Thank you for covering this topic. Play-by-mail remains a hobby, albeit much smaller than the 1980s and 1990s. You can find out more about the hobby, including an index of 70 available games at Suspense & Decision: http://suspense-and-decision.com
Hey Jack! I enjoyed the game immensely. I remember writing to you as a teen and asking questions about the development of the game. I recall you answering that it had been written in Visual Basic. As an adult I’m a working software engineer and people like you were an inspiration.
It was. I remember looking at the source code and being totally baffled by it; it was very much spasghettiish code and not exactly great; I worked for KJC Games in Cleveleys, just short of Blackpool as a game designer/programmer from 1988-1990 and created the Warlord and Quest games that they still run nowadays.
From a 34 year old memory I remember looking at the way some parts of arrays held special values. I'd never seen that done before. MInd you it was Basic so quite ingenious getting it working like that. Nigel Mitchell did most of the day to day running (apart from the girls who entered the orders) so the praise should go to him.
Wow, thanks for digging up this info. I used to play this game as a teen and I could not find any information on it. Blood Pit, which I guess was a competitor to Duel Masters, was also a favorite of mine.
"You could get that with a PBEM game, but there is also something very viceral [sic] about getting that envelope in your hands and pouring over the results in hard-copy." There should be a "[sic]" after "pouring" also, since the proper homophone here is "poring."
Interesting! I played "It's a Crime" for perhaps a dozen turns before the expense got to me. I played other PBM games, most notably the non-computer-moderated "Star Lord," which was a hot mess.
In the small world department, I worked with Jack Everitt's brother Charlie at my first job out of college. Charlie mentioned helping create planets for their space game.
I played "It's a Crime" for several cycles in the early 90's and got quite a few of my college's gaming club members into it as well. One of the guys who did it with me in college made contact with someone else in the game who had put together nearly 50 pages of statistical probabilities and strategy for it, which helped me to make it to mob boss the last time I played and allowed him to win it once as well. Never looked forward to my mail as much as I did with It's a Crime, heh.
I *just* missed PBM games, having been born in ‘81. I remember seeing an advert for one in some magazine when I was about 10 … It was a Barbarian-themed game. I wanted to play it but couldn’t make my parents understand what they were paying for.
Fortunately I spent my teenager years playing MUDs but this was a very interesting article about the PBM craze. Thanks for researching and writing.
I wonder, o I would like to ask if part of this complexity of multi-user text-based games has been lost forever when did the jump to graphics and to nowadays designs. Do you think there's any equivalent to the experience of playing this game, or any other PBM game, in digital graphic form?
The same questions go to the MUDs This is a totally uninformed question, but a true one. I meant no disdain graphics or make the kind of "good ol' times were better". I really wonder if some complexity or deepness has been lost when made the jump away from the text.
There's very much a dominant narrative that newer always equals better in computer games. I hope articles like this and the LambdaMOO piece (among others) are doing their part to help deflate this assumption, and make a case that there are great reasons to talk about old games other than nostalgia.
Aaron, thank you so much for writing up Monster Island in your incredible series on paper based text games. You’re doing so a wonderful service of preserving the memory of these games.
There were three types of PBM games:
1. Computer-moderated = 100% adjudicated by the programs (It’s a Crime!, Duelmasters, Monster Island, Starweb)
2. Computer-assisted, human-moderated = (Beyond the Stellar Empire, Midgard)
3. Hand-moderated = 100% adjudicated by humans (Tribes of Crane)
I’ve a collection of more than 450 PBM game rulebooks (1975-1997), and I’m pretty sure there were at least 750 or more of them made.
I believe the top grossing (and most profitable) games were It’s a Crime! and (RSI’s) Duelmasters.
TSR’s Dragon magazine was (sadly!) too expensive for PBM companies to advertise in. Player acquisition was ridiculously expensive and a PBM company had to be great at player retention. Our best way of recruiting new players was having a booth at the Gencon and Origins game shows.
I met my partners at ABM playing Pellic Quest (a superior Star Web clone) and Tribes of Crane. Frankly, it was Tribes of Crane that was the first big game in PBM and caused the explosion. George Schubel is the father of the industry, to me, not Rick Loomis. We started Beyond the Stellar Empire to provide a space game akin to Tribes of Crane.
We introduced laser printers to PBM with It’s a Crime!. We could input a turn in less than 30 seconds, and then process/print it also in less than 30 seconds. This was revolutionary and the first-ever PBM that was really profitable.
It was at Gencon 1993 that Magic: The Gathering was released; I could instantly tell it would be huge (though no way as huge as it became) and returning home I was determined to sell it by mail. We convinced WotC to sell to us directly, and then some months later became a WotC distributor. This saved our company, as PBM was dying due to something called the Internet.
I don’t think Monster Island turn processing was ever slow; there was no way for that to happen. But, selling Magic cards soon took up all of my time in 1994 (causing to cease development of an It’s a Crime! sequel) and we turned development over to KJC Games, our long-time English partner. (I was the only developer for MI up until then.) KJC did everything on the east side of the Crystal Hills barrier.
