Pinned
Woah you have a book?? What's it called I totally want to check it out
Big coffee table size, it's got 400+ images, 100+ artists, lots of fun facts and jokes. Grab a copy now and you've got your dad's next birthday gift all figured out. Here are some nice photos of it from 50 Watts.
On patrol -- "Rim of Space" by K C Ellis, cover for The Space Gamer 63, May/June 1983
PBM = Play By Mail
It's 1983, and email exists but it's still kinda rare. I didn't get my first internet email account until 1986 or so.
Were they actually talking about mailing game turns via physical (paper) mail? Wow.
Play by mail was absolutely a thing, though I was too young to try it. I think it was mostly big wargame stuff, so this was probably like Risk in space.
The history of PBM games goes back at least to correspondence chess, mentioned in some ancient and medieval records, and well documented from the 1800s when specific correspondence rules were codified. In the heyday of Avalon Hill board wargames there were similar accepted standards for playing against remote opponents by mail. That's one reason that wargame maps have had a unique ID number in every hex since at least the 1960s-70s.
In the 1970s, Flying Buffalo and Schubel & Son introduced a number of games designed specifically for PBM, primarily with fantasy and sci-fi themes, usually involving building empires and conquering the neighbors, but also including some smaller scale adventures like dungeon crawls. These games developed their own subculture, spawned many imitators, and were loved by enough players that some are still being played today in some form.
Originally players filled out a short form on paper or a postcard, or even a computer punch card, and mailed it at regular intervals to the host company. Games could be human- or computer-moderated, but they could only run smoothly if their widespread player bases replied promptly and clearly, as noted in Ben Sargent's "Murphy's Rules" feature in that same Space Gamer issue:
As a variant of PBM, Play by Email (PBEM) games appeared as soon as email access reached a sufficient population. There were some early adopters in the 1980s but it really took off in the 90s, contemporaneous with the growth of early online MUDS.
Check out my interview with @lookcaitlin! I'm really happy with this one.
Stanley Martucci & Cheryl Griesbach, illustrating an article about coding magic tricks for RUN magazine's 1989 special issue.
That's it for my @lookcaitlin reblogs today! Give them a follow and then sign up for my art blog newsletter and check out my interview with them tomorrow!
Uncredited, from an Informix ad in the November 1996 issue of Italian computer magazine Bit. "Whatever form your data takes, there is only one technology that can handle it"
John Hamagami's cover art for PC Tech Journal, February 1984
Robert Tinney, for an article about neural networks in Byte magazine, August 1989.
Uncredited art that accompanied the "menu" table of contents for the French-language Micro-Mag, May 1989.
Seth Jaben's interior illustration for chapter two of Scholastic Computing: An Introduction to Computers, by Jack L Roberts, 1984
Anna Davidian, for the cover story "Beyond BASIC: New Languages for Your C-64" in RUN magazine, October 1984
Artist uncredited. From an ad for Hughes LAN Systems ("There’s nothing terminal about our servers") in the May 1990 issue of DEC Professional.
