I believe the most common caller to The Keep is likely the type of person who enjoys playing RPG games and living vicariously through their digital character. Therefore, a degree of imagination is required to guess what the community was like back in its heyday. It is hard to gauge the exact type of caller who participated in The Keep during the 80s, since it has been updated constantly and today’s accessible site only has archives stretching back to 2015. Legend of the Red Dragon main menu, credit: Its mechanics of levelling up one’s character, socialization/competition with fellow players and permanent digital consequences for one’s actions remain in most modern RPGs today. In the game, multiple players competed over several weeks to fight monsters, “flirt” (ranging from “shy wink” to “sex”) with other players, and eventually slay the dragon terrorizing the town. Although text-based, lord actually shares many similarities with modern Role-Playing Games (RPGs). Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) was created in 1989 by 14-year-old Seth Robinson to – unsuccessfully – attract more callers to his Darkside BBS.

For a better sense of the kind of community The Keep attracted as a BBS for games, it makes sense to take a look at one of its most popular and widely-recognized games: Legend of the Red Dragon. The Keep was a BBS mainly for multiplayer games and, although it was technically accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, the high cost of dialing in from far away meant it primarily attracted local callers in Oregon. The Keep was launched in 1983 in Beaverton, Oregon and is one of 373 BBSes still online and working today it is accessible through Telnet using the modem 50. One of these original BBSes for games was The Keep. Nonetheless, they represent the birth of a community that would grow and grow into the 2.5 billion gamers in the world today. These games were extremely primitive and text-based, a world away from the enormous AAA projects we know today.

Once these tools were distributed to people, our natural tendency to improvise took over and BBS became a simplistic sort of social media, being used to create some of the first internet-based messaging systems, forums and (for our focus) games. BBS allowed text-based information to be shared between individuals and groups: you needed a modem, a functioning telephone line and a computer.

Bbs game legend of the red dragon