racism is no different than ageism except in one respect: my race is unlikely to change in my lifetime; but, no one escapes growing old.
Ageism is Silicon Valley's "dirty little (not so) secret." If you're a commercial software developer and you're not in "management" by the time you hit forty or so, your days are numbered. Once you hit fifty, your career is over unless you have what it takes (money, talent, energy, time and luck -- mostly luck) to put a successful start-up together.
There is nothing funny about ageism, just as there is nothing funny about racism. Ask yourself this question: "What would happen if I posted a sarcastic message about a racial minority on
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
I remember this game on Prodigy (still remember my ID!), but why is it still requiring IE for the Internet version? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Amen.
If it ain't adventure (the colossal cave)... GET OFF MY LAWN.
I have the library of games from our high school's minicomputer (1980), text classics like Golf, Blackjack, 3d Tic Tac Toe, Slots and multiuser Star Trek.
For the record, they ran at 110 baud, 10 characters per second, on a teletype initially, then 30 characters per second on a Lear Siegler ADM3A.
Now they all run in SIMH telnet sessions on my PC and Mac, and I can change the code and cheat at cards.
Still trying to hook up the SIMH HP2000 simulator in my Mac Pro to the Teletype ASR35 someone gave me a while back, but I can't set the serial port speed (add-in card) to 110 baud - it won't go that slow...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Myst? Seriously? You consider that old?
When I think of an old online multi-player game, I think of RabbitJack's Casino, which has got to pre-date Myst by a decade or more.
Or some of those relay games we played on ARB, WWIV, and C-Net (no relation to cnet.com) BBSes, circa 1983.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Yes I run one of those boxes with a Telnet version of Empire. It also has a Player vs. computer version of MILLBORN, It also has a game of MANSION (the one were you're supposed to seduce the maid). ADVENT (the one with the Troll bridge), and WARP. ZONE, DROID, FUEDAL TRIREME. The CIVIL war game where you enter food and money before each battle. And three versions of the classic Star TREK games, where you fight Klingons on a grid.
(URL in my homepage germane) http://198.212.189.111/
Telnet to the same IP address. Works best with a Hewlett Packard version of a terminal emulator.
Sorry no domain name anymore, IP only.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
When I was a kid (80s) my dad would always show off his text-based Star Trek game, which he played on a VAX terminal at work. I've always looked for a port of that game, but heck, I don't know the exact system it ran on or even the real name of the game, just that he text-commanded his way through space firing photon torpedos at Klingons. One day I hope to find it and boot it up on his home computer, I imagine he'd have a fit (and not leave the computer for days).
Assistance, ideas, or vague leads are appreciated.
There was an even older, better, simpler version of Trade Wars that used a 1000-sector universe where everyone had the same type of ship (with the same number of holds) and there was one planet called The Wanderer.
Can anyone remember the version number? Is it available to play over the Internet today?
(If I had to guess, I'd say it was called Trade Wars 9.014 and came out long before Trade Wars 2002.)
No, but platformers and point-and-click adventures are representative of the pre-FPS era that us late-80s/early-90s children grew up in, that always seems to get glossed over in the transition from textual interfaces to WoW and Halo. And I included Descent, because it was definitive at the time, even if nothing of its legacy survives today.
Rebel Space! Anyone play it on Prodigy? It was a turn-based, play-by-email game from Stormfront Studios, around the early to mid-90s. Stormfront shut it down, and many of us went to The Realm, then EQ. Some started playing VGA Planets, too.
~theprincess!
Anyone out there remember Legends (for TBBS/TDBS) or Swords of Chaos (for MajorBBS)? I wasted my teens on those games.
I used to play a game called Blackdragon on The Source (My userid back then was TCI006) - it wasn't multiplayer, but I would play it with a friend of mine, and we would imagine that the other monsters we ran into were other players. That game really ate up a LOT of my time, and I remember my dad getting really irked that I ran up such a bill (but he was also really glad that his daughter was so into computers, so it evened out :)) That and the Game Master BBS in Illinois used to really eat up a LOT of time for me.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
As someone who most strongly identified with Bean Delphiki out of any character in any book I've ever read (and I've read hundreds), and spent most of high school correcting incompetent teachers and trying to get state legislators to take my political movement seriously, I'm aware of the unfunniness of ageism. That may be part of the reason I'm so strongly drawn to one of the few areas where the stick of ageism beats in the opposite direction. That being said, I also have sympathy for you -- I've spent 95% of my life being the victim of ageism, whereas you're probably finishing up a stretch of exemption from it at least as long as I've been alive, and it sucks to come back under that again. But that doesn't excuse lacking a sense of humor. Us youngin's put up with good natured get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids poking, and you put up with the good natured silly-old-farts-think-they-are-hip poking. It goes both ways.
You don't know where you're going unless you know where you've been, as the old proverb goes. And this is a good case of it... looking at console games that are getting released today, it really seems like 90% of new games have much less depth than these ancient texts.
What does this mean for the future? Should we expect console controllers will go back to just having one button?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Although strictly not from before the Web, I love the Stars! game. Talk about addictive 4X strategy game. And since it is turn based, you can play with your friends over email! It is a shame their sequel never materialised. I believe it was called Stars! Supernova Genesis.
Check out Toril... still very active dev's Not nearly as many players as there used to be... but its well done and still growing. Still plenty of people to group with or quest high level zones etc... http://www.torilmud.org/