BBS Door Games

Most bulletin boards had one phone line, so only one person could be connected at a time. That should have ruled out multiplayer games. Door games worked round it by turning the wait into the game. You called, spent your few turns for the day trading cargo between star systems or hunting monsters in the forest, and hung up. Hours later someone else called, found that you had raided their planet or taken their place at the top of the rankings, and planned their revenge.

In May 1993 Computer Gaming World surveyed dozens of these games and found that they lived or died by their players. Commercial games could survive a flop for a while, it said, but “the cruel dictates of available hard-drive space cannot tolerate the presence of an on-line game which fails to attract players.” Of Trade Wars it wrote: “For many players cruising the boards, there is no other on-liner.”

Fast facts

What a door was: a separate program that the bulletin board software ran on the caller’s behalf, then returned them to the board when they quit.
Turns: a daily allowance, so every player on a board moved at the same pace however often they called.
Best-known games: Trade Wars and TradeWars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Usurper, Global War, The Pit and Land of Devastation.
Peak: the early to mid 1990s, when a board’s list of doors was part of its advertising.
Afterwards: a few games are still sold and played on bulletin boards reached over the internet.

Why it was called a door

A board’s own software handled messages, mail and file transfers. For anything else, the sysop, the board’s operator, could install an outside program and put it on a menu. Choosing it took the caller through a “door” out of the board and into that program; quitting brought them back.

The two programs had to agree on who was calling. Before running the door, the board wrote a small text file, a drop file, describing the caller and the connection. The door read it and used the serial port named in the file to talk to the caller’s modem itself. One common format, DOOR.SYS, was a plain text file of 31 lines in its early form: the serial port and connection speed on the first lines, then the caller’s name and where they were calling from, their security level, the seconds and minutes left on the call, and whether their terminal could show graphics. A door that read the drop file knew whose turn it was and when to send them back before their time ran out.

The shared formats meant a game did not have to be written for one make of board. A 1993 review of the Powerboard BBS package in BBS Callers Digest made the point for sysops: “Any standard door can be used. DOOR.SYS and DORINFO.DEF based doors are supported.” Game authors advertised the same thing from the other side; in 1995 Continuum Software’s MUD Magica could run “as a Door on a BBS (using the standard DOOR.SYS drop file format)”.

A few turns a day

The daily turn limit made the games fair and kept them social. Computer Gaming World‘s 1993 survey found that nearly every game wrote a bulletin of high scores for the month, week or day for the board to post, “maintaining high caller interest through the gamers’ desire for cyber-glory”. Some added “make-up days”, so a player who missed a day did not fall behind. Global War, a game like Risk, multiplied the armies a player received by the number of days they had missed. It also came with its own terminal program, GWTERM, which drew the map on the caller’s screen with their own computer’s graphics and let them use a mouse.

Trade Wars

Trade Wars put each player in a merchant ship in a galaxy of numbered sectors, buying and selling commodities at ports and building up a fighting force. Computer Gaming World credited it to Chris Sherrick and John Morris of The Abandoned Land BBS, and warned that because so many versions were circulating and each was “highly configurable”, “no two boards seem to carry the same exact” game. The best-known version, TradeWars 2002, was written by Gary Martin, according to modern accounts.

By 1994 boards were competing on how big their galaxies were. One Chicago board advertised in Computer Gaming World “the latest version of Trade Wars 2002 (5,000 sectors!)”. The game also crossed into the bigger commercial systems: a 1995 price list of add-ons for the Worldgroup BBS software included Trade Wars 2002 at $400.

Legend of the Red Dragon

Seth Robinson wrote Legend of the Red Dragon, usually shortened to LORD, in 1989. PC Gamer described it in June 1995 as “a limited MUD that can be run on a BBS”. The player chose one of three classes, a fighter, a thief or a magic user, and gained experience by killing the monsters in the forest round a small town. The game world was small, the magazine admitted, and everything ran from multiple-choice prompts. The fun “really comes from competing with other players, either by simply killing them or just by gaining more experience than anyone else”, and “as each player can only do so much on a single day there’s a real sense of competition to be had.”

Board profiles show how central it became. In BBS Magazine’s board profiles of 1995 and 1996, sysops named it as their most popular game, one board kept “an entire file area full of cheats, tips and related software” for it, and another outlined its menu entry in red to mark its “special status”. Robinson sold his door games to Metropolis in 1998, and says he no longer owns them.

