I was disscusing with a much younger friend recently (I am 37 he is 23) about his WOW (WOrld of Warcraft) gamming and how quite a long time ago I was involved in something similar, at least for the time. It was the mid-80’s and a friend of mine got some of us invovled in Play-by-mail RPGs. I tyred to explain how these worked, and how computers then controlled all the action in a turn based styles, and put forth the hypthosis that these were the early ancestors of current MMORPG’s. He laughed and dissmissed my idea out of hand. So I thought I woudl ask some of the people here what they thought.
I was also curious if anyone remembers the name of one of the games I played back then. I think both of the games I played were run by Flying Buffalo but I could not find the names on their current website. IN one you played a monster and i thought it was called simply “Monster Island” and the other one you lead a gang in a city, and controlled differnt blocks in that city. I was hoping someone here remembered the name of that game
I don’t believe there’s a direct evolutionary link between the computerized PBM arbitrators and modern MMORPGs. MMORPGs evolved out of text-based MUDs, and those evolved out of text-based adventure games. For more info, read the Wikipedia entry on MUDs.
That’s not to say, however, that the old PBM games weren’t cool in their own right!
I played PBM games for years back in my teen years in the 80’s. I played a conquest/diplomacy game called “Kings” run by a tiny company called JF&L. There weren’t a lot of us who played, but those of us who did were pretty hard-core, in that we even had 3 annual “conventions” where users gathered together from all over the country to interact for a week about the game with the GMs. It was pretty cool. Running something like that today would be so much easier…
I used to play these too. I did play Monster Island, which was pretty fun. I played a PBM of the old board game Supremacy, and another Fantasy Football type game. I spent the longest with a game called Adventurer’s Guild, which evolved into a turn-based PBEM and I believe is still active. Problem was that you’d suddenly stop getting turn results, and sometimes never find out what happened to the company.
Didn’t Flying Buffalo run Star Web (I think that was the name)? It was a space exploration/trading/conquest game that included Berserkers as a playable race/class.
Back in college, I used to play “Duelmasters.” It was a text-based gladiatorial combat game. You had a group of fighters of differing styles, and had to decide what weapons, armor and tactics they would use in each fight. I really sucked, but it was fun.
A bit later, I tried out “Pathocrom,” which might still exist. It was similar but had a more “fantasy” feel; there were different races and chi attacks (magic, essentially). Actually, my roommate and I were some of the first players and we got a credit in the rulebook. Woot for meaningless geekery.
Anyone want to explain to this youngster how these games worked? Surely it wasn’t as slow as playing chess by email (something I used to do back in sixth grade) but with real “snail” mail.
OMG! I remember my buddy Chris playing this, and us spending weekends trying to figure out how to program his Apple IIe to run a ‘fantasy’ version of this!
This thread is a bit dated, but there’s actually a number of PBM companies and games still in existence, although most have died out or become more of a lineal descendant of play by mail, by going the digital route.
I run a few sites that deal with PBM gaming. They are:
I also publish a small PBM magazine in PDF format called Suspense & Decision. The latest issue of Suspense & Decision is Issue #10, but Issue #11 should be out in another week or so, for any of you who happen along after the fact.
The PBM Hivemind section of the PBM Wiki can help you to locate some of the groups of PBM gamers still out there scattered across the Internet.
It’s always good to come across threads like this on the Internet, even if some of them are a bit dated. A lot of PBM gamers have moved on, of course, and some former PBM gamers return to the fold, from time to time.
