I Miss the Sound a 1200 Baud Modem Makes When Connecting

Created by Seth Robinson at the age of 14, LORD quickly became a sensation, attracting tens of thousands of players around the world and revolutionizing the BBS gaming landscape. Its success came not only from its engaging gameplay but also from its innovative social features that appealed to players. Additionally, Seth allowed other developers to add their own IGMs (In Game Modules) to LORD, also expanding the game’s universe.

To dive into the fascinating story behind LORD and the golden age of BBS, we invited the game’s creator, Seth Robinson, to join our interview. In the conversation, we embarked on a nostalgic journey through the history of BBS, explored the creative process behind LORD, and discussed the challenges and opportunities facing the game industry. Seth also offered valuable advice for aspiring indie game developers, emphasizing the importance of creating brand new experience and shareable games.

Today, Seth and his wife run a unique game-themed cafe in Kyoto, Japan. If you find yourself exploring the city, why not stop by and get lost in this delightful world of games?

▮ The Nexus: Could you share your first encounter with a BBS? 

Seth Robinson: I got a 1200 baud modem for my Commodore 128 in the late 80s and used the online service Quantum Link (which later became AOL).

Figuring out that I could also use that same modem to call local computers (known as Bulletin Board Systems) to send messages and play games for free was incredible! As a homeschooled kid living in a tiny town, it was a gateway to the wider world.

▮ The Nexus: For those who missed out on the early days of BBS, how would you describe BBS and its communities? How does the atmosphere of BBS differ from that of the Internet?

Seth Robinson: The BBS world was mostly text, zero spam, and real people that lived in the same town due to only local phone calls being free.

People who’d never hang out at school or in the "real world" would become friends online. It felt like being a part of a secret society, a technological subculture that came out at night when nobody else was using the phone.

It wasn’t uncommon to receive an actual voice phone call from the system operator after calling a new BBS - they would "verify" you before giving you access; this is how we would stop people from making duplicate accounts.

Not only could you call other people’s systems, but you could run your own if you had at least one spare phone line. Sort of like having a website today, but instead of a URL, someone had to know your phone number to connect. 

You would then gleefully watch as they’d navigate your system, breaking into text-chat if they looked like they needed help. That sounds kind of creepy today, hah.

▮ The Nexus: What are BBS door games? How did the limitations of BBS technology shape their design?

Seth Robinson: Converting data to a sound, sending it over the phone, then converting it back to data is quite slow. As a result, the best bang for the buck was sending text with special sequences to change color or move the cursor around, a standard that used all 8 bits and was called ANSI, vs a 7-bit format called ASCII.

Sending a real picture was out of the question in the early days, even if the client running on your computer could display a bitmap image (most couldn’t, keep in mind your computer in those days might only have had around 64KB of ram, less space than a modern Windows icon). Would you want to wait around twenty minutes for a single tiny image?

It turns out there is a lot you can do with just text. The strength of the BBS is the multi-user interaction, and nothing made better use of that than games designed for a group of real players rather than just one.

A BBS server would launch a "door" to another program (a game for example), giving full control to it. When the door exited, the normal BBS software would take control back - all transparently to the user. 

The big limitation of these doors is that only one person can connect at once to a BBS per phone line, so for most systems (typically run by normal people in their spare time) this means taking turns.

These games were designed to limit how long you could play so that one person wouldn’t hog the line all day.

The "turns per day" limitation meant missing a day might put you at the bottom of the leaderboard.

The magic of the modem let me play games with real people! (even if only asynchronously most of the time)

▮ The Nexus: What was your inspiration for Legend of the Red Dragon? What was the creative process like? Any challenging moments? 

Seth Robinson: I was 14 and having trouble getting people to call my crappy BBS. Because I used an Amiga, I couldn’t host any of the popular door games of the time.

I must have found source code to an example BBS door written in C - I used that example to write a very simple door. It was a slow process not only because the Lattice-C compiler I had ran like molasses, but also because I had never used C before and was learning from code I’d found.

Eventually I was able to watch as users entered my virtual tavern. They could both write messages on a chatwall as well as flirt with the barmaid. As simple and dumb as it was, it was pretty thrilling watching people navigate my little door.

▮ The Nexus: How did you come up with the "flirt" feature in LORD? What other elements or mechanics captured the attention of the players?

Seth Robinson: Being immature, flirting and killing monsters was my focus and I think that struck a chord with other players who were probably close to my age.

Originally, the game wasn’t much of a game - it was just a "chatwall", a place where people could graffiti public messages to each other on a wall. Then, you could flirt with the barmaid, as this was simple to implement, much easier than the fighting and leveling up stuff that came later.