My goal for Monster Island was try to get a player to play for two years. Some years ago I learned at least one player played for more than 20 years and more than 1000 turns. This just blows my mind.
I don’t think the German language version of Monster Island every appeared. We never heard from them after we sent them the code.
Each game we made took 1-2 years to develop and test. Every other one was success. Oh, and I made that map font you in the printouts; the only graphics anything I’ve ever made.
Hi Jack-- thank you so much for these corrections and additional insights, I'll definitely incorporate them into the book revisions. If you have anything else from the article you want to correct or add thoughts on, feel free to reach out (I'm aareed at gmail). Happy to have a small part in preserving the joy of play by mail for future generations! Monster Island brought me a lot of joy when I played it as a teenager, and I knew I saved those old turn reports for a reason =)
Rick Loomis also deserves a mention in the chapter on Choose Your Own Adventure. Buffalo Castle, the first "solo adventure" for the RPG Tunnels and Trolls, was published in 1976, three years before CYOA, and invented the genre.
Loomis was definitely hugely influential, but this isn't quite accurate: Ed Packard's first multiple-choice book, "Sugarcane Island," was also published in 1976 (and written in the sixties), and the CYOA article talks about some of the many earlier examples, including the 1930 novel "Consider the Consequences!" by Doris Webster and Mary Alden.
This is part of why I generally try to avoid claiming someone did something "first" in this series: reality tends to be a lot more complicated than our desire to narrativize it into beginnings or endings! (Although I think it's pretty uncontested that Loomis's success with Flying Buffalo helped give rise to commercial play-by-mail.)
I liked reading about this one PBM I'm sure there were many not as fleshed out, but I wonder how many did have in excess of a decade of scope?
You've passed over the years of the first 100 World of Eamon Adventures, and the release of the Eamon Dungeon Designer Diskette; but I wonder if you might have it in your upcoming list somehow none-the-less.
I don't know for sure how many PBM games ran for over a decade: there were definitely quite a few with long-term fanbases, but the vast majority were only around for a few years before fading away.
Sorry we won't be hitting Eamon! There are literally hundreds of games and systems that would have been cool to touch on in this series...
P.S. Flying Buffalo still runs Starweb and Heroic Fantasy games by PBEM, but they have an option for paper turns!
Thank you for covering this topic. Play-by-mail remains a hobby, albeit much smaller than the 1980s and 1990s. You can find out more about the hobby, including an index of 70 available games at Suspense & Decision: http://suspense-and-decision.com
I'm loving this series! So much I didn't know.
Wow! Thanks so much for the incredible write up of my Monster Island game.
Thanks for stopping by, Jack! Glad you enjoyed the article and hope I didn't mangle the history too badly. =)
Hey Jack! I enjoyed the game immensely. I remember writing to you as a teen and asking questions about the development of the game. I recall you answering that it had been written in Visual Basic. As an adult I’m a working software engineer and people like you were an inspiration.
Apparently it was QuickBasic rereading. Visual Basic probably wasn't a thing yet. :)
It was. I remember looking at the source code and being totally baffled by it; it was very much spasghettiish code and not exactly great; I worked for KJC Games in Cleveleys, just short of Blackpool as a game designer/programmer from 1988-1990 and created the Warlord and Quest games that they still run nowadays.
KJC Games did a great job running Monster Island, btw!
David!
From a 34 year old memory I remember looking at the way some parts of arrays held special values. I'd never seen that done before. MInd you it was Basic so quite ingenious getting it working like that. Nigel Mitchell did most of the day to day running (apart from the girls who entered the orders) so the praise should go to him.
Wow, thanks for digging up this info. I used to play this game as a teen and I could not find any information on it. Blood Pit, which I guess was a competitor to Duel Masters, was also a favorite of mine.
"You could get that with a PBEM game, but there is also something very viceral [sic] about getting that envelope in your hands and pouring over the results in hard-copy." There should be a "[sic]" after "pouring" also, since the proper homophone here is "poring."
Good catch, thanks!
Interesting! I played "It's a Crime" for perhaps a dozen turns before the expense got to me. I played other PBM games, most notably the non-computer-moderated "Star Lord," which was a hot mess.
In the small world department, I worked with Jack Everitt's brother Charlie at my first job out of college. Charlie mentioned helping create planets for their space game.
I played "It's a Crime" for several cycles in the early 90's and got quite a few of my college's gaming club members into it as well. One of the guys who did it with me in college made contact with someone else in the game who had put together nearly 50 pages of statistical probabilities and strategy for it, which helped me to make it to mob boss the last time I played and allowed him to win it once as well. Never looked forward to my mail as much as I did with It's a Crime, heh.
Wow, small world!
I *just* missed PBM games, having been born in ‘81. I remember seeing an advert for one in some magazine when I was about 10 … It was a Barbarian-themed game. I wanted to play it but couldn’t make my parents understand what they were paying for.
