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?

Comments

Apogee's "Monster Bash"

[Kreychek]

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

Re:Oh, if I could get the hours lost back

[commodore64_love]

>>>If I could get the hours lost back I'd be young again

I'm happy to say I wasted very little time on online games. I tried the various MUDs and of course Tradewars, but they held little appeal for me. Like today's online games they seemed to have no point, and instead I stuck with classic Atari and Commodore simulations/arcade-style games. Like Red Storm Rising & Stealth Fighter which helped me land my first job.

Also I'm happy to say I was never stuck at 300 baud (0.3 kb/s). Imagine reading slashdot if the messages scrolled on the screen at the same speed you read them! Zzzz. Well you don't have to imagine. Here's a demo (turn down the volume) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkHwT6o6Jvw#t=2m - I used to watch TV when I was online, because otherwise I would have been bored out of my mind waiting for the slooooooow loading speed.