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Classic Games (Games)

Thieves' Guild: a BBS Game With the Best 1990s Pixel Graphics You've Never Seen (breakintochat.com) 55

Posted by EditorDavid from the dial-up-delights dept.
"The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn," writes BBS history blogger Josh Renaud. "You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: 'Thou seest rippling waters...'"

He's describing the beginning of a 27-year-old game that he'd been searching for since 2013. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 why the game is so special — and so rare: Thieves' Guild is a BBS door game for the Atari ST that came out in 1993. [A "door" connected the software running the dial-up Bulletin Board system to an external application.] What made Thieves' Guild unique was its graphical front-end client, which features dozens of eye-popping pixel art vignettes, along with simple animated sprites, sampled speech, and sound effects.

As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering.

The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms."

The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.
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Thieves' Guild: a BBS Game With the Best 1990s Pixel Graphics You've Never Seen More

Thieves' Guild: a BBS Game With the Best 1990s Pixel Graphics You've Never Seen

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  • Couple other tidbits (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kirkman14 ( 2442696 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @11:52AM (#60521900) Homepage

    A couple other interesting tidbits:

    Witte and Flower didn't just sell the game to sysops. They also developed things to sell directly to BBS users, such as a standalone version of the game, and a parchment map of the game's world

    CompuServe was impressed by the graphics in the Thieves' Guild front-end client, and began negotiating with Witte about licensing the game, but it didn't pan out.

    Earlier this year, Herb Flower's previously-unreleased Atari ST platform game Dark Fortress was rescued [breakintochat.com], and is now available to download and play.

    • It's funny you should mention this...

      It's true.. there was a budding and very immature industry writing either BBS software, or extensions to BBS software, which was essentially killed off by the internet.

      I often wonder what the world would look like if the Internet stayed partitioned from the public and that nascent industry was allowed to take hold.

      • Re:Couple other tidbits (Score:5, Informative)

        by Kirkman14 ( 2442696 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @12:18PM (#60521952) Homepage
        You can see the direction the BBS industry was headed if you watch the "Make it Pay" episode of the BBS Documentary [youtube.com] ... around 1993-95 there were conventions like One BBScon, there was a cottage industry of books about how to become a sysop, there were even short-lived trade groups like the Door Authors Marketing Association [breakintochat.com].

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by JustOK ( 667959 )
        It was the internet that allowed BBS to become alive, it was the world wide web that killed it.

        • It was the internet that allowed BBS to become alive, it was the world wide web that killed it.

          The BBSes that I used to use were by dial-up. No internet involved. My phone bills were painful.

          • that's because you did not subscribe to 2600 LOL

            • that's because you did not subscribe to 2600 LOL

              Actually I did. But I tended to not do things that seemed unethical. Admittedly I had a good job, which made those types of decisions easier.

              • Ha, I'm glad there is another.
                what a great read 2600 was. I always looked forward to it.
                some of the stuff I learned was amazing. helped me learn
                how to control a few machines using the c-64 and self created
                interface board.

                I wonder if there is anything like it now-a-days

      • Yep, wrote a door library in turbo pascal back in the day. Was very easy to use, but ultimately killed by the internet.

        • before I forget, thank you for writing the code, it helped many ( even me maybe )
          but it was people who started the foundation that sometimes need the clapping of the hands.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        It's true.. there was a budding and very immature industry writing either BBS software, or extensions to BBS software, which was essentially killed off by the internet.

        I'd say by the 90s doors were relatively mature.

        Of course, the big problem with doors was the PC - DOS was the major stumbling block, resulting in nasty hacks like needing things like FOSSIL drivers and multitasking environments like DesqView in order to handle multiple lines and have multiple programs that can bang on the serial port (becaus

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wv5k ( 771543 )
          Oh, for mod points today... I ran an OS/2 support BBS for a number of years back in the 1990's. FOSSIL drivers, etc, how I remember having to jump through all the DOS hacks required (and how so many of them were denied to me as an OS/2 support bbs). I also wonder what has happened to all of that source code... Anyway, thanks for the memories... ;-)

  • And so it begins – entering an age in which not immediately knowing what 'BBS' is supposed to mean doesn't mean you were too young to know, but old enough to start forgetting what it used to be and that you once knew about it. Adding insult to injury, though, would then be the fact that retirement age would still be too far away to actually start looking forward to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Artemis3 ( 85734 )

      Not many people used computers in the 80ies, and of those, even less people used modems to connect to other computers.

