I’ve been playing Urban Dead lately (Mac Parker is my human’s name, Headbitey is my zombie).

I like it. Way back, when I was a kid, I had a Tandy Color Computer that my father bought from some guy at his work for like $100. Just for kicks, the guy threw in like 50 back issues of Rainbow magazine, which was a magazine put out by Radio Shack (I believe) that had all kinds of coding tutorials and articles about how the Color Computers 16k of memory was amazing, and how powerful the external 5 1/4 inch floppy drive was. There was also a cartridge slot in the Color Computer, and I’m sure they waxed poetic about the power of that as well.

Anyway, somewhere in the back of one of these magazines, I saw an ad for a PBM role playing game.

I’m sure you know what role playing games are. This one was a Play-by-Mail game, where you literally made moves by mailing instructions off to a guy who entered your move into a computer, and then mailed you back the results of your instructions. You got printouts of maps, and you could enter instructions like “MOVE NORTH 6″ or “SEARCH AREA” onto his little forms every month. If I remember correctly (I’m sure I still have the printouts somewhere), you had a party of five different people (whose class, race, and sex you could choose), and you wandered around this little make believe world doing quests and fighting monsters and stopping in towns. It was a role playing game that you played through the mail one month at a time.

But here’s the thing: your group wasn’t the only one in the world. The guy who ran the game was getting mail from lots of people every month, and in your printout, you would see other groups who were in the same town you were, or who were working on the same quests you were. In that way, it was the first massively multiplayer game I’d ever played.

It’s too bad, then, that I didn’t really get into it. You got like five pages of printouts, but it was kind of hard to get into the game when all you had was a little sheet that said all of your characters had torches. And I guess it would have been better if I’d known or had contact with the other player (I think the other guys all called each other to talk about the game or something), but since I was a kid, I didn’t get as involved as the other guys playing did. Not to mention that $5 a month was probably chump change to them, but it was a big deal to me. And so, after two months, I sent a letter that thanked the guy for letting me play a few turns, but that I had decided PBM wasn’t for me.

Of course, now it’s 2005, and we have World of Warcraft, which lets you instantly interact with millions of people at the same time. And I do. A lot.

But we also have Urban Dead, which reminds me very much of the old PBM conceit. It’s really play by HTML, but the concept seems like the same. You wander around a landscape, a few turns at a time, and it seems like no one is moving in the same timeframe. Every day, your character gets 50 turns, and so it’s like people are moving in flashes– you run out of a building, hit a zombie 20 times, and run back inside to wait for your next day’s turns. The only contact you have with others (usually trouble– zombies hitting you and such) actually happens when you’re not there. If you log out outside a building, you’ll come back and find out that five people have killed you, three people have revived you, two more have killed you, and one has walked by saying “z0mbie5 roK!”

Still, it’s fun when you have action points. I’ve spent the past few days wandering through fire stations looking for a fireaxe (30% chance of damage, 3 points). And now that I’ve found one, heads will roll. And while I don’t have to wait a full month to do it, I kind of enjoy, in a surprisingly nostalgic way, that I do have to wait about a day.