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pmarreck

Oh my god, this must have inspired NetTrek, one of the earliest networked Macintosh games that worked over AppleTalk:

http://retroweb.maclab.org/articles/Online-Games.html

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/nettrek

https://archive.org/details/NetTrekTheRealVersionMacintosh

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We played Nettrek on unix workstations at my college. Basically filled up the labs at night doing so on a Friday and Saturday nights back in the early '90s.

What's interesting is that different servers had different styles of games. One was more like hockey, using tractor beams to pull the puck around the playing field.

To some extent, I still miss this. The gaming was simple enough, and easy to kind of get into.

https://www.netrek.org/

Yes! As soon as I saw it I recognized it... hours of playing after school in the computer lab on the Mac SE/30s ;)

Those were my first networked gaming experiences along with Risk, which we also played using a physical game board. Those are good days.

Netrek made its way onto PCs also and I remember playing it in probably 1994/95 when it was about the only game our crappy rural DSL could handle. Tons of fun and the requirement for strategic teamwork was probably only rivaled by RTS games.

The "black and white Mac" implementation of Risk made it such a breeze to play that I could barely tolerate the physical setup and teardown of the actual board game after it.

To this day I'm still looking for a good large electronic game-board touchscreen. (I know there have been some stabs at this... PlayTable?)

And it reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decwar (which was based on ... which was based on ...), which was played on a timesharing system. It was fairly well known back then, so I wouldn't be surprised if Alto Trek was inspired by it. I played DECwar once, at night, because only then all the terminals were free, and the operator could run this game.

http://decwars.com

It may still work... Still loading over here...

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