This Sci Friday is long-overdue – it’s time to celebrate scifi @ 2400bps, BBS Door Games were mobile app games before there were mobile app games. Come take a deep dive into the arcane, 90s-era social gaming adventures!
Door games were called ‘door games’ for a simple reason: “They’re called “doors” because they were separate programs that would run on the BBS host. Since machines didn’t necessarily have multitasking capabilities, the main BBS program would “shell out” and start up the door program, which would then communicate with the user. When the door exited, the BBS software would start back up. Hence a door — an excursion from the BBS to the outside world.”
Once activated, a text-based GUI would fire up and you could play scifi-based games with people all over the world, 10 years before LAN parties! Here’s an example of playing Trade Wars 2002 that you can watch on YouTube:
I loved playing Trade Wars. It was ‘a series of online space-strategy games loosely based on the Star Trek realm,’ and now that I think about it – I don’t understand how they didn’t receive a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer. Ah, the 90s.
BBS Door games provided the stepping stone of interactive scifi games we needed in the late 80s and early 90s before LAN parties, mobile games, and MMPORGs. I hope you enjoyed this dive through scifi game history. Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!
