Break Into Chat

I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Design.html

For a quick “where are they now”:

- Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in downtown Austin (but it was just sold)
- Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies
- Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/

I also remember using the BlueWave offline mail reader:

* https://en.everybodywiki.com/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader)

As well as the QWK and SOUP file formats (the latter when I started on Usenet as well):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

* https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.techwood.org/old/soup12.html

And Tradewars 2002 'door game':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars

* https://breakintochat.com/wiki/TradeWars_2002

* https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)

These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.

I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.

I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webcomics-bbses-and-the-artscene/

I ran a couple BBSes with a friend in the mid 90s. We got rid of file downloads and door games when we transitioned to an all message board system, but we always kept one door game around:

Barneysplat! by Bong Software

Interview with the author, who is also blind:

http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/05/08/austin-seraphin-creator-of-barneysplat

Oh yeah, being snarky teenagers, we also kept Pimp Wars on the board.

At first I assumed it was going to be based on this: https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Space_Empire_Elite which is more like the trader type games you're talking about.

There was a history of BBS "door" games with this style of interface, that would have been quite adaptable to Emacs.

But yeah, his link to 'Elite' does take to the classic 3d game.

Nifty.