I also remember some very, very active and high quality boards that ran citadel ... citadel was sort of the HN of the BBS world ... no ANSI, no fluff, just quick command keys and all high quality discussion.
This meant it could offer an active chat room, and it had a MUD game that everyone loved, called TeleArena.
For me, TeleArena was fun because I'd write scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.
I had this weird software I licensed which let people play Doom against each other, over the phone line, simulating a local IPX network ... MPGS (Multiplayer game server) by a company called APCi.