Fortunately I spent my teenager years playing MUDs but this was a very interesting article about the PBM craze. Thanks for researching and writing.
I wonder, o I would like to ask if part of this complexity of multi-user text-based games has been lost forever when did the jump to graphics and to nowadays designs. Do you think there's any equivalent to the experience of playing this game, or any other PBM game, in digital graphic form?
The same questions go to the MUDs This is a totally uninformed question, but a true one. I meant no disdain graphics or make the kind of "good ol' times were better". I really wonder if some complexity or deepness has been lost when made the jump away from the text.
Thanks.
There's very much a dominant narrative that newer always equals better in computer games. I hope articles like this and the LambdaMOO piece (among others) are doing their part to help deflate this assumption, and make a case that there are great reasons to talk about old games other than nostalgia.
Aaron, thank you so much for writing up Monster Island in your incredible series on paper based text games. You’re doing so a wonderful service of preserving the memory of these games.
There were three types of PBM games:
1. Computer-moderated = 100% adjudicated by the programs (It’s a Crime!, Duelmasters, Monster Island, Starweb)
2. Computer-assisted, human-moderated = (Beyond the Stellar Empire, Midgard)
3. Hand-moderated = 100% adjudicated by humans (Tribes of Crane)
I’ve a collection of more than 450 PBM game rulebooks (1975-1997), and I’m pretty sure there were at least 750 or more of them made.
I believe the top grossing (and most profitable) games were It’s a Crime! and (RSI’s) Duelmasters.
TSR’s Dragon magazine was (sadly!) too expensive for PBM companies to advertise in. Player acquisition was ridiculously expensive and a PBM company had to be great at player retention. Our best way of recruiting new players was having a booth at the Gencon and Origins game shows.
I met my partners at ABM playing Pellic Quest (a superior Star Web clone) and Tribes of Crane. Frankly, it was Tribes of Crane that was the first big game in PBM and caused the explosion. George Schubel is the father of the industry, to me, not Rick Loomis. We started Beyond the Stellar Empire to provide a space game akin to Tribes of Crane.
We introduced laser printers to PBM with It’s a Crime!. We could input a turn in less than 30 seconds, and then process/print it also in less than 30 seconds. This was revolutionary and the first-ever PBM that was really profitable.
It was at Gencon 1993 that Magic: The Gathering was released; I could instantly tell it would be huge (though no way as huge as it became) and returning home I was determined to sell it by mail. We convinced WotC to sell to us directly, and then some months later became a WotC distributor. This saved our company, as PBM was dying due to something called the Internet.
I don’t think Monster Island turn processing was ever slow; there was no way for that to happen. But, selling Magic cards soon took up all of my time in 1994 (causing to cease development of an It’s a Crime! sequel) and we turned development over to KJC Games, our long-time English partner. (I was the only developer for MI up until then.) KJC did everything on the east side of the Crystal Hills barrier.
My goal for Monster Island was try to get a player to play for two years. Some years ago I learned at least one player played for more than 20 years and more than 1000 turns. This just blows my mind.
I don’t think the German language version of Monster Island every appeared. We never heard from them after we sent them the code.
Each game we made took 1-2 years to develop and test. Every other one was success. Oh, and I made that map font you in the printouts; the only graphics anything I’ve ever made.
Again, thank you SO MUCH for writing up my game!
Hi Jack-- thank you so much for these corrections and additional insights, I'll definitely incorporate them into the book revisions. If you have anything else from the article you want to correct or add thoughts on, feel free to reach out (I'm aareed at gmail). Happy to have a small part in preserving the joy of play by mail for future generations! Monster Island brought me a lot of joy when I played it as a teenager, and I knew I saved those old turn reports for a reason =)
Rick Loomis also deserves a mention in the chapter on Choose Your Own Adventure. Buffalo Castle, the first "solo adventure" for the RPG Tunnels and Trolls, was published in 1976, three years before CYOA, and invented the genre.
Loomis was definitely hugely influential, but this isn't quite accurate: Ed Packard's first multiple-choice book, "Sugarcane Island," was also published in 1976 (and written in the sixties), and the CYOA article talks about some of the many earlier examples, including the 1930 novel "Consider the Consequences!" by Doris Webster and Mary Alden.
This is part of why I generally try to avoid claiming someone did something "first" in this series: reality tends to be a lot more complicated than our desire to narrativize it into beginnings or endings! (Although I think it's pretty uncontested that Loomis's success with Flying Buffalo helped give rise to commercial play-by-mail.)
I liked reading about this one PBM I'm sure there were many not as fleshed out, but I wonder how many did have in excess of a decade of scope?
You've passed over the years of the first 100 World of Eamon Adventures, and the release of the Eamon Dungeon Designer Diskette; but I wonder if you might have it in your upcoming list somehow none-the-less.
I don't know for sure how many PBM games ran for over a decade: there were definitely quite a few with long-term fanbases, but the vast majority were only around for a few years before fading away.
Sorry we won't be hitting Eamon! There are literally hundreds of games and systems that would have been cool to touch on in this series...