Summer of '91; my best friend Chris Riegger and I are hunched over my slightly old but still fully capable i386DX with a blazing fast 14.4 kilobits per second connection. Only 28 days until the start of 8th grade at Gayle Middle School (Stafford Middle for Chris). The day marked the 186th consecutive day we had logged in. I had already slayed the dragon and had been reset to a level one thief.
At the time I didn't know what a MMRPG (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game) was, but if I did I'd bet $$$ that none would ever beat this game. And to this day I'm not sure any have.
Keep reading to learn about one of the best games of all time...
On-line games in 1991? What console was that? I didn’t think M$ launched Xbox Live until 2002?
Well, it truly was played on a console. But it was a "telnet console," not a modern day gaming console... Back before the World Wide Web; we accessed the Internet through a system called a BBS (Bulletin Board System). We’d leave messages for each other called "emai", download GIF pictures, and of course, play games like Legend of The Red Dragon.
LORD was a text-based adventure game; not as in-depth as Zork, but it was multi-player "Internet" enabled. You would think that simply describing a text-based game would be sufficient, but it's not. So enough text already, go play the game for yourself!
What prompted me to write about LORD? I was doing some fact checking for an upcoming article when I bumped into a new version called Legend of the Green Dragon. I'm going to give it a whirl but I won't get my hopes up. Nothing can ever beat the nostalgia or memories of playing the original LORD with my best friend Chris on my i386. Good times.
Good times!
