Years ago, I had an account on the General Electric Network for Information Exchange (GEnie). It was a Compuserve type BBS, with all kinds of information, stock quotes, discussion groups, and chat.
The chat section (called the CB Radio I believe), had 40 or so different channels. It was fun, or as much fun as you could have with a 1200 baud modem…
Anyways, my question is: For those who remember GEnie, they ran a Trivia type game from time to time on one of the CB channels. It was a live trivia game - the “moderator” ran the program, asked the questions, and you sent your answer privately (with the /sen xx command) to them. If you got the question right, you scored points. The points were calculated as (Number of Answers Received)/(Number of Right Answers). The game ran for an hour or so, and at the end, whoever had the most points won. Anyone remember this?
I was wondering if something like this still existed somewhere on the internet. All the Trivia Games I’ve found, you don’t really compete against anyone, and no “person” runs the game. Is there a live version around?
P.S. I think GEnie still exists in some capacity, but not like it used to be… Not by General Electric anymore anyways.
Sorry, GEnie is history, as is the similar Prodigy Classic and the live trivia section of MSN, but live trivia games are certainly not. There are several thriving trivia communities on AOL chat - which, contrary to some impressions, aren’t all sex and teens. Try keywords Paradise and Inner Circle.
These have the advantage of greater interpersonal contact, permitted by the chat feature, to the point where the trivia game itself is often incidental. The game itself benefits from being able to see other people’s answers and “lem” them if you like, or even put in wrong answers yourself to get others to lem you. Due to real life, I don’t play as often as I used to on the old Prodigy, where I was a host, but I still show up occasionally.
Mods, this may look like an AOL advertisement, but I’m really trying to provide information about the only available answer to the OP.
You familiar with IRC? There are many channels devoted to trivia that have various forms of trivia bots on them 24/7. Try searching for “IRC trivia channel” or something similar on Google.
Not sure about the chat stuff, but since this thread’s initial poster “mske” was wondering what happened to the original GEnie service, here’s a bit of a timeline. In 1996 General Electric deemed the online service a non-strategic asset, and also decided they didn’t want to be an ISP. Was sold twice that year, the second time to a company named Yovelle Renaissance. Yovelle maintained Genie for about three years, migrating from a proprietary content model to an ISP. Then, over a year ago, they discontinued their ISP services in favor of what now seems to be an Application Services Provider business. I wish I could be more clear, but if you go to http://www.genie.net, a quick read of the newest Genie’s company info doesn’t provide very many clear indicators of what exactly, they are about.
I was on GEnie for six years. It was a great community, but General Electric pulled the plug (ironically, Jack Welsh always wants GE to be in the top three of any business it was in, and GEnie was, at one time, in the top three online services). It actually started out as a way for GE to make money from its computers during the evenings – priced so consumers paid to use their network when they didn’t.
GE sold to Yovelle, a company set up solely to buy GEnie (and GE ignored a better offer from the GEnie sysops, who wanted to get it done right). Yovelle was a phantom arm of IDT Corp., a true bunch of sleezy operators, and IDT took it over after about six months.
Once it became clear the Internet was going to be the big thing, Genie claimed it would be going to be an Internet service, but did nothing and just died out.
Try keywords Paradise and Inner Circle.