Internet Age
1995 – 2002
After the Internet hit the scene in a big way around 1995, my partners and I saw the writing on the wall. I leveraged my graphics company, DGI (Digital Graphics, Inc.), to produce graphics for my gaming company and moved to the Internet, forming a new company called Quest Interactive Online. We ported many of the games from the BBS world to the Internet using CGI (Common Gateway Interface). Blood Quest: Vampire Chronicles and Galactic Fleet Wars were the two flagship products.
Blood Quest
When we first wrote Blood Quest, we felt it would be a Pay to Play model. This was early in the Internet life cycle, so users immediately rejected paying for anything online. The money started to flow after switching to an ad-supported and Pay to Win model. In this game, you play a burgeoning vampire trying to make your way into vampire society. In addition to the usual dollars, territory, and power, you earn IP (Influence Points) in the game, which you spend to call on the elders of Vampire High Society for favors. We sold IP points in the IP shop to earn money for the game. The same people who burned us in effigy, unwilling to pay to play the game, willingly gave us ten times that amount of money, on average, buying IP points to enhance their vampire.
Galactic Fleet Wars
This game was a strategy multi-player game where you controlled a race on the brink of inter-stellar technology. Using wormholes, you could move to distant areas of the galaxy. Controlling the jump points was the critical strategic part of the game.
Rack-Ware
Stellar Defense, Monserts & Mayhem, Joust, and other titles from the BBS days were remastered and sold on racks in Wal-Mart, Office Depot, and other stores. Ultimately, we ended up posting these games to C-NET Central download and FilePile for distribution and embedded ads within these games. It ended up being more lucrative to give the games away with ads than try and sell them.
Other Games
My other games were more of the common variety, but all graphical: Black Jack, Concentration, GridLock (A Tron Cycles™ clone), GunShip (arcade shooter), Hangman, Metal Worlds (Side Scroller), Milos Hi/Los (card game), Poker, Private Eyes (Graphical Clue “Who Done It”), Slotris (Tetris Clone), Slayers (Graphical version of L.O.R.D.), Syndicate (Hacker Simulation), eChess, Joust, and TOAG (Ishido clone).
DDO-F/X
DDO-F/X was a scripting language I developed to allow BBS’s to have full graphical interface. You could consider it a precursor to HTML, Javascript, and CSS today. My terminal program “LI-TERM” supported it. It stood for Digital Design Online Effects Language. It allowed the controlling of sprits, music tracks, sound effects, event driven architecture, 3D ray-casting, and more. Unfortunately, it was released in 1994, about a year before the internet hit the scene and wiped out the BBS.