A board’s door menu might run to thirty games. In November 1994 BBS Magazine visited The Flea Market BBS in Florida, which had about 30 doors (“All the Doors here are heavily played”), the more popular among them Usurper, Legend of the Red Dragon, VGA Planets and Barren Realms Elite. The PigPen BBS in North Carolina offered Trade Wars 2002, LORD, Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Land of Devastation, The Pit and Usurper, alongside lighter games such as Fresh Water Fishing and Food Fight. Its sysop, Paul Lewis, wrote doors himself; his most popular was a role-playing game called Yankees and Rednecks.

BBS Magazine described Usurper as “a D&D-style game”; PC Gamer said LORD’s players progressed “in a D&D fashion”. The Pit was an arena fight, which Computer Gaming World summed up as “Let’s Pound Each Other”.

Beyond one board

A board’s game was normally a world of its own, limited to people within a local phone call. Some games reached further. The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review told readers in 1993 that “some games, like Barren Realms Elite or Dragon Warz, even work on mini-nets, so players on different boards can beat each other up”.

The games also travelled well. In 1992 Acorn User’s comms column listed a British board whose conferences carried “on-line games such as Tradewars”, and in 1995 PC Gamer’s British edition told readers that LORD was available on the After Hours BBS.

After the boards

In September 1994 Compute! recommended local bulletin boards to new online gamers: they would probably have “limited graphics (if any), no sound, and one-turn-per-day access”, but they were free, and two of the most popular games were Global War and Trade Wars. The internet emptied most boards later in the decade, and with them the door menus. PC Gamer had already set LORD beside internet MUDs in 1995 and suggested it for “people without internet access”.

Some of the games kept going. John Pritchett’s company EIS sells TradeWars 2002 and a stand-alone server, the Trade Wars Game Server, for hosting it on the internet, and describes a “devoted community of gameops and players”. Robinson’s own site still answers questions about LORD and directs players to the company that sells it. Modern bulletin board software, such as Synchronet, documents DOOR.SYS so that the old doors can still be run for callers who now arrive by telnet instead of by modem.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 106, May 1993, pp. 64–68: survey of BBS games (hard-drive space; bulletins and “cyber-glory”; make-up days; Global War and GWTERM; The Pit; Trade Wars, credited to Chris Sherrick and John Morris).
Computer Gaming World issue 123, October 1994, p. 192: readers’ BBS listings (“the latest version of Trade Wars 2002 (5,000 sectors!)”, Operation Overkill 2; Solar Realms Elite, Usurper and Legend of the Red Dragon on another board).
BBS Callers Digest (BBS Magazine) vol. 4 no. 4, April 1993: review of Powerboard BBS (“DOOR.SYS and DORINFO.DEF based doors are supported”).
BBS Magazine vol. 5 no. 11, November 1994: Bob Browne’s board profiles (The Flea Market BBS, The PigPen BBS, Ten Forward BBS).
BBS Magazine vol. 6 no. 4, April 1995: board profiles (The Hour Glass BBS, “the most popular one right now is Legend of the Red Dragon”; The Town Square BBS).
BBS Magazine vol. 6 no. 6, June 1995: news item on MUD Magica (“the standard DOOR.SYS drop file format”); Worldgroup add-on price list (Trade Wars 2002, $400).
BBS Magazine vol. 7 no. 3, March 1996: board profiles (Dragon Haulers, Usurper “a D&D-style game”).
BBS Magazine vol. 7 no. 1, January 1996: board profiles (a file area of LORD cheats and tips; LORD’s menu entry “outlined in red”).
PC Gamer (UK) issue 19, June 1995, p. 67: shareware and online games, Legend of the Red Dragon.
The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, Commodore Amiga Annual 1993: comms guide (Barren Realms Elite and Dragon Warz on “mini-nets”).
Acorn User issue 117, April 1992: comms column (“on-line games such as Tradewars”).
Compute! issue 168, September 1994: online games feature (BBS games, “one-turn-per-day access”).
Seth Robinson, “LORD FAQ”, Robinson Technologies (web, secondary): LORD “created in 1989”; “I sold all my doors games to Metropolis Inc in 1998.” https://www.rtsoft.com/pages/lordfaq.php
Synchronet wiki, “DOOR.SYS” (web, secondary): the format’s 31 original lines and their fields, and its history. https://wiki.synchro.net/ref:door.sys
EIS, TradeWars home page (web, secondary): the Trade Wars Game Server; “a devoted community of gameops and players”. https://www.eisonline.com/
“Trade Wars”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Chris Sherrick’s original of 1984 and Gary Martin’s TradeWars 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars