For the last few years, I’ve been researching and imaging other people’s old disks — but recently someone turned the tables and salvaged one of mine!
Let me tell you the story.
Front of an old 5.25″ floppy disk labeled “OASIS-BACKUP”.
Synchronet creator Rob Swindell recently shared some sad news: longtime BBSer C.G. Learn died earlier this month.
I didn’t know C.G. very well, but we interacted occasionally over the years on Dovenet, a message network for Synchronet BBSes. But I’ll never forget one kind gesture that C.G. extended to me after my daughter died in 2020, at a moment when I was trying to capture any fragments of memory, any evidence of her short time on earth.
Yesterday entrepreneur 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 Atari ST BBS door games, Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier.
Today he found some and gave me permission to post them on Break Into Chat.
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.
Paul Witte, left, and Herb Flower collaborated to create Thieves’ Guild for the Atari ST.
Flower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Witte and Flower teamed up again in 2001 as “Mythyn Interactive” to develop the MMORPG Linkrealms.
Few folks are likely to remember Thieves’ Guild because it was released for the ST in the 1990s, just as that platform was dying out — and that’s a shame. It’s a fun game with interesting ideas, and its front-end client has pretty much the best pixel art of any BBS game that I’ve come across.
These two screenshots show images of the sea shore, and a sea battle, from the Thieves’ Guild front-end client.
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? Something’s out there, and it’s headed your way.
So it goes in “Thieves’ Guild,” a unique BBS door game for the Atari ST.
This is the fifth installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games.
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 for the serious players. (Check out the textfile Slice’s War Manual, an incredibly detailed guide to TradeWars, for a taste of what the good players were doing.)
