Interview with Amit Patel, Creator of “Solar Realms Elite” (2013)

Other awesome BBS door games, for a those that want a shot of nostalgia:

LORD, Barren Realms, Falcon's Eye, Land of Devastation, Planets: TEOS, Usurper

It was a fun era. I had a BBS all setup and ready to go, complete with insane ASCII art: the plan was to make it live once my sister went to college, giving me the second phone line entirely to myself. But in the intervening two years the internet really took off and by the time she moved out (1997) it felt like a pointless endeavor.

Amit Patel was employee #7 at Google and built many things including the little geo display in the lobby that would show live search queries as dots color coded by language.

Amit Patel's website is so good, some of the best explanations of concepts like pathfinding, perlin noise etc

https://www.redblobgames.com/

For what it's worth, you can still play it today if you want to. I set up Solar Realms Elite a while back on my BBS with help of Amit's instructions found here[1]. In the spirit of things it's pretty funny having to circumvent a Y2K bug by setting the date to 12/31/1999, but it works flawless after that.

[1] - http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Docu...

Ah, nostalgia. I was a LORD man myself. One of my good friends from the BBS scene in my hometown (412/724) had a Telnet/SSH instance of LORD that ran for a good decade plus.

(2013)

[dead]