Comments on: BBS door games: Social Gaming innovation from the 1980s

By: The question that got me to leave Seattle for greener startup pastures | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:49:03 +0000

[...] in computing, including access to gopher and telnet via Seattle Community Network, the pre-web BBS scene, and a 5th grade classroom filled with Macs. As a college student, I got to work at various tech [...]

By: Free Games

Free Games — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:49:25 +0000

Haha! This is surely brings back the old memories.. Long .. long time ago where there's no such thing as MMORPG ^^

By: huang

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By: huang

huang — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:08:03 +0000

By: tom212

tom212 — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:15:38 +0000

TradeWars was totally awesome… You can also get back into it now fyi at http://www.tradewarsrising.com in the browser version!

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:12:36 +0000

I miss MajorMudd on WorldCom. The ones you list are all awesome in their own regard. LORD, TradeWars, Pit Fighter were all so much fun. You're right that it was the community aspect. That's why I loved MarjorMudd so much. WorldCom BBS's seemed – in the Portland, Oregon area – to be the ones with lots of nodes. I even got to the point of writing my own scripts for the different dungeon areas of MajorMudd.

By: XIX

XIX — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:32:43 +0000

I'll go one geeker and mention PBM games.

Similar to BBS doors but played by sending turns through the postal system.

I noticed recently that one of the companies that i played games on back in the 80s is still hobbling along. This is no doubt thanks to the fact that these where all pay to play games, paid by the turn (turns where usually about once a week) So it is possible to survive on a small number of users.

http://www.kjcgames.com/

nowadays its play by email, but to be honest it was nice to receive turns in the mail rather than the collection of junk that normally turns up

I wonder if these facebook games will still exist in some form in 30 years time…

By: Benjamin Yoskovitz

Benjamin Yoskovitz — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:34:07 +0000

I miss mudding more than I care to admit, and used to be heavily involved in a great, RP-intense MUD before we ran out of time to support it.

There's a company today (name escapes me immediately) that actually runs paying MUDs, quite successfully I believe. I'd love to do that — graphics ruined gaming, text is the REAL storyteller.

By: chrismotes

chrismotes — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:02:49 +0000

Wow – blast from the past!

The first social on-line game I recall playing was a text adventure game on Compuserve… it may have been called “Adventure”. I remember being nervous the first time another player entered a room I was in!

By: Sarwar Faruque

Sarwar Faruque — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:18:28 +0000

LORD 2 was the game to play in it's day. I had a lot more fun playing that than today's MMORPG's!

By: seanpower

seanpower — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:34:47 +0000

LORD, SRE, BRE, TradeWars, PitFighter all supported multiplayer & multinode BBSes, as early as '94.

Just sayin'

Great article.

By: holgerd

holgerd — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:28:29 +0000

Wow, thanks for bringing back some geek memories! I had “Legend of the Red Dragon” running on my own BBS (anno 1994). It was fun and addictive.

By: Tony Arkles

Tony Arkles — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:25:07 +0000

LORD was so much fun — specifically because you knew everyone you were competing with, either personally (because the BBS community was pretty small), or from interacting with them in-game.