Air Warrior - the grandfather of the WWII multiplayer games - had a BBS, similar to this one. Those who remember better than I do can correct the following (and please do):
Sometime around 1999, the AW Gods tried to run, for the first time, a very large multi-player mission, coordinating things that hadn't previously been coordinated in an online game, basically trying to emulate the real-life WWII Big Week missions of February, 1944. They set up a separate BBS, similar to this one, for people who were participating in the experiment, to chat among themselves in anticipation of, and in reflections on, the experiment.
The Big Week missions worked, as I recall, although I wasn't able to participate. But the Bigweek BBS was a huge hit, and people made lots of virtual friends. You know who you are.
Then came Y2k. AW eliminated the Bigweek BBS. I was heartbroken, and wrote a piece about it (if I can ever find it). But fortunately, the survivors started a new newsgroup, also named "Bigweek," on a Nutscrape server. That worked out well, for years and years, and migrated to different servers. Many of the people who post on these boards (including Animal) were part of it.
Sadly (IMHO), newsgroups were buried by Facebook, and Trip, who was valiantly hosting the Bigweek NNTS, moved on further in his family's life and couldn't host the newsgroup any longer. Most of the veterans moved to Facebook but, as I've said, I refrain from joining that social heroin needle. I miss them, though. I've met some of them in person over the years (including Shane), and I miss the cameraderie.
But the AH BBS is the next best thing. Don't forget that you're making lifelong friends here, even if you never will get a chance to meet them in person.
- oldman
I'm pretty sure the Bigweek scenario was way back in 1997, Oldman. I think you are recalling the Longbow scenario. Bigweek was a "test" scenario to see if the servers could handle the upcoming "auto scenarios" I think. Initially, Kesmai/Gamestorm had newsgroups set up for the Bigweek.allies, Bigweek.axis and Bigweek.general. After the scenario, folks continued post in General because the new message board system set up at Gamestorm was terrible. Before Gamestorm, Air Warrior was using the bulletin Board system on AOL (Homer was the moderator) and alt.games.airwarrior to a lesser extent whose origins pre-dated AOL. Before all of that there was the GEnie message boards starting in 1988.
Kesmai abandoned Bigweek.general after about couple months and Frenchy (Fnchy) setup an NNTP server and kept Bigweek.general alive. A huge number of subscribers including old DOS Air Warrior folks like Dead Duck, Tex, SB, NB, Rocket Man, Fool, Grey Eagle, Moggy, DoK Gonzo even HiTech among many others posted there. Plenty of AOL newbs like DeadF, Rotor, Mage, Flossy, Fidd, Dipsy, Oopsie, LaLa, Seeker, +Mir, +Tiff, Earl, Lone, B17, the one and only Pasha, the great Blesk....the list goes on and on, were posting there as well. TK (DJ Nephew) took over the servers in about late '98.
In 2000, TK no longer wanted to keep the old server up and going so Trip from England took over as he was running an ISP over there and had ample bandwidth and server space. in 2002 EA bought up Kesmai and killed off Air Warrior. Bigweek continued on but folks lost interest, came over here or just got tired of things in there for various reasons. I left there a few months after the game went away. I checked in every once in a while over the years and I think there were a few folks posting as late as 2014.
I know Damned Egger collected everything from the original Bigweek nntp servers all the way up to the demise of TK's server. I'd love to get in touch with him again to see if he still has the .zip file he put it in.
Somewhere in all of that, alt.games.air warrior went away. I think it was about 2001
That's my memory of events but I could be off on the dates a bit. I do remember the NG became popular because the BBS system that Gamestorm set up was atrocious.
And I agree with Oldman as I know a bunch of the core group went to the dumpster fire that is Facebook. I'd like to correspond with some of them but I'm not going in that place.
Brooke, Flossy or Shane probably have the best recollection of Bigweek and its various dates.
Sorry for all the edits, my memory pulses and fades.
