The Forgotten World of BBS Door Games | Hacker News Reader

The Forgotten World of BBS Door Games

pcmag.com

57 pointsohaikbai54 comments

In all the years of gaming and "internet"-ing since then, there is something intangible about the experience BBS systems and these types of games provided that hasn't been achieved since. I know some of it must be simply rosy-goggled nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something material that made the BBS experience awesome that didn't quite translate over to the "internet" as we know it today. I remember that BSSs used to have "picnics" and stuff where everyone met up in real life (I couldn't go because I was too young, but I still appreciated the sense of community that grew around those.)

There was a sort of "liminal" phase of the internet that I've never seen anyone even mention in these types of articles, as well: the "Freenet" era ( http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/history.html ). It was sort of halfway between local BBS and WWW. I wonder if the emergence of the Physical Web or the like might bring about a resurgence of some of this "local"-ness the web lost as it outgrew its origins.

I think I agree that it's the localness of the BBSes that made them so special for me. When I was in middle school, the BBSes were my social group. The games were a fun way to waste some time, uploading games for credits in bytes you could download, but the conversations were the best part. I went to BBS parties and hung out with the people-behind-the-handles in real life. It was always such a shock to see how someone differed from the way you imagined them to look. When I got to college, the BBS scene instantly created a whole new set of friends for me. I don't know how I would have gotten to know people in that strange place without it.

Then the internet came. Suddenly, all by favorite BBS boards were synchronizing their posts with other BBSes across the country. Our little conversations of 5-10 people suddenly exploded into hundreds. It was too much. My posts got lost--or worse, I once got the notice of some sysadmin in another state who didn't like my politics or my language and demanded my local sysadmin deactivate my account. I fled to some other locals-only BBSes, but things were dying. Then Gopher, WWW, and Usenet came along and the BBSes vanished as everyone rushed to build web sites and post comments for all the world to see.

I telnetted into the cavebbs.homeip.net and it was a nice brief bit of nostalgia. I'm not sure if this is something we can recapture, but I hope it gets a bit of historical footnote somewhere.

Some of that feel will likely come back if(when) the internet begins to splinter, infrastructure begins to fail, and you start seeing hacked together municipal or neighborhood networks.

In Florida the MajorBBS scene called them GTs. In my opinion, the split-screen chat really brought people together. But chat in general was the community thing, along with a few of the door games. Like my old TW2002 opponent, we're still in touch. My little bro went to a couple of those GTs. In retrospect, if I had kids, I wouldn't want them involved in that, because some of those BBS people were questionably creepy.

In one way, Internet chats haven't caught on to what we had in 1989, which was seeing every keystroke from everyone simultaneously in separate panels. Line by line (IRC style) is less personal by comparison. Watching the keystrokes and edits unfold, it's more compelling, and MajorBBS deserves credit for that unique multiuser experience which required specialized hardware. Multitasking > 2 phone lines was rare because fast PCs could barely multitask 2 modems with DESQView or OS/2. Windows did not have any multitasking capability yet. And only OS/2 had any concept of prioritizing the CPU. So most BBS doors were limited to "turn based" games where you play after somebody else (your turn, like RISK) unless you had MajorBBS which had low-latency fast action battlefields like Flash Attack. What you now call AJAX (single page apps) we could do that in the 80s with ANSI position codes, which you're just starting to see today on Facebook, where you can see content updating without a page refresh. We were severely limited to an 80x23 grid with only 16 foreground colors, but we made it amazing.

I went to those picnic bbq parties when I was in elementary school and the older folks were always cool about it. :)

I just had a flashback of my discovery of the band Rush from a bbs party.

I think door games have a lot of interesting similarities to modern mobile games. First, door games tended to limit you to X number of moves per day in order you to play a small bit each day. Multiplayer was sometimes much more interesting in door games (ala TradeWars) than some modern AAA mobile games that limit interactions quite a bit (such as Boom Beach). I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a renaissance of door games onto mobile devices already.

I agree, I think the limited turns/day format is prime for a come back!

I think the audiences are mutually incompatible. The old-school folks who grew up on BBS door games are, by and large, not happy with the microtransaction model.

And the reasons for limited turns are diametrically opposed. In door games, turns were limited to prevent players with more spare time from dominating the game. In mobile games, it's to encourage players with disposable income to spend extra money so that they can dominate the game.

> In door games, turns were limited to prevent players with more spare time from dominating the game

And to prevent them from tying up what was very likely the BBS's only phone line.

I feel the limit on time you can spend per day would fit more with busy professional lives. For me, it always made me greatly anticipate the next day when my turns would be replenished. That would make actually playing it much more special.

