If you’ve played Barren Realms Elite at any time in the past quarter-century, you probably have seen this spiffy ANSI title screen:

That’s because — like most classic BBS door games — BRE became more or less “frozen in amber” in the late 1990s after BRE’s creator, Mehul Patel, sold the rights to the game to John Dailey Sofware.

Dailey rebranded the game with a new title screen and released v0.988 in 1999. And BRE hasn’t really changed in the decades since then.

So, a person could be forgiven for thinking this was always how BRE looked. But, in fact, BRE had gone through many title screens while it was under active development. Mehul Patel pushed out dozens of updates between June 1992 (v0.601) and February 1997 (v0.987), and regularly changed the title screen.

Over the years, I have collected nearly 40 releases of BRE, all of which are available for download from the BRE wiki article.

Here, then, is a gallery of 14 BRE title screens culled from my collection.

Hope you enjoy this trip down ANSI/BBS memory lane! (And feel free to share your BRE-playing memories in the comments)