I Turned My Business Site Into a 1994 BBS. Then I Put a Fishing Game In It.

If you were online before the web, you remember the sound. The modem screech, the hiss, then CONNECT 14400. A blue menu with letters in brackets. You pressed F for files, M for messages, and if the sysop let you, D for the door games.

That was my internet. So I built it again, on top of this site.

Go to kitmobley.com/bbs and you dial into Kit Mobley BBS. It’s the whole site, rebuilt like an old Wildcat! board. My portfolio is a file area. The blog is a message base. My prices are bulletins. And down in the doors menu there’s a multiplayer game I’d have stayed up all night playing in 1994.

What’s on the board

The file areas list every client build like a download: DIRTYBOA.ZIP, size, date, description. The size is the actual length of the case study, because I didn’t want a single fake number on the page.

The message base is the blog. Every post has a From, To, Subj header and an origin line at the bottom, the way FidoNet mail looked. N for next, P for previous, R to reply.

Comment to Sysop and Page the Sysop both reach me for real. Comments land in the same inbox as my contact form. Paging me goes straight to my phone, and when I answer from the boat, the reply shows up on your screen.

TIDES.EXE draws today’s tide curve for Islamorada out of block characters, with a wind gauge and the moon phase. The data comes live from NOAA every morning. It’s not for navigation, but it’s a fast read on what the day looks like.

The door game

Anybody who played Legend of the Red Dragon knows the loop. A few fights a day in the forest. Beat your master to level up. Kill players while they sleep. Hunt the dragon.

I can’t use LORD, so I wrote my own, set where I live. It’s called Legend of the Blue Marlin.

You fish the flats instead of the forest. You beat eleven mentors on the dock, from Dockhand Rudy to the Ghost of the Hump. At level 12 you run offshore to the Hump to fight the Blue Marlin. Win, and your name goes on the wall at the tiki bar and you start over.

The first draft had a Black Marlin. Black marlin live in the Indo-Pacific, not off the Keys, and I caught it the same afternoon. The boss here is a blue.

What makes it feel like home:

• Square groupers. Now and then a bale drifts past. Turn it in to the Coast Guard for a reward, or keep it and try selling it in the tiki bar’s back room. Sometimes the guy in the back room is the Marine Patrol.
• Late nights at the tiki bar. Buy a round and see where the night goes. A guide tells you where the fish are. Or you sing Margaritaville twice and wake up on a sandbar with less gold.
• The real water. The game pulls the same NOAA data as TIDES.EXE. A calm morning gives you extra trips. A small craft advisory cuts them and closes the Hump. New and full moons fill everybody’s cooler.
• The real calendar. Tarpon season, sailfish season, lobster mini-season. Land a tarpon, a bonefish and a permit on the same day and you get a Grand Slam.
• Other people. Crews with a shared bank, mail between players, fights on the dock, rivals for the same sweetheart at the bar, and a new season every month.

How it’s built

It’s still an Astro site on Netlify. Every BBS screen is a real page with real links, so the board works without JavaScript and search engines see normal HTML. Only the doors need it. The hotkeys, the modem sequence and the blinking cursor sit on top. The font is IBM’s VGA 9x16 from VileR’s Oldschool PC Font Pack, which is why it looks right.

The game is the part I’m proudest of under the hood. The server owns every number. Your browser only ever says “I want to fish” or “attack,” never “I have a million gold.” Every save checks that nobody else changed your character in the meantime. When two players fight on the dock, both of their records update in one database statement, or neither does. You sign in with a link in your email, no password, and other players only ever see your handle.

I wrote a bot that plays the game every day for months, over and over, to balance it. The first version died about once a day and never got past level eight. The finished one reaches level 12 in about three and a half weeks and takes roughly four to seven weeks to beat the Marlin, depending on class.

AI did a lot of the typing on this, the way it does on most of my builds now. The calls were mine: what goes in, what the Keys actually look like, and what a door game is supposed to feel like at 2 a.m.

Why bother

Partly because it’s fun, and I wanted to see if I could. Mostly because it shows the thing I actually sell. Most business sites are interchangeable. This one has a working multiplayer game with live NOAA data hooked into the same codebase as a booking engine and a quote form. If I can put that together in a day, a fast, clean site for your charter or your restaurant is not a stretch.

Dial in. Make a character. Tell a lie on the wall at the tiki bar. And if you need a website, page the sysop.

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Dial in to Kit Mobley BBS or play Legend of the Blue Marlin. If you’d rather skip the modem noise, here’s the regular quote form.