Re: Lost Forever Games

On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 09:05:09 +0200, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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?

The software / gaming thing that I would like to see preserved is those
videogames that were broadcast in TV and you were supposed to call and
play by pressing the numbers on your landline phone.
Sure, you can play the game nowadays since it was a normal Atari ST /
Amiga game and map the inputs to the numpad, but It's not the same
experience as:

I have to admit, I never heard of THAT type of game. But no surprise
if it was on Atari ST; that's a lineage I've little experience with
(and even less desire to learn about now. I'm well satisfied
specializing in DOS games; that's enough for me. ;-)


I gotta say, I'm not at all sure how it would work. Was the game
running on the TV (well, on some computer whose display was broadcast
over the airways)? Like you said, the latency must have been
IMPOSSIBLE for anything but the most basic puzzle games. What if more
than one person called in (or were specific callers selected and
allowed to play)? And what if it was a re-run? ;-P


Either way, without the TV show and the software on the other end, I
imagine this is another "Lost Forever" game. Although it was --like
PBM/PBEM-- basically trying to solve the same problem: hooking up
people to play against one another back before the Internet made such
things effortless.