Originally published at: How thousands of players explored a shared virtual world a quarter of a million rooms big, using nothing but pencils, paper, and postage stamps | Boing Boing
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I hadn’t heard of that one (which sounds pretty cool for the time), but I do have fond memories of the old play-by-email VGA Planets. Not text-based; for that I dialed in to MOOs, MUDs and the like.
I found one hard-to-find room in Lambda (iirc) that was like a universal panopticon, I could read everything that anyone was posting anywhere in the MOO realtime - fun for a few moments but too much of a firehose to stay longer than that.
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I played “It’s a Crime!” for a few turns. Other PBMs, I played for years. They costs were considerable for a college student; when I got my own computer I played games on it instead.
Flying Buffalo still runs games of Starweb and Heroic Fantasy. The code was lost years ago, but the ports from minicomputer to IBM PC still run, and a dedicated employee processes the turns. You can play by actual paper email, but there are stiff surcharges.
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You can still play the original version of VGA Planets, if you’re hardcore enough, but there’s a much easier and flashier web-based version now, created by different hands with the original creator’s permission: https://planets.nu/
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I know nothing of this. are we talking Dwarf Fortress In Space here, or what?
It’s more like Diplomacy In Space, a 4X space-empire-building game. The big twist is that you’re playing one of eleven races or factions based directly on ones appearing in pop-culture, namely Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, each with special abilities and separate ship-lists. It’s fun, but has a steep learning curve (above, “easier” in the sense that the gameplay is more automated) and one game generally takes months to finish. You can read more at Wikipedia or TV Tropes. (Disclaimer: I wrote the second article.)
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