Articles by Break Into Chat

I have long loved playing games by Amanita Design with my kids, particularly “Machinarium.” They create such stellar worlds with interesting characters, without a single word of intelligible dialogue. So it was like Christmas in January when I read on Twitter that Amanita had released a game called “Creaks” in …

Yesterday entrpreneur and tech pioneer Jon Radoff shared on Facebook a letter he found from a former player of his early internet game Legends of Future Past. I asked him if might have similar letters related to his earlier BBS door games, Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier. Today he …

Paul Witte and Herb Flower were friends who collaborated from 1988-93 to create the BBS door game Thieves’ Guild and its graphical front-end client for the Atari ST under the “Mythyn Software” banner. Flower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Witte and Flower teamed …

The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn. You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: “Thou seest rippling waters…” Sea serpent? Giant squid? …

This is the fifth installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games. TWTerm I was never a very good TradeWars 2002 player. Sure I would trade, hunt for the StarDock, and fight other players — but I was probably just cannon fodder …

This is the fourth installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games. GTERM GTERM was a front-end for Land of Devastation that enabled an SVGA-resolution interface with graphics, music, and sound effects. Land of Devastation in a traditional terminal Land of Devestation …

This is the second installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games. Pit Terminal James Berry’s The Pit was an action game in which players could fight each other in gladiatorial combat. In the normal ANSI version of the game, the player …

Silent. Simple. Social. I think that’s how most people remember BBS door games. They think of quaint multiplayer, turn-based, text games. The games’ lack of sophisticated graphics, music, and sound effects are probably considered flaws. Their social aspect is remembered fondly — it was door games’ primary advantage and marketable …

I’ve written in the past about my adventures telnetting to BBSes from terminal programs running inside the Hatari emulator. I’ve made some changes in my process and I thought it would be good to explain everything, step-by-step. It’s not for the novice, but it is rewarding. Besides Hatari and any …