Also, the reduced audience available for the BBS made cheating less of an issue (at least at my local BBS)

The MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing seems to be essentially a browser-based door game, complete with turn limits, and it was still running last I checked. Might be worth a look if that's what you're into.

So I've heard, although in my area most BBSes limited users to an hour a day anyway.

The entire model was totally different. Door games were usually shareware. Authors wanted sysops to pay a registration fee, and they used different tactics to encourage that. Sometimes the game had extra features crippled unless you registered; sometimes there was a time limit after which the game would be unplayable if you didn't register. But note that the registrations were paid by SYSOPS rather than the individual end users. (Though sometimes users on a BBS would chip in together to help their sysop register a favorite game)

I'm impressed they picked some of the best games for this. I paid for The Pit, the registered version had enhanced features, excellent game. Unfortunately, it wasn't popular on my BBS. I also liked OOii which had very unique graphics for the time, toxic wasteland theme. TW2002 was by far the most popular and I had people paying me subscriptions to play it. It was almost an exact copy of Yankee Trader, which makes me think maybe Yankee Trader deserves credit for the idea. But TW2002 had much better graphics. The fishing game was surprisingly fun and made with loving care, you could actually see the fishing line animated in ANSI! Also very popular (#2 behind TW2002) was Global Wars, not in the article, which was exactly like RISK the boardgame. The article doesn't mention MajorBBS at all, which is unfortunate, because they had their own unique ecosystem that had a loyal following, and although it was very expensive (pay by the minute) it was extremely addicting.

To this day, Barren Realms Elite is my favorite BBS game. I believe there are some boards still running (accessible only via the Internet) simply to participate in the interplanetary leagues.

I liked the "sequel" to it a little more. It had the acronym FE and was fantasy themed but similar otherwise.

Yep, Falcon's Eye. I played it every day as well but liked BRE more. Both of them were great games!

I ran a couple BBSes with a friend in the mid 90s. We got rid of file downloads and door games when we transitioned to an all message board system, but we always kept one door game around:

Barneysplat! by Bong Software

Interview with the author, who is also blind:

http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/05/08/austin-seraphin-cre...

Oh yeah, being snarky teenagers, we also kept Pimp Wars on the board.

BarneySplat was invariably the most popular door game on my BBS (mid-90s). Thanks for that interview link.

Thanks for posting that link to my interview. Austin Seraphin now does a lot of work on software accessibility.

TradeWars 2002, The Pit, and Legend of the Red Dragon reminds me of many pleasant Friday nights, in high school. Thanks for posting this.

Dunno about the rest but TradeWars is still being maintained! As are some really nice helpers, like SWATH. One of these days, I'd like to maybe run my own server again. (I had no problems getting TWGS to run jailed under Wine/VNC/screen on my FreeBSD servers, and SWATH ran well under Wine on my Mac.)

Oh my, SWATH. When I was just a kid, a nice fellow player on a big board bought me a copy so we could form a cartel and own a little slice of the galaxy. It was an awesome experience, learning to cooperate with somebody who I'd never met, never heard the voice of, didn't know what they looked like, what gender they were or anything. All I knew was their handle and what slice of this virtual universe we owned. It could have been a gecko or an advanced time-travelling AI for all I know.

Are there still any active servers? TW2002 is by far my favorite game of all time, but I had a lot of trouble getting a good reasonable-turns game (~750 - 1250) with high engagement humans.. or at least passable bots! :)

TradeWars seems like it would be a great mobile game. The limited number of turns per day mechanic would be appealing for busy gamers who don't want to spend too much time. The new mobile game Subterfuge has a similar feel to me:

http://subterfuge-game.com/

There are a few! Ice9 used to be pretty good, but I don't know how well maintained it is these days. Cruncher's is well maintained but sparsely populated.

http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/

http://cruncherstw.blogspot.com/

Here's another list:

http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate

I think I might just dust off my copy of SWATH and go exploring. :)

LoRD!

Wow. I had forgotten that that game ever existed. Nostalgia is magic.

A little nostalgia for PC Magazine too. haha.

tradewars++ lord++

So many nights, dialing in at 12:01 to finally be able to run turns, and auto dial until you can get in.

Tradewars 2002 never caught my attention but I spent plenty of time playing Land of Devastation:

http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic

I still have a graph paper notebook with carefully laid out map of the world, with blank spaces that still need filling in. I dreamed of getting the GTERM client to 'properly' play the game.

