BBS Door Games on the Internet Archive

BBS door games were the multiplayer online games of the dial-up era. Before the web, people used a modem to call a bulletin board system (BBS), usually a hobbyist's computer on a home phone line, and many of those boards offered games you played a few turns of each day against everyone else who called. Titles like TradeWars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon kept whole local communities dialing in for years.

## How door games worked

A "door" was a program the BBS handed you off to: you picked a game from a menu, the board passed your name and connection details to it, and you played in plain text or colored ANSI characters until it handed you back. Because most boards were reached by a local phone call, the players in your game were usually people from your own area code.

Turns were rationed, often a set number per day, which made door games slow, social and competitive. Strategy games like TradeWars 2002, Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite had players building empires in shared universes, while role-playing doors like Legend of the Red Dragon and Operation: Overkill sent you into forests and wastelands to level up and attack other callers.

Legend of the Red Dragon has a good origin story. Seth Robinson ran his BBS on an Amiga, which couldn't run TradeWars and the other popular PC doors, so he wrote his own game to give people a reason to call his board.

Other sysops asked for it, and at its peak tens of thousands of players were fighting the dragon on boards around the world. The earliest surviving PC version, 1.7, dates to May 1992; no copy of the Amiga original has turned up.

## What you'll find in the BBS door games archive

The archive holds the games themselves, often as the original installation files a sysop would have downloaded and registered, along with documentation, sysop guides and the text files that circulated with them. Some versions can be run on their own in DOSBox; others expect a working BBS around them, so they're better treated as preserved software than one-click play.

For the bigger picture, the archive also hosts BBS: The Documentary, Jason Scott's 2005 series in eight episodes about bulletin board culture, released under a Creative Commons license. It's the best single introduction to the world these games lived in.

On Arkibber, searching a game's name and filtering to software turns up the installers and versions, and widening to video and texts brings in the documentary and the files around it. The software & games hub covers the rest of the era.

## Why door games matter

Door games were persistent, shared, asynchronous online worlds a decade before most people had internet access. The daily turn limit that kept players coming back, the leaderboards and the rivalries between neighbors all show up again in later browser and mobile games. They also show how sysops paid for their hobby: many registered the doors they ran, the same way users registered shareware.

The same bulletin boards that hosted these games distributed MS-DOS shareware games, which is a good next stop.