Lost Forever Games

Game preservation is becoming increasingly popular; the restoration of
old games, not only making them available for sale but ensuring they
can be played on modern hardware. It's been GOG's modus operandi for a
while, but other publishers are increasingly realizing that it's a
potentially profitable way to make money off their back-catalog. It's
good for gamers too; there are some ancient classics that haven't been
seen by gamers in decades, and deserve another chance to shine.

But it occurred to me --whilst thumbing through the back pages of an
old copy of "Computer Gaming World"-- that there is one genre of games
that will /never/ be preserved and, in fact, seems likely to be
forgotten forever. And that's the world of PBM/PBEM games.

Now, while it is likely some of the regulars here at least know about
these games, a lot of modern games might have no idea what those
initials even mean! (It stands for "Play By Mail / Play By E-Mail).
Before the Internet, it was one of the only ways to play multiplayer
games without physically lugging your Commodore-64 to your neighbor's
house and using a null-modem cable, or squeezing two or more onto a
computer keyboard. With a PBM/PBEM, you'd get a status update of the
game (usual a photocopy of the 'game board') and a selection of moves
you could make in your turn. You'd fill out the appropriate form, pop
it in an envelope, and send it off to the bloke running the game. Said
central dispatcher would enter your moves into his computer, then send
the next player an updated copy of the game status, and the game
proceed round-robin through each player until the turn was complete.

It was slow, it low-fidelity, often arbitrary in options and results,
and it often made Infocom games look impressive with their visual
fidelity. But if you wanted to play against a group of people from
around the world, it was usually your only alternative. The games were
comparatively cheap too. Sure you might find similar options with a
BBS Door game, or if you were in university... but the rates for
either of those in the 80s and early 90s could be exorbitant! PBM/PBEM
games were cheap in comparison (although still not THAT inexpensive.
Rates of $5 for initial set-up and $2 per turn were common).

Because they relied on proprietary software --often run by a single
individual-- there was no wide-spread distribution of the game code.
When the companies running them went belly-up (even by the early 90s
they were a dying breed) no attempt was made to preserve the code.
Even if there was, these games often didn't run on home micros, but
ran concurrently with other games on re-purposed PDPs and other old
mainframes. And even if they could be preserved, they aren't something
you could easily run on your own. So a lot of the games are just gone
forever.

     (Technically, the PBM/PBEM genre isn't completely dead*;
      in fact some modern games still include a PBEM option!
      But all those services advertised in the back pages of
      gamer magazines are lost)


Which is a shame because --while they weren't very good-- they were a
part of gaming history that deserves to be remembered, and it seems a
shame they've been tossed into the dustbin and forgotten.

I tried PBM games a couple of times; one was a role-playing game of
some sort, another was a strategy title. I didn't stick very long with
it because it was just so limited in options and the responses were so
trite and arcane that it didn't seem worth the cost. Sure, the idea of
multiplayer gaming was neat, but since you weren't really interacting
with the other players it didn't feel much different than playing
against the computer. Maybe some PBM games were better, but the ones I
experienced quickly put me off the concept.

Do you remember PBM games? Did you ever try one of the services? Did
you RUN one? Is there any hope, you think, of preserving the software
from this lost era of gaming?









* here's a list of active games
 https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/all4.html