In 1992, Joe Reiss began the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary, an effort to collect ratings for each week’s episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from fans on Usenet.
The “S.O.S.” caught on and remained popular for years, moving to the web in 1995. Ultimately, Reiss collected nearly 300,000 individual ratings.
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.
One of my favorite things since I started Break Into Chat has been interviewing BBS door game creators.
So I really enjoyed watching Dr. Matt Barton of St. Cloud State University interview Seth Robinson. They talk about Robinson’s childhood, his favorite BBS door games, Legend of the Red Dragon, LORD II, and Planets: The Exploration of Space among other topics.
Robinson has discussed LORD in various interviews and posts over the years, but Barton’s interview sheds some new light on things, particularly LORD II and Planets.
Check it out right now!
In 1990, Amit Patel created the BBS door game Solar Realms Elite. In his other life he has worked with programming languages, scientific equipment, data analysis, visualization, geological exploration, simulation of complex systems, economic modeling, maps, trend analysis, artificial intelligence, and web software. He’s now working on interactive reference materials for game developers.
SRE was one of my all-time favorite games. It was my great pleasure, then, to interview Patel about SRE. The interview was conducted by email Jan. 3-27, 2013.
