What Kinds of Content and Collections Are on the Break Into Chat Wiki?

Break Into Chat is a wiki and blog devoted to bulletin board systems (BBSes), door games, and retrocomputing. Its content falls into four main groups: wiki articles on individual games and BBS topics, in-depth histories and blog posts, interviews with door game creators, and special collections such as archived Fidonet messages and an ATASCII animation player. You can browse it as a reference for a specific game, as a source of preservation write-ups, or as a primary-source archive of creator interviews.

Wiki articles on games and BBS topics

The wiki's core is a growing set of short reference entries. The site describes the project as created to preserve the history of BBS door games "after editors on Wikipedia began deleting door game articles," so the article list leans heavily toward titles that are hard to find documented elsewhere.

The entries cover:

• Classic door games, such as TradeWars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, Solar Realms Elite, Barren Realms Elite, Phantasia, Global War, Global Backgammon, Arrowbridge, Assassin, Barneysplat!, Drugwars, Food Fight, and Land of Devastation.
• Platform- and system-specific titles, such as Dark Fortress (Atari ST) and Kyrandia (Major BBS).
• BBS and retrocomputing concepts, including BBS door, BBS door game, BBS Simulator, ANSI art, and Instant Graphics and Sound (IGS).
• People and projects, such as Mistigris and Break Into Chat articles.

If you are trying to identify an obscure door game or check whether a title has any documented history, start with this article list. Expect short entries rather than long essays; the deeper writing lives in the blog sections below.

In-depth histories and blog posts

The blog carries longer research pieces, mostly about recovering and explaining old software. The site lists these under "In-depth histories," including:

• "Bringing dry bones back to life: Saving the software of Ya'akov Kirschen"
• "Instant Graphics and Sound, the innovative protocol for Atari ST BBSes"
• "ANSI art and webcomics"
• "Unearthed: Rescuing lost software"

The author also describes the blog as a place for "experiments with ANSI art animation techniques" and "BBS door game retrospectives." This section is the best fit if you want narrative context—how a protocol worked, why a piece of software was nearly lost, or how ANSI art was made and animated—rather than a one-line definition.

Interviews with door game creators

Break Into Chat publishes interviews with the people who wrote the games. The listed interviews include:

These are useful as primary sources: first-hand accounts of how games were designed, distributed, and run on BBSes, which is the kind of detail a wiki entry usually cannot supply.

Special collections

Beyond articles and interviews, the site hosts "a growing number of BBS- or retrocomputing-related special collections." Two examples named on the site are:

• A Fidonet message archive—described as 300,000 Fidonet messages from the 1990s.
• AtasciiTube—an ATASCII animation player for Atari 8-bit text-mode animations.

These collections are the place to go if you want raw material—message traffic from the BBS era or playable/viewable period animations—rather than commentary about it.

How to choose where to start

• Looking up a specific game or term? Use the wiki article list first.
• Want the story behind a game or protocol? Read the in-depth histories and retrospectives.
• Need first-hand design history? Go to the interviews.
• Want period data or animations? Browse the special collections.

The site does not present itself as a complete or systematic archive; the article list is described as growing, and the collections as expanding. Treat it as a curated starting point for BBS and door game history, and expect gaps for titles that were never documented.