Wow, I thought I was the only person alive who still remembered this. Tile-based MMO on a BBS... even if I ran into another player only about once a month. The gambling system was nicely exploitable, too :)

I feel the main thing missing today is the locality imposed by area codes. BBSs hit a scope sweet spot where users were more than just your friends but still came from the local community. That aspect always gave me warm and fuzzies.

It also allowed you to compete in online games through the big fish in a small pond principle.

I used to dominate LORD, TW 2002 and Proving Grounds BBS games. First time I ever played Internet Quake or any other Internet game was a humbling experience.

There's a wiki dedicated to them (http://breakintochat.com) and a blog with interviews with door game authors (http://breakintochat.com/blog).

People are still WRITING doors, too. Musician Shooter Jennings of all people released a door game recently, and he offered a Bitcoin prize to people playing it. (http://breakintochat.com/blog/2015/09/18/shooter-jennings-cr...)

There's an active mini community of folks writing new Javascript doors for Synchronet BBS software (http://synchro.net). These are still ANSI games but they are more action-oriented.

So yeah, not entirely forgotten.

Of course LORD, but anyone here played Usurper? That sure was a dark game as a little kid!

Absolutely!

Kids at school begging me to join their Usurper team is what brought me in to BBSs. :)

Its been open sourced (copious amounts of pascal), https://github.com/rickparrish/Usurper

I've seen it, and taken a look around in there!

I lot of nostalgia for me here. I ran a BBS for years, initially on WWIV and then on to Wildcat! 4.

Throughout high school, my buddies and I spent countless hours on TradeWars 2002. We even wrote our own door game, the little known Mercury Fighter, which had a modest installation base.

The Internet just isn't the same. A lot of memories come back looking at the list of games on this article.

Door games are, in a way, what got me interested in reverse engineering. Being a teenager running a BBS for some friends in school, I didn't have any money to "register" the games (and was lucky that my parents ponied up the money for the extra phone line). I had some experience w/ 6502 assembly and Pascal (all self-learned), got a copy of a debugger (Soft-Ice?) and set to work figuring out how to "crack" the registration systems.

Eventually, my BBS got shut down because I was dialing into other BBS's all over the country to spread my "patches" (and racking up outrageous phone bills). :(

Two distinct worlds. PD and NPD. I was on the PD side but a couple of my classmates were NPD and there was some crossover. Seemed the NPD side was more serious about artwork and that got to be competitive, as far as login graphics, menus, logoff graphics. As an aspiring artist, I was impressed by the NPD ascii art and loaders.

You know what's interesting here, nobody mentioning MajorMUD. That was (and somewhat still is) the kinda-not-a-door-game door game serving as the engine of a lot of BBS use. Unfortunately, MetroBBS (the company that owns the IP) is still holding out for some kind of MMO or movie deal or something and the pricing for this game is silly. Also, being from the KC area, I have it on very good authority that some of the source code for MM was lost during an office move. And this is why (in addition to having lost their main programmer) there haven't been substantial updates in years.

I recall playing a custom derivative of DikuMUD in the 90s. There was this technology called telnet that allowed me to play it from any Internet-connected computer, rather than dialing up a BBS.

The major keystone codebases, as I recall, were AberMUD, LPMUD, DikuMUD, MUSH, or MOO.

If the company is holding out for some kind of licensing deal, someone might want to remind them that their snowflake was probably a whole lot more precious before it melted.

You might be excited to learn that MUME (multi-users in middle earth) has been running for almost 25 years now [0]. I have been playing off and on for twenty years. I met my wife through that game. PvP is legendary, and specifically used as a model by early graphical MMOs.

[0] http://mume.org

Writing Telemate scripts to automatically play MajorMUD for me while I was AFK is how I got started with programming! I got to the point where I was distributing my scripts via a forum on a board I played on, and I even got contributions back from a couple people. Definitely a lot of fond memories there.

Yes, programming macros was exciting (too) because it gave you a competitive advantage and opened the door to a lot of creativity.

Me too! In fact I doubt i would be a developer today without MajorMUD and Telemate!

I played a lot of TradeWars, but my favorite door game was a similar space conquest game called Dominion. To my dismay, I can't find any reference to it online today! :(

This[1] have anything to do with it?

[1]http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/DOMINION/

A couple of these BBS games were easy to break back in the day: just head to the casino and keep gambling. One of the games had an easy higher/lower random number game.

Forgotten to you, PCMag. I've never stopped playing these bad boys.

Jennie? Jennie Garth? Describe her.

trade wars 2002.. legend of the red dragon.. global wars

tele-arena was me gateway to scripting

man, I miss BBS'ing

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