This brings back some nice memories. I was into the Toronto BBS scene pretty heavily back before public internet access became affordable and readily available.
As much as I love modern games, I have to admit I sort of miss some of the classics like TradeWars 2002 and L.O.R.D.
They never really went away. A web remake of LORD, Legend of the Green Dragon (LoGD), has at least 4000 monthly active users currently: https://github.com/lotgd/census
That census also contains some of the more popular servers you might play LoGD on. However, even LoGD is getting a bit old and development stopped a few years ago. There are two modern forks being worked on that I am aware of. The first gets rid of backward compatibility and is more ambitious: https://github.com/lotgd/core
If I can drop a tiny plug for a project I'm working on: I grew up on LORD and MUDs and have been trying to recreate the feeling in a game I've been developing in my spare time for a couple years. It's still in dev/testing, but I'd love any feedback or bug reports anyone may come across: http://www.chatandslash.com
It sure does! Does anyone remember MUDs? Some of those boggled the mind with how creative some folks can be with text and symbols. Good times, great memories from back before being a nerd was en vogue.
Certainly do! Some of the oldest and most creative of the MUDs are still in operation, and still being continually updated. One still-running DIKUmud that is still in operation and is absolutely amazing in regards to the ~25 years of constant evolution is Duris Mud. If you have any interest in MUDs or MUD programming its definitely worth checking out.
MajorMUD! Also, for anyone interested in MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), a Tolkein-based MUD running since 1992, albeit via telnet and not as a BBS door game... It is still running, all these years later [0].
I'm working on websocket MUD based on MajorMUD in Elixir. There are quite a few people actively building new mud engines in modern languages in 2018. There's even a community with a slack org / newsletter etc at https://mudcoders.com/
I think the games I played most in addition to those two is T.E.O.S. (The exploration of space) :)
I ran my own on MBBS (Mike's BBS, Norwegian specific software) and later PCBoard. I still have images of the MS-DOS 6.22 floppies and PCBoard 15.3.. Maybe I'll have a go at them again on my old pentium pro.
I'd like to have Desqview though for more than one node and that is one piece of software I have not been able to keep.
As much as I love modern games, I have to admit I sort of miss some of the classics like TradeWars 2002 and L.O.R.D.