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  • Hacker News
  • (2013)
    by schoen
  • 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...

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

    https://www.redblobgames.com/

    by nylonstrung
  • 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.
    by exogeny
  • Same here, I played a lot of LORD! Only a little bit of BRE. Incidentally the author of LORD Seth Robinson continues making games long after LORD. I think he’s semiretired now but he has been working on an ai-coded photoshop clone https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy
    by bananaboy
  • 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.

    by Boxxed
  • Operation Overkill
    by FlyingAvatar
  • Tradewars
    by greesil
  • Like others said, pretty much blasphemy leaving off Tradewars, but props for mentioning Usurper! LORD was fun mostly only fun (unless it was heavily modded) for social/community aspects. Usurper was kind of like LORD, but was actually fun to play in and of itself.
    by somenameforme
  • 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.
    by a11r
  • I was lucky enough to spend ten or so hours with Amit over the span of six or eight years after he left Google. He has a fantastic ability to find the simple core of very complicated things, making it easy for others to understand. People repeatedly thought it was so impressive that I understood deep concepts so thoroughly. Then I'd say, "wait, let me draw the simple line chart on the whiteboard that Amit drew for me." Then they immediately understood it just as well as I did. My time with him always left me feeling inspired. He's a truly nice guy too.
    by rented_mule
  • And writing “Don’t be evil” everywhere. I suspect being the “originator” is contested; but this wonderful nerd, who made Red Blob Games, is the spirit.

    Barren Realms Elite and Falcons Eye were my favourite doors games as a teen (written by his brother). Inter-BBS - playing against people in other countries - was just amazing at the time.

    by lll-o-lll