Before I ever got on the Internet, I was an avid BBSer. For two years of my life, I spent time dialing up onto one-user systems running anywhere from 2400-28800 baud.
It was bliss.
Part of that bliss was thanks largely to BBS doors. A variety of strange games, all text based, drew me in and kept me addicted for months. Legend Of The Red Dragon, Usurper, Tradewars, Barney Splat, The Pit, Planets: The Exploration Of Space…even the more obscure ones like Cannons & Castles, Food Fight, and n-space were fantastic. (I’ve been meaning to devote an entire entry to n-space, but god knows when that’ll happen.)
Unfortunately, text-based BBSing is nearly entirely dead – which is doubly sad for me because that’s where I started online and stayed for nearly three years. Sure, there are some small systems here and there – but of course, there’s a minor hitch. With a dial-up BBS, you had guarantees that everyone was most likely in the same geographic area. With a telnet BBS, there’s no immediate personal connection, outside the fact that you all telnet to the same address.
On the other hand, I do have a number of small communities I’m in now, with some common threads. One in particular is very passionate about retrogaming and emulation and geeky things such as these. Luckily, a number of us have fond BBS Door memories, and there’s some good open source work-alikes for the web. So we’ve made some installations of two of them and I’d be more than happy if some of you wanted to join us.
Legend Of The Green Dragon – similar to Legend Of The Red Dragon, a somewhat rudimentary RPG. Still fun, although this particular installation has a lot of very inside jokes for the particular community I’m in.
Black Nova – similar to Tradewars, without the inside jokes. A lot of fun, a lot of depth, and certainly able to eat up a ton of your time. A little poorly documented, though.
Hope to see some of you joining in on the fun.
