I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Desi...

For a quick “where are they now”:

- Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in downtown Austin (but it was just sold) - Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies - Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/

LORD is available here: lord.nuklear.org

Ditto actually.

I mean, ultimately that's what Eve Online is, a massive TW2002 "clone". Only everything made better.

I think the problem with an economic system is you need enough people to do it properly, or you have to figure out some kind of 'fake' where it can be dynamic enough for the concept of cross-space trading work, but also not be entirely unrealistic.

I did learn a lot about event-driven programming, state machines, and the telnet protocol however.

What are the TW games out there right now? I was not aware!

I've dreamt for years about licensing TW to make a mobile version consistent with the gameplay of the BBS days. Before scripts. I don't know if you fall in love with the first games you play as a kid, but 25 years later, I still yearn for a 6 month TW bang with a corp of 4 friends.

You can find the Majorbbs Entertainment Edition out there. Has TW, SoC, trivia, etc. Supports telnet.

There was also custom TW2002 Telix-based software that had an overlay with macros you could use. Made things so fast.

Telix scripts were great! Easy to learn and useful, I had mine set up to automatically upload and download my QWK mail packets.

Oh man...TW2002...brings back memories....damn. I remember playing with Cruncher. I played heavily on the Fament BBS...

I was in middle school...so this would have been mid 90's.

I was connected to the Internet using a freenet that was provided by SEFLIN (South East Florida Library Information Network)...text based. People who had real internet ran applications, and using ICQ to chat (since you can scan the in network chat for teams chattering!) I was using plain ol text based Internet...and Pine was my email program. I still use nano very often as my editor of choice :)

One time my local BBS moved to Miami...but the area code was still 305. It was considered long distance, even though the area code was the same. I racked up quite a telephone bill.

Ah yes, I've seen SWATH before. Here's my issue: when I started playing, it was on a BBS where everyone played manually. There were no helpers or scripts. We'd manually keep track of sectors and port pairs and potential bubbles and so on. It was great. I belong to the camp that believes the scripts ruined the game :-/

A few years ago I found the original letter from (was it Seth?) about my LOTRD registration...

Ah, violet...