Chauffeur for the Grim Reaper
How Baltimore BBS culture led to unspeakably weird adventures.
I think his name was Steve.
High school era.
My friend Eric and I met him online, and he said there was a party at someone named Gilgamesh’s house, and so we hopped in my car, picked him up, and found Gilgamesh.
I think she was a 40-year-old brunette.
There were also ~50 other people with handles in tow, making the trek to Chevy Chase, Maryland, and they each spoke with great diction.
If they couldn’t type their technical language, they would instead be compelled to speak it.
Steve’s online presence was “The Grim Reaper,” and we’d never met before — he was as friendly as any other black mohawk main-toting, trench coat-wearing, person I’ve met.
Which is actually pretty friendly.
I have no idea why he channeled the dark side so much in his outward persona.
He played Magic though, unsurprisingly, a mono-black deck.
At the dawn of Magic, the deck had to match the persona.
BBS culture hit its stride in 1993 or so, and high schoolers and post-grads started dialing in with 14.4 baud modems, creating and sharing really weird content with each other, and meeting in real life.
I think about those modems — we joke today about the sounds they made and the handshakes (or failure to shake hands) they implied — but those modems were way better at creating resolution on how to behave than humans.
*weird sound #1*
*weird sound #2*
One way or another, the modems were in accord.
They were trying to connect to a shared purpose.
They understood what they were trying to do, how to convey information, and how to parse that information.
If only humans could be more like 14.4 baud modems.
Maybe then the people on the Earth could all get the support they need to enjoy their time here.
But back to the BBS.
We’d met Grimmy, as we called him, and countless others, but the real glue of our local scene was a teenager named Tronster, who ran community events at a nearby park and could pull 100-200 remote friends together for a rendezvous.
He ran the Master Control Program, one of the major hubs of online activity in the early days.
He had vitality & an enthusiasm for people that appeared unbounded.
That is, until he played Magic.
We got tired of Gilgamesh so Grimmy asked us to drop him off in Fells Point, which was the fun part of Baltimore adults often drank at.
We hadn’t been there much, as we were only 16 at the time, but we didn’t want to dampen the mood.
(Things were already “Grim.”)
20 other kids from around the Baltimore area were hanging around quad, all of whom looked like Grimmy, or like his nearest relatives.
It felt like the 90’s version of the end scene from The Joker.
Fortunately, they just loitered, and didn’t cause mayhem.
Kids in white and black makeup, just hanging out.
Huh.
We absorbed this scene for about 5 or 10 minutes, when someone we knew spotted us, and took us to a house down the street.
I still to this day can’t explain what I saw.
But I never saw Grimmy again.
I hope he found other colors to put in his black deck.
Years later, I spotted Tronster playing Magic with Marc Aquino and others, at a local mall.
He didn’t look right.
“These cards are crack, man.”
Tronster was a “never used drugs in his life” kind of kid, so I don’t know what basis he had for using that specific reference, but I got the point.
He needed a detox.
I slowly coaxed him away from the game store.
“We can beat this. I’ve got you.”
Over time, he learned how to better manage his focus, and eventually retired his cards for good.
He became internet famous in the 90’s for the Knight Rider song, below:
Just one of the many great things we have today that could come only after firmly putting down their deck of cards.
One of the oddities of the 90’s BBS scene is that a lot of us, and I mean a lot of us, ended up as creative technologists in the games industry.
Tronster has spent 17 years at Firaxis, working on the Civ franchise.
We’re still in touch — this is from our trip earlier in the year, with our kids & my brother Jeremy (who ran the Rainbow Slinky BBS), in tow.
We did not play any Magic during this get together.
We couldn’t take the risk.
And perhaps most interestingly, Tronster did not order “The Tronster,” an ice cream confection named after him, because he wasn’t feeling it that day.
That’s when you know you’ve made it.