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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
"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.
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.
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!"
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.
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/