Break Into Chat

These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes. I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected. I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webcomics-bbses…

At first I assumed it was going to be based on this: https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Space_Empire_Elite which is more like the trader type games you're talking about. There was a history of BBS "door" games with this style of interface, that would have been quite adaptable to Emacs. But yeah, his link to 'Elite' does take to the classic 3d game. Nifty.

I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Design.html For a quick “where are they now”: - Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in downtown Austin (but it was just sold) - Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies - Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/

There are two archives available. What ExecPC had before it was frozen in time, covering 1993-1997 or so, and an archive from "Starfleet HQ BBS" https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index.html A lot of current BBSes may have archives from the last 10 years or so. I know mine does: https://warensemble.com

Holy shit...I went goggling and the dude who wrote SRE was the same guy from google who coined the term "Don't Be Evil." http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/02/18/amit-patel-creator-of-solar-r…

He also wrote a bbs door game in 2015! http://breakintochat.com/blog/2015/09/18/shooter-jennings-creator-of-f… Maybe some more recent ones too, I haven't kept up at all.

Solar Realms Elite sounds similar, but Amit Patel wrote it in 1990. It was inspired by Space Empire Elite in 1987 (the programmer was 13 years old at the time). This article has some screenshots: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator-of-space-…

Some more details here https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-update/

Only a few Atari 8-bit people in the audience, but one thing that wasn't covered in his overview was ATASCII art - sometimes made with a program called a "Breakin' Generator". There are some online demos here: http://www.breakintochat.com/collections/atascii/

I ran a couple BBSes with a friend in the mid 90s. We got rid of file downloads and door games when we transitioned to an all message board system, but we always kept one door game around: Barneysplat! by Bong Software Interview with the author, who is also blind: http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/05/08/austin-seraphin-creator-of-ba… Oh yeah, being snarky teenagers, we also kept Pimp Wars on the board.

I also remember using the BlueWave offline mail reader: * https://en.everybodywiki.com/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader) As well as the QWK and SOUP file formats (the latter when I started on Usenet as well): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) * https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.techwood.org/… And Tradewars 2002 'door game': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars * https://breakintochat.com/wiki/TradeWars_2002 * https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)