      Though a "bbs" was just technically some sort of "wall" were people just left messages (like web guestbooks later) they added so many things it became something else. Then internet came and they died. But in Japan, somehow they kept the term for their 2chan style forums.

      Too bad this was an Atari exclusive, if they had done the port for PC earlier it might have seen more exposure. I definitel

  • What? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    "Best 1990s Pixel Graphics You've Never Seen"

    I call bullshit immediately.

  • I was never really into Thieves Guild. LoRD was way better.

    On the topic of mixed media front ends, who here remembers the trend of RIP front ends? The technology had such promise. It's a shame all those artists moved to flash and now there's nothing like it anymore* :(

    * Don't believe wikipedia or other journalistic historical comparisons, SVG and HTML are nothing like the RIP front ends of yore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alantus ( 882150 )
      I used to run a BBS with LoRD and LoRD 2, they were very popular. I also tried RIP at one point, but for some reason people preferred plain old ANSI. I think the clients available were not so good.
  • Wow, this really takes me back to the late 1980's as a high school kid. I created a small Pascal library to handle all the serial communication stuff in a few door programs I wrote for use with QuickBBS. My buddy then ran with it and made a shareware package called "TriDoor" so that folks who didn't understand how to do serial port programming in DOS could still easily write doors. I'd already move on to college at that point and was much more interested in learning Unix network coding by then. But he had a
    • Remember when you had to write TSR's? 'Programmers' these days don't even have clue what's happening behind the blox they stack.
      • Don't blame programmers for computer engineers making contemporary hardware undecipherable.

        • contemporary hardware undecipherable.

          Quite the opposite. You had the key. Behavior was predictable. Fine-tuning was precise. Thinking about all the cool things you could do with VGA registers and refresh syncing... There's nothing really like that anymore. It's kind of a shame.

          • There's nothing really like that anymore. It's kind of a shame.

            Ah, but there is. I spend my time these days doing bare metal coding on ARM Cortex M microcontrollers. You're still twiddling registers and such without any of the modern layer upon layer of API on top of it. Though they're certainly trying to make it that way as basic ARM microcontrollers get more complex. CMSIS as a start and then all the crappy chip manufacturer libraries that typically don't actually work correctly (Yes, I'm looking right at you NXP who's code won't even compile out of the box. And

            • Re:Doors (Score:4, Informative)

              by yassa2020 ( 6703044 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @03:08PM (#60522356)

              Ah yes. My favorite Cortex M are the Gecko series from silabs (previously Energy Micro). They are superbly designed. You can just twiddle a bit to turn off an entire section of the cpu so it doesn't consume power, you can drive a display, and you can even ping-pong frame buffers directly from ram chips using very low power DMA without eating up main cpu time.

              On the downside, their newer, especially RF chips are nearly impossible to use without their bloated Eclipse-based dev environment and confusing/obtuse code-generating templates. ugh. But if you're willing to read through 750 pages of manuals and dozens of code samples there are *some* things you can figure out how to do without their silly templates.

              • Re:Doors (Score:4, Informative)

                by technothrasher ( 689062 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @04:06PM (#60522420)

                Abloated Eclipse-based dev environment

                I still shake my head trying to understand this. I'm using small chips, on small boards, why do I want a huge bloated IDE with 'workspaces'? I do like the Embitz IDE, but support is pretty minimal and the project only seems barely alive, so I can only practically use it for very small projects. Anything with a more current chip, I'm basically stuck with Eclipse.

                • No I absolutely hate Eclipse. It's terrible. My 'IDE' is a Kate (KDE) session. That's it. Code highlighting is all I need. It's possible, with some work, to set up a CMSIS gcc make uclib/musl/etc environment. I've never had the time though :(

                  • Re:Doors (Score:4, Informative)

                    by technothrasher ( 689062 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @04:41PM (#60522474)
                    I've experimented with setting up a simple gcc make environment with any old editor. I've made it work, and if I could use FreeBSD as my dev environment, I'd love it. But we're standardized on Windows at work, so that's what I'm stuck with using.
                • You probably can't beat Astrobe when it comes to anti-bloat.

          • bet you even recall c-64's sprite collision detect, i did not see that anywhere until 1990's

        • I guess I read that wrong. I wasn't reading it pedantically enough ;)

    • Haha yes, did the same thing myself. My library could convert most text mode turbo pascal applications to door applications just by using my library instead of crt. The only caveat was that my writeln only accepted strings as input.

  • ... check out Iron Realms [ironrealms.com] (not affiliated). They've been doing MUDs (old school MMORPGs) since ever and still do today. Highly recommended if you don't need grafics to have fun.

