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The Game Archaeologist: Revisiting the BBS
Back in 2010 (2010, really? Wow.) I gave a broad overview of the history and importance of the BBS -- the bulletin board system. BBSes were a sort-of proto-internet, a homebrew networking solution that allowed users to connect online (via phone lines and low-baud modems) to chat, share ideas, and play lots of games. In fact, it's just impossible to think of BBSes without these multiplayer games that ranged from fantasy dungeon crawlers to cutthroat capitalism in space. Today I'd like to revisit this topic by inviting you to get to know bulletin board systems in a new light. I'm going to share my own experiences with BBSes in the early '90s, a documentary on them that I found fascinating, and a game you can play today to get an eerily accurate feeling of what dialing up BBSes back then felt like.
The Game Archaeologist plays with MUDs: Your journeys, part 1
What a long, strange trip it's been back through the heyday of multi-user dungeons and the many, many spin-offs and variations thereof. We've looked at the history, talked with Richard Bartle, and promoted a few of the best titles out there -- but we're not done yet! The Game Archaeologist will not hang up his hat and call it a day well-lived until your stories are entered into the history books. Throughout this month, MUD and MU* players have deluged the inbox of the Game Archaeologist Institute for Text-Based Virtual Worlds, impressing us with hefty paragraphs of passionate experiences. These stories are so good, in fact, that we have little desire to choose between them, which is why we're going to annex the first week of May so that we can share all of them. May won't mind -- May's cool like that. So hit the jump and read the testimonies of the word warriors who were there on the front line of parser combat and grammatically correct roleplaying. These are their stories. This is your lunch break.
The Game Archaeologist and the SysOp's Sinister Stratagem
When you think of MMORPGs, I wouldn't blame you if your mind stayed rooted firmly in the past decade or so, perhaps taking a brief vacation to 1997 before returning to today's 3-D polygonal glory. But it's not like people just woke up in the late 90's, looked at each other, and said, "Hmm. Online multiplayer RPGs. Let's make it happen!" On the contrary, history had been building up to that moment for quite some time. Tabletop RPGs and computer MUDs (multi-user dungeons) were both important ancestors of modern MMOs, just as was a mostly forgotten piece of software lore: the bulletin board system, also known as the BBS. In layman's terms, BBSes were like pocket internets -- host computers that allowed anyone to dial up and use special programs remotely. While BBSes weren't (initially) tied together like the world wide web, they featured a lot of the elements that would make the WWW so popular, such as email, forums, and, yes, online games. Today's special one-shot Game Archaeologist will take a brief look at the history of the BBS, as well as a couple of its games that could be considered "MORPGs" (like the renowned website, the "Massively" part would be a while in coming). Dial up, gentle readers, and make your hissing modem noises!
