SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Right from the beginning, games were a component of the commercial online services that predated the World Wide Web; both The Source and CompuServe included them among their offerings from the moment those services first went online. In the early years, such online games were mostly refugees from 1970s institutional computing. Classics like Star Trek, Adventure, and Hammurabi had the advantage of being in the public domain and already running without modification on the time-shared computer systems which hosted the services, and could thus be made available to subscribers with a minimum of investment. Eventually even some text-only microcomputer games made the transition. By 1984, CompuServe, now well-established at the vanguard of the burgeoning online-services industry, had a catalog that included the original Adventure along with an expanded version, nine Scott Adams games, and the original PDP-10 Zork (renamed for some reason to The House of Banshi). And those were just the text adventures. There were also the dungeon crawls Dungeons of Kesmai and Castle Telengard and the war games Civil War, Fantasy, and Command Decision, while for the less hardcore there were the CompuServe Casino, board games like Reversi, and curiosities like a biorhythm charter and an astrology calculator.
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 1: Strategy and Simulation
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 2: MUD
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 3: The Persistent Multiplayer CRPG
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday December 25 2017, @09:00PM
This game is still actively played, and (at least for Debian which I'm using now) has a client ready to install from a repo. As one would imagine from a game with such longevity there is much to recommend it - with a sound and graphics upgrade the kids would happily play it today.