  • I think this is why someone came up with the concept of the “Xennial” generation, because to us the BBS scene consisted of DOS machines and ANSI art, not this Atari stuff.

    Lord, Usurper, Trade Wars... those are the BBS doors I remember. Most of the users I remember from that era seemed to consider graphical front-ends to be too inefficient to use over the slow ass analog models of the day.

    • “Modems”, not “models”. Damn autocorrect.

    • You know what graphical front-ends were efficient? Prodigy. And yes, even AOL. :P Of course they were proprietary, but the point is, fancy stuff was possible with modest bandwidth.

    • Re:Old gen-xers vs young gen-xers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Saturday September 19, 2020 @03:20PM (#60522366) Homepage

      Powercntrl reminisced:

      Lord, Usurper, Trade Wars... those are the BBS doors I remember. Most of the users I remember from that era seemed to consider graphical front-ends to be too inefficient to use over the slow ass analog models of the day.

      I played Tradewars, but my fave was the trivia game Pyroto Mountain. You had to actually know stuff to do well in that one.

      Of course, Sergey and Larry were still in junior high school back then, and Wikipedia was still over a decade away.

      It's also important to note that private individuals were permitted on the Internet as far back as the late 1980's. The problem was that, until first the Web, then IP stacks (or, at least, a shim that emulated an IP stack) for the Windows and Mac platforms were developed, the dominant access paradigm was via terminal emulation software over a dial-up connection. In order to actually use and participate in the 'net, you had to be comfortable with basic BSD Unix commands (because access providers like Netcom ran BSD servers on non-proprietary hardware for the most part), and be content to to live in a text-based, command-line-driven environment online, using front-ends like pine, lynx, nn, and gopher.

      That required a level of nerd-fu that was completely beyond most PC users - and over Grandpa's and Grandma's head like a parachute - which meant the Great Unwashed was largely barred from participation.

      Until 1996, that is, when first CompuServe, then AOL opened their Internet gateways, and the ignorant masses promptly flooded in, bringing with them a level of incivility-by-default - and of credulous stupidity, as well - that has characterized Internet discussion forums ever since.

      And, sure, there was plenty of trolling on BBSes, and no lack thereof on Usenet, either. But, for the most part, it was artful trolling, rather than the juvenile namecalling and racism that characterizes the form today ...

    • Indeed! I've also heard us called "The Oregon Trail" generation.

      Lord--haven't thought about that game in years. Land of Devastation. Great times. I still remember the phone number of the BBS I used to dial in 6th grade.

    • I think this is why someone came up with the concept of the “Xennial” generation, because to us the BBS scene consisted of DOS machines and ANSI art, not this Atari stuff. Lord, Usurper, Trade Wars... those are the BBS doors I remember.

      The BBS scene was more heterogeneous than that. Sure the PC was dominant in the 90s, but there were still Amiga, Atari, Mac, and other kinds of BBSes in small numbers. In fact, many DOS BBS games were ported from (or copied from) other platforms. For example, Assassin [breakintochat.com] began as an Atari ST BBS game in 1990, then migrated to the PC in 1995. Space Empire Elite [breakintochat.com] for the Atari ST was the inspiration for Space Dynasty [breakintochat.com] and Solar Realms Elite [breakintochat.com] on the PC (not to mention Barren Realms Elite [breakintochat.com], Falcon's Eye [breakintochat.com], etc),.

      Anywa

  • Here's Shinobi 3 from 1993: https://i.imgur.com/iiX0KJz.pn... [imgur.com]
    Here's Shining Force 2 from 1993: https://i.imgur.com/lOj6Aeo.pn... [imgur.com]
    Here's Alisia Dragoon from 1992: https://i.imgur.com/O9ph9wM.pn... [imgur.com]

  • Like the stuff produced here [thedarkener.com]. I had a board [thedarkener.com] in the mid 90's, right when they were the most popular, and right *before* the big crash. I loved it more than anything. It was such a huge part of my growing up. BBSes are way underrated by those who hadn't experienced them then, before the Internet connected every computer quasi-seamlessly.

  • As BBS's started to enter their sunset age in the early to mid 90's, mainly due to people with modems starting to to discover the internet, I remember seeing a few interesting developments.

    I was running a BBS and had been looking around for newer BBS software. I came across one that supported your regular ASCII/ANSI graphics but also had a graphics mode which you could use a mouse with. It looked a bit like an 8bit GUI essentially. It also supported basic sound.

    If the internet took a few more years to take

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