For years I kept adding more random events and mini-games inside, all carefully designed to not allow the playtime to rise above 15 minutes per day. There is a certain freedom when making text games - any mental picture is only a single sentence away.

What truly added longevity to the game was allowing other developers to create little doors within my door to add new options. Hundreds of these IGMs (In Game Modules) expanded what players could do and kept players engaged.

I love the concept of allowing addons to games and incorporated similar features for my later games too, including Planets: The Exploration of Space, LORD 2, Funeral Quest, and Dink Smallwood.

▮ The Nexus: How many times was LORD played per day at its peak?

Seth Robinson: I’ve estimated over a million daily, but I really have no idea. It was widely "pirated" around the world as the registration code key system I used was complete ass.

Instead of hackers making a keygen to post, it was so simple you could just explain how to generate your own code in a few lines of text.

▮ The Nexus: Back then, how did game communities like LORD differ from other online communities? And in your opinion, how did they impact people’s sense of belonging and social connections?

Seth Robinson: LORD allowed players to not only flirt with the barmaid or bard, but also each other. Eventually I added features that let players marry and even have kids, which might have been novel at the time. 

Probably most players ignored this stuff and just killed monsters and dragons, but I did get letters from at least a few people who met in the game and got married in real life. I still really appreciate it when I get a nice email about LORD or my other old stuff.

▮ The Nexus: How has LORD changed your life? What aspects of LORD and its community do you find yourself missing the most?

Seth Robinson: I was extremely lucky to have grown up at a time when you could present a simple text-only game to the world and make money from it.

While I enjoyed being a part of the BBS world, I also love what we’ve evolved to now.

I miss the sound a 1200 baud modem makes when connecting.

▮ The Nexus: How does a game idea turn into a playable reality? Could you give us a glimpse into your typical development process? What do you enjoy most about game design and development? 

Seth Robinson: I have a text document with a bunch of ideas. When I’m between projects, I’ll look it over and try to improve them. When one feels good enough, I’ll start working on it. 

Allowing the idea to grow and change as you go is very important. I don’t like thick design guides; I like to keep things light and get the main gameplay loop and feel correct and iterate from there. 

Enjoy most?  Hmm, part of it is seeing your creation come together; gleefully spawning a hundred ducks on the screen and seeing them waddle around and quack.

And of course finally releasing your game to the wilds and checking downloads and sales is equal parts exciting and terrifying.

▮ The Nexus: Beyond LORD, what other games have you created, spanning from BBSes to the PC and mobile platforms? Which of these games are you most satisfied with? What have you learned from creating them? 

Seth Robinson:  Hmm, my more popular games include Dink Smallwood (an RPG), Dungeon Scroll (a word game),  Funeral Quest (a Web based multiplayer funeral parlor simulator), Teenage Lawnmower (a 3D Lawn mowing simulator) and Growtopia (a 2D social MMO). 

Dink Smallwood

I can’t really see any rhyme or reason to the things I make or why. I truly love programming and trying new things, so that and financial needs at the time dictate what I work on more than anything. 

In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have made the RPG, it was too large a project for us at the time. Good thing I was young and naive so it got made, I guess. 

Flexibility is key. I like to jump on fresh platforms (PocketPC, iPhone, VR, etc.). It's not only exciting but can be a nice payoff if you beat the bigger players to market - small ponds and all that.

▮ The Nexus:  What was it like to transition from BBS games to other platforms? How did you approach trying to achieve the sense of community on these new platforms, and how did that differ from the BBS environment?

Seth Robinson:  Community for me has come full circle.

We’ve slowly gone from everyone you talk to online being a real person in 1984 to 2024 where most people on social media aren’t real and most definitely aren’t actually "singles in your area".

The most recent multiplayer online game I worked on (Growtopia) is now, like most free online games/services, battling bots.

Growtopia

I believe charging even a tiny signup can drastically help situations like this and stop community decay, but this would also likely kill the game as nobody would pay to play. 

The entire free Internet is flooded with bots, and with recent AI advances, there will be no captcha good enough to keep them out. 

That said, games like Growtopia do have wonderful creative communities. However, player privacy + strong bans against bad actors are just a hard thing to achieve with current limitations developers have in free games.

▮ The Nexus:  How do you manage player interactions, especially as the game community expands? What insights do you gain from their feedback?

Seth Robinson:  People are wonderful; people are horrible. If you let players have interesting choices in your online game, it will be minutes before someone draws a rude body part by dropping rocks or whatever.

I like the excitement and risk of it, but there is also a responsibility we developers have, especially when kids play our games. Kind of sad when it forces developers to dumb down multiplayer games to keep them safe, but I understand.

