bbslistFollow along with another few years of my gaming history. In this episode: RoboSport, dial-up bulletin boards, Legend of the Red Dragon and Barren Realms Elite.

January, 1992

I am eleven years old.

I am feeding reams of paper through a clattering dot-matrix printer. I have invented rules to take Maxis’s RoboSport game for the newly-released Windows 3.1 platform to my classmates. We meet on the playground, under the jungle gym. They will mark their moves on the map I have printed, I will play the game on my computer according to their directions, and return triumphantly the next day to report the results at recess.

The game is popular. I print thirty copies of my directions. The printer clatters throughout the night; the next day, the teams are full. I turn a girl away and she cries to the recess teachers. They come, wielding umbrellas, and my game is shut down for not being “inclusive” enough.

January, 1994

I am thirteen years old.

My mother’s phone line is tied up. I am trying to manage another caller through my dial-in bulletin board system. Called “Level B4”, a double-homage to the funk band Level 42 mixed with a pre-apocalyptic worship of Wargames-style military NORAD command and control, it is a GAP system, run atop DOS 6.0, running games like Legend of the Red Dragon. When users call in to the bulletin board, the call is routed to the house, and the phone line becomes busy; nobody makes calls in or out. Grandma warns Grandpa when the beeping starts and the 80486 computer system I run it on catches another call: “Charlie’s on the mod-ey-em again, ‘hun. Don’t use the phone.”

The same users – people from the highschool – call every day, and at fourteen-thousand kilobits per second, experience games, files, and chat, padded with ANSI artwork I drew to match my young impressions of official-looking control panels.

I try a new game – Barren Realms Elite; it promises the ability to send data between bulletin board systems. At the time, it seems revolutionary. Encouraged, I advertise the game on my bulletin board, promising an inter-system war of epic proportions. I even write a poem about the game that I read in eighth grade English class.

The communication between the bulletin board systems never quite works. Half-games played, nonsense data, scheduled calls at midnight failing for unknown reasons. Documentation is sparse, examples are nonexistent, and the only communication available is to dial into another board, leave a message, and wait. Months pass.

Soon, the Internet approaches, seeded by early dial-in networks like America Online. Something bigger than any inter-board communications looms; we know we are being phased out. Not by a conglomerate interest, but by a technological and social force majeure called the World Wide Web.

I shut down Level B4 and pick up an HTML book. It will be three years before I can make another game.