Published 10 Feb, 2021
This is The Limit Break, a fortnightly column in which Kat Bailey explores all things RPG.
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, I was lucky enough to have a dad who happened to be in IT. It meant that from an early age I was banging away at keyboards, playing games like MadMaze on a laptop the size of a briefcase. I eventually fell into to the nascent world of online gaming, which was how I discovered Legend Of The Red Dragon, or LoRD as it’s often known.
Developed by Seth Robinson, a teenager with a bare minimum of programming knowledge, Legend Of The Red Dragon was an extremely popular example of the “Door Game,” a sub-genre of social gaming that grew out of a desire to cultivate a community around online bulletin board services. BBSes were a fixture of the pre-internet days of the 1980s and early 90s, a place to gather, play social games, and download new demos. I’d dial in on my blazing fast 19.2k modem, suffer throug