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Sometime in the 90s (sorry, can't be more specific) I used to dial in to a BBS and play a multi-player game that involved manually mining elements from a planet. It was very detailed, you got employed by a company and even got assigned quarters and had to spend the money you made from mining in order to buy food, clothing and other items. There was a whole mining complex you could navigate with shops and restaurants. I remember lots of players being online and it had a very active chat that you could participate in while mining. I think there was even a live marketplace with active commodity pricing for the minerals you mined.

It's been killing me for days. I tried searching old bbs lists and even pulled out an old hard drive I kept from the system I might have used at the time to see if I could extract the phone number from the dialer logs, but it failed during read. Any thoughts? I would love to find it running somewhere and play it again, but mostly I just need the name so I can find info about it for something I am writing.

You were planet bound in the game, no ships. Ascii art graphics only, I think.

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    Maybe this list will spur your memory. Perhaps this one too.
    – IconDaemon
    Dec 2, 2021 at 20:13
  • Thank you, I found those lists and many others during my initial search. For some reason it isn't on any of them. I think it was a dedicated bbs, not a distributed game.
    – timbitsaregood
    Dec 7, 2021 at 20:22
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    It might be helpful to note the state that the BBS was located in; I dialed into many BBSes in central CT in the 90’s and even ran one (TAG based), but I never heard of a game like this.
    – Michael Tracy
    Dec 19, 2021 at 8:05
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    Also, if there were “lots of players online” [simultaneously, I assume], and this was not a distributed game, it seems to me that it must have been on a computer more powerful than a PC. Could it be that you were actually dialing into a University system? Some of those did host games occasionally.
    – Michael Tracy
    Dec 20, 2021 at 2:12
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    The large number of online users suggests a mainframe host, and given the VGA-style graphics, perhaps Prodigy? I never used the system and can't find any sort of good list of its games.
    – Maury Markowitz
    Feb 11 at 18:37

1 Answer 1

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Are you thinking of TRADEWARS perhaps?

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    Could you provide some details of TRADEWARS, for comparison?
    – wizzwizz4 ♦
    Dec 16, 2021 at 0:03
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    Tradewars does not match the description provided. Amongst other details, TW was not a synchronous multiplayer game and did not have any real time interactions or chats between the dial-up players.
    – colonelclick
    Dec 16, 2021 at 20:46
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    No. I used to play TW, too. Different game.
    – timbitsaregood
    Dec 17, 2021 at 1:33

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