Multiplayer BBS Door Games: LORE and Legend of the Red Dragon
Seth Able Robinson (1989)In 1989, Seth Able Robinson released Legend of the Red Dragon, the BBS door game where that pixelated red dragon on the title screen unified thousands of local dial-up communities. You'd connect at 2400 baud—that screech-and-handshake—and get your daily turns. But unlike single-player games, your actions rippled through the entire server. Kill the dragon? Everyone benefits. Gain a level? The whole community's power distribution shifts. The game explicitly incentivized the strong descending to help the weak: marriage bonuses for partnerships, mentorship rewards, economic interdependence woven into the mechanics. Meanwhile, the sysop maintained the hardware and phone lines at personal expense so strangers could play together. Hexagram 42 is Increase (益)—thunder below, wind above, each force amplifying the other. LORD worked because it was architected as mutual increase: the strong descending to strengthen the weak, generous action propagating through the network, the red dragon watching over fellowship born from sacrifice.
Practical Integration
You're experiencing actual growth. Not the aspirational kind, not the hockey-stick projection in the deck—real expansion of capability happening right now. The system's working, resources are available, momentum exists. Here's what this probably means: you have a window. Every developer who's experienced a truly functional team knows the feeling—features shipping, bugs getting fixed, communication flowing. It's tempting to think it will last forever. It won't. Teams change, requirements shift, resources get reallocated. The move isn't to hoard the increase or protect it defensively. The move is to build something during this window. Those BBS sysops didn't save their resources for later—they expanded the door game selections, upgraded the hardware, added more phone lines. They used the increase to generate further increase while it was available. Same principle in your code: when you've got momentum, when the architecture's solid and the team's aligned—that's when you tackle the ambitious refactor, implement the complex feature, pay down the technical debt you've been carrying. Not recklessly, but decisively. The classical text is correct about the danger: this state is temporary. It's a window. Use it well, or watch it close.