I learned awk for the purpose of playing Tradewars, running on DOS. Playing Tradewars on the local BBS in the mid-80s, I developed a system where I would spend the first night in a new game just running around and logging the session. Wrote an awk script to generate a map of the places I'd been. Then on successive days I'd work over the mapped areas, and expand into unmapped areas, awking it down to keep expanding the map. Good times.

Thanks for this. I've tried telnet and web-based variants over the years since with mixed results, looking forward to this.

Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, and running a WildCat! BBS kickstarted my interest in computers and programming in middle school. Never got into video games later in life but look back fondly on the days of staying up late playing 90s-era door games with people that lived in my area.

Does anyone on HN still play this?