The term multiplayer gaming likely brings to mind the image of hopping online or sitting down with friends. A third method—mail—is unlikely to come up. Once a sprawling industry, play-by-mail (PBM) games have been rendered an afterthought in gaming history by the internet. And yet they’re still clinging to life.
Chess and Go were played by mail for centuries, and in the 1960s devotees of Diplomacy, a lengthy multiplayer board game that requires a neutral moderator, began using mail. According to a 1985 Computer Gamer article, competition sometimes got so intense that players offered bribes and forged letters.
But games built from scratch for PBM have a clear origin story in Rick Loomis. Born in 1947, Loomis was a fan of war games like Gettysburg, a creation of the long-running gaming company Avalon Hill, which sees two players restage the 1863 battle over six hours of in-depth combat. While stationed at Hawaii’s Fort Shafter in 1970, Loomis created a 10- to 30-player game called Nuclear Destruction and advertised it in The General, Avalon Hill’s magazine.
While Loomis initially ran his game by hand, he was overwhelmed by mail from 200 players and got to thinking about how some newfangled machine called a “computer” could moderate games. He recruited his friend Steve MacGregor to write a program, and together they soon had a company called Flying Buffalo and the basis of a new industry. While they initially rented computer time, in 1972 they left the army and made a down payment on a $14,000 company machine with a blistering four kilobytes of memory.
To play a PBM game you contact the company who runs the one you’re interested in, and they’ll add you to the next open game while providing the rulebook and any essential components, like maps. Then you mail the moderator your opening move and a processing fee, and a few weeks later you get the results of the turn back and spend the following week or two planning your next play. What made Nuclear Destruction—and many of the games that followed it—unique was its scope and its wrinkles. Countless Diplomacy games have fallen apart when struggling players dropped out, but Loomis’ rules allowed for interactions with inactive players. And because the game featured hidden information, you wouldn’t always know what your opponents were up to.
That complexity was appealing in the days before personal computers were common, and Loomis soon found himself with hundreds of competitors running games of wildly varying quality, many of which were designed for hundreds of simultaneous players. Flying Buffalo’s Chuck Gaydos tells WIRED via email that at their peak in the mid-’80s they had about 1,200 regular customers, a couple hundred concurrent games, and franchisees managing their games in Europe and Japan.