Help me find this Prodigy serial novel
June 16, 2023 8:37 AM Subscribe
Help me find a (no doubt terrible) story that I read on an early dial-up BBS in the 90s! Details inside.
When I was a kid, we had a subscription to the Prodigy dial-up service. It was very cool--they did this thing where it would send vector images over the slow bandwidth one pass at a time, so if you were playing the MadMaze game it would draw in the broad strokes of a scene, and then additional details would get scribbled in.
But one thing I've been obsessed with for years is that there was a serial novel published on Prodigy, I think around 1994-5 (it was around the time that Doom came out). The story was a kind of Stephen King pastiche--I remember that there were a bunch of characters with different supernatural abilities, and they were all snatched up by a government agency and had to escape, I think. There was a werewolf, and I think a Firestarter girl, and I think I remember an older guy who could maybe see ghosts? It's pretty vague at this point.
Prodigy folded in 1999 and it does not appear to be archived in an emulated form. I don't know if some of the content might still be available somewhere. But I would love to read this story again, or find the author. I'm sure it's terrible, but I've been thinking about it for years.
When I was a kid, we had a subscription to the Prodigy dial-up service. It was very cool--they did this thing where it would send vector images over the slow bandwidth one pass at a time, so if you were playing the MadMaze game it would draw in the broad strokes of a scene, and then additional details would get scribbled in.
But one thing I've been obsessed with for years is that there was a serial novel published on Prodigy, I think around 1994-5 (it was around the time that Doom came out). The story was a kind of Stephen King pastiche--I remember that there were a bunch of characters with different supernatural abilities, and they were all snatched up by a government agency and had to escape, I think. There was a werewolf, and I think a Firestarter girl, and I think I remember an older guy who could maybe see ghosts? It's pretty vague at this point.
Prodigy folded in 1999 and it does not appear to be archived in an emulated form. I don't know if some of the content might still be available somewhere. But I would love to read this story again, or find the author. I'm sure it's terrible, but I've been thinking about it for years.
Response by poster: Ah, that's very cool! I don't see the story I was looking for in there, but I definitely remember flipping through that NOVA "how computers work" presentation as a kid.
posted by Four String Riot at 12:21 PM on June 18, 2023
posted by Four String Riot at 12:21 PM on June 18, 2023
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posted by jessamyn at 11:40 AM on June 18, 2023