Hello from Jim Landes!

[Jim_Landes]

Oh man.
Your name brings back memories.
I used to play pbm with the Pbm Express in the netherlands. All the students I hanged out with (still do) played The Northern Island campaign at that time. It was the greatest game I was in, the game was great fun.
I think it was based on a handmoderated game you used to run before the Legend system. Is that even true?

Anyways. Wellcome!

Good Morning Walter, thanks for the question.

This is a bit of a long story, so bear with me.

Before Midnight Games, I had spent a great deal of time being a GM for role playing games. One of the accomplishments during this time was to create a very realistic game world called “Pelarn”, complete with hundreds of years a detailed history.

After my first computer game company (Horizon Simulations) folded in 1980, I started life anew in Anchorage Alaska and shortly thereafter started a little hand moderated PBM game called “Swords of Pelarn” under the company “Midnight Sun Games”. This game was based upon the history and players of the role-playing game “Pelarn” and the format was following roughly the model of “Realms of Sword and Thunder” by Empire Games run by Glenn Holiday.

It quickly became evident that hand moderation was not the way to go as it took too long to process turns. When I was evaluating the turns I noticed many similarities between what actions players performed in the game. I started keeping a log of these which eventually became the list of orders for the game “Legends”.

I taught myself how to program by creating the game “Epic”. It took me five months and I started with a program that read a data file and created address labels to understand disk I/O. Epic was just the combat system of Pelarn and later Legends with a light context overlay. It was successful enough to allow me to work full time on bringing the full concept of Swords of Pelarn to life in what would manifest as the mega game “Legends”.

The North Island Campaign was a game module for Legends created primarily by Edi Birsan who had purchased Midnight Games in 1993 and the North Island Campaign was released I believe in 1994.

Best regards,

Jim