While gaming has its celebrities like Ninja, Shroud, and TimTheTatman, Duel2 has Mannequin, TUM, and Doc Steele, among others, but the main difference is that Duel2’s stars have been stars for decades. It was obvious I needed help to get reacclimated. During my time away, a host of resources for managers to share their wisdom and evolve the game was now online, even if the game wasn’t. Since this isn’t Hollywood, my teams all got demolished. Priceless! Well, not exactly priceless, but I will talk more about pricing below. Imagine the looks on their faces when a slew of teams they had never heard of appeared in the top spots of their respective arenas. Since I had an ample supply of whims, I thought it would be funny to run my teams again and surprise all the current players. They also noted that my assortment of teams (I ran about five of them) all had incredible win/loss records. On a whim, I called the company to see if they had my 20-year-old records on file, which surprisingly they did. While Reality Simulations’ site showed they had embraced the internet age, it was only so far as to post the game’s newsletters – the gameplay was still being played by snail mail! It turns out Duelmasters was still active, but now called Duel2 (an online search for Duelmasters instead surfaced a popular manga series). As the next 21 years rolled by, Duelmasters became a childhood memory of simpler times like a scene from Stand By Me.įast-forward to 2007 and a Google down memory lane when I decided to see if Reality Simulations was in business. Life then happened: I went to college, got married, had kids, and became deeply entrenched in the console gaming industry, which included working on the launch of Sega Dreamcast and BioShock, among dozens of other titles. In 1986, after playing for about two years, I boxed up a stack of fight sheets that could have decimated the forest population of Endor and quit to pursue bigger aspirations, such as growing my imported Goth music album collection. There is also a newsletter to track the success of your warriors and team, publish quips about your opponents, and plan challenges for the next turn with the hope of becoming the arena’s Duelmaster. You also choose your weapon, armor, and whether you want to try and raise a statistic or learn new skills.Ī couple weeks after your turn is mailed in, you get back an 8-by-10 orange envelope with dot matrix printouts that showcase a computer-generated turn-by-turn recap of each of your warrior’s fights versus another opponent in the arena. Once your warrior is created, you fill out a strategy sheet for each minute of a 7 round fight that includes your activity level, your offensive effort, your kill desire, the body part you want to attack, and the part you want to protect (fights can go many more rounds, even in the thousands, but your strategy from the seventh round repeats).
Since the general public didn’t use the internet back then, the idea of using the mail for a game was more ground-breaking than off-putting. His cousin in Tempe, Arizona, ran a company called Reality Simulations, which had just launched a play-by-mail gladiator combat game called Duelmasters.
It was then that my friend Jeff, an avid collector of Conan the Barbarian comics, delivered some exciting news. The place was Tucson, Arizona, the year was 1984, and I spent my time dabbling between being a runner, a breaker, a head-banger, and a dungeon master.
And I mean way back to when I was in eighth grade. Postal Service, Duel2 is in for some challenges, but before we go any further, we need to go back. Given what is currently happening with the U.S. The genre refers to mail without an “e” before it, with a notable game being Duel2, a gladiatorial simulator- RPG whose aging demographic makes it more like an AARPG. In these fast-moving times where nothing takes a break, there is one form of slow-motion entertainment that has endured: play-by-mail games. Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23.
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