▮ The Nexus:  You mentioned in your blog that you saw someone making daily purchases that seemed strangely high in Growtopia and you thought it might be a kid using a parent’s device. What do you think of this phenomenon? How did you handle it in your game?

Seth Robinson:  Any game with unlimited purchases that attracts children should be closely scrutinized. It’s weird that the actual casino industry is still much more heavily regulated than games with millions of children players.

Gacha mechanics are particularly odious. Until platform owners are forced to do anything, it’s up to us to boycott this crap.

For example, Genshin Impact is a game where you can sink $200 into "crystals" to gamble with and still not get that new character you want. I’m not saying the game is bad, just the methods of monetization that are designed to find people that will make bad financial decisions over years.

In Growtopia, we added spend limits internally because Apple/Android wouldn’t. Why should anyone ever spend more than $30 in a day in a freemium MMO? We also added an internal game option that disables all game purchasing options completely, making it safer to hand a freemium game like this to a younger player.

Seth giving talk at C2 Kyoto Gamedev meetup

▮ The Nexus: What do you see as the biggest challenges currently facing the game industry, and how do you believe they can be addressed or overcome?

Seth Robinson: Well, in addition to bots, I’d say creating a new game puts you in the unenviable position of not just competing with other games released this year, but every game ever made.

At first, we had to contend with cheap illegal game boxes on Amazon that come with 50,000 games, but now even legal bundles and subscriptions have lowered the value of even relatively new high budget games to just pennies.

Supply and demand, I guess. All the more reason for indies to target underserved niches, but I guess it’s hard to have a hit Apple Vision Pro game if nobody buys the hardware…

On the flipside, this is an amazing time to be alive for gamers. 

▮ The Nexus: You’ve been running an indie game company（Robinson Technologies）for many years, which means you have to wear many hats, from programming and design to marketing and community management. It’s undoubtedly challenging. What advice would you offer to fellow indie game developers facing challenges?

Seth Robinson: I think everyone should make games, music and art, but not necessarily expect to make it a paying career choice.

However, if you want to go that way, your best bet is to create something nobody has ever played before, a brand new experience. That’s a pretty tall order!

Oh, absolutely don’t confuse time spent working on something with its value to players. Life isn’t fair like that. 

Build games that are easy to share (hey, it’s free marketing). Don’t worry too much about the money at first, if you get a lot of players, you can figure that part out later.

Until you release it publicly, it’s like it never existed.

▮ The Nexus: Living in Japan, have you explored the history of Japanese games? If so, which part or game is most appealing to you? 

Seth Robinson: I’m very interested in Japanese gaming history and gaming history in general. It’s a lot of fun to read about something, then play it on original hardware. It’s like history comes alive. Learning about the exchange of gaming ideas between Japan and the rest of the world in the early days is very interesting. Nothing happens in a vacuum. 

For example: did you know Sega was started by Americans?  Taito by a Russian Jewish businessman?

A mind blowing factoid: An Iranian-American working for Square in Japan named Nasir Gebelli programmed a bunch of hit NES games including Rad Racer, Final Fantasy and Secret Of Mana. He spoke no Japanese initially, had no translator and programmed in raw assembly. To a modern programmer, that’s like climbing Mount Everest without clothes.

▮ The Nexus: In your view, what can generative AI bring to games? What are the challenges of trying to use AI inside a game?

Seth Robinson: Every tool used to develop games will eventually be touched by some form of generative AI. I have no doubt at all.

As far as being used directly in the game - well, we’re now at the point where we can include locally run generative AI (Lama 3, Stable Diffusion, etc.) inside a game on a user’s computer, but I think most games would benefit from a more invisible use.

So instead of, "SAY ANYTHING YOU WANT AND IT WILL CHAT BACK, AMAZING!" which gets old quickly, AI might be running in the background transparently to make smart decisions or create rooms and enemies that fit the situation better.

It might just be powering a game of chess because it’s simpler to instruct an advanced AI to "make a good move in this situation" than implement a real chess algorithm. 

I think players will be numb to games (or anything) bragging about AI at some point, so using it subtly and just focusing on a great experience is probably the better play.

▮ The Nexus: How do you describe your current lifestyle? Do you have any exciting new game ideas you’re working on?

Seth Robinson:  I’m semi-retired and am being pretty lazy these days. It’s sort of boring, honestly. 

To help with the boredom, my wife and I run a cafe in Kyoto where we host real-life meetups for board games, gamedev, mahjong and retro computing - all are welcome. 

With BBSes long-gone, locally meeting real humans for community is more important than ever.