Solar Realms Elite タイトル画面の謎 (breakintochat.com)
原題: The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen (breakintochat.com)
日本語訳
# Solar Realms Elite タイトル画面の謎
最近の「ANSIアートとウェブコミック」シリーズでは、ある歴史書に記載され、ウェブ全体に広まってしまった誤った主張を論破しました。
さて、今回は、私が20年前にウェブ全体に広める手助けをしてしまった、ある古いANSIアート画面の謎を解明する時が来ました。
説明させてください。まずは、2006年に遡りましょう。
私は、クラシックなBBSドアゲームである「Solar Realms Elite (SRE)」に関する新しいWikipediaの記事に出会いました。
その記事は、短いスタブ（書きかけの記事）に過ぎず、失望させられるものでした。SREにはもっとふさわしい内容があるはずだと感じたのです。私は10代の頃、このゲームが大好きでした。ファンフィクションや多くの模倣作を生み出すほど人気がありました。私にとって、それは重要で注目に値するものでした。
そこで、記事を充実させるために、新しい詳細を追加し、表現を微調整することにしました。しかし、大きな欠落がありました。記事には出典とスクリーンショットが必要だったのです。
質の高い出典を見つけるのは、思ったよりも困難でした。しかし、スクリーンショットなら？ どこで見つけられるか分かっていました。
2006年当時、地元のBBSシーンはほとんど死に体でしたが、Fire Escapeの「BBS Directory Headquarters (FEHQ)」は、最後の拠点の一つとして残っていました。サイバースペースの暗闇の中に灯る、一筋の光のような存在でした。
Fire Escape（Beth Lunceford）とLucis（Mark Brooks）によって運営されていたFEHQは、1990年代半ばのセントルイスで最も活発なボードの一つであり、競争的なSREトーナメントも開催されていました。10年後、Fire Escapeはすでに運営に関わっておらず、BBSも消えかかっていましたが、まだいくつかのアクティブなゲームは残っていました。当時、私がSREをプレイできる場所は、ほぼそこだけでした。
私はターミナルを開き、FEHQにログインして、ゲームメニューへと進み、Sレを起動しました。私はいつもこのタイトル画面が好きでした。地球に似た惑星の上に巨大な宇宙船がそびえ立ち、「SRE」という文字が太い3DのANSIアートで描かれているものです。
私はそのスクリーンショットをWikipediaに追加しました……そして、その後は忘れてしまっていました。家族が増えるにつれ、生活は忙しくなっていったのです。
長い年月を経て、そのスクリーンショットのコピーが、さまざまなゲームやレトロコンピューティングのウェブサイトに現れました。
事の重大さに気づいたのは、2013年のことでした。
アクティビスト・エディター（編集者）たちが、私にとって大切な3つのBBSドアゲームの記事、「Space Empire Elite」「Space Dynasty」「Solar Realms Elite」を削除してしまったのです。これに対抗するため、私はBBSの歴史、特にドアゲームの研究に特化した新しいウェブサイト「Break Into Chat」を立ち上げました。
Solar Realms Eliteの制作者であるAmit Patel氏への最初のインタビューに際して、私はSREの宇宙船のタイトル画面をCRT
原文（英語）を表示
In my recent series ANSI art and webcomics, I debunked a false assertion that began in a history book and propagated across the web.
Now it’s time to solve the mystery of an old ANSI art screen that I helped propagate across the web 20 years ago.
Allow me to explain — but first, let’s go back to the year 2006.
I had come across a brand new Wikipedia article about Solar Realms Elite, the classic BBS door game.
The article was disappointing: just a short stub. I felt SRE deserved better. It was my favorite BBS game as a teenager. It had been popular enough to inspire fan fiction, and a host of imitators. To me, it was significant and notable.
So I decided to help flesh out the article, adding new details and tweaking wording. But there were big holes: the article needed sources and screenshots.
Finding quality sources proved harder than I thought. But a screenshot? I knew where to find one.
In 2006, my local BBS scene was mostly dead, but Fire Escape’s BBS Directory Headquarters remained one of its last outposts: a beacon of light in the darkness of cyberspace.
Run by Fire Escape (Beth Lunceford) and Lucis (Mark Brooks), FEHQ was one of St. Louis’s busiest boards in the mid-1990s, and hosted competitive SRE tournaments. A decade later, Fire Escape was no longer involved and the BBS was running on fumes — but it still had some active games. It was pretty much the only place I played SRE anymore.
So I opened my terminal, logged in to FEHQ, made my way to the games menu, and fired up SRE. I had always liked this title screen: a hulking space ship looming above an Earth-like planet, with “SRE” in bold 3-D ANSI art lettering.
I added the screenshot to Wikipedia … and then forgot about it. Life was getting busy as my family grew.
Over the years, copies of the screenshot popped on various gaming and retrocomputing websites.
It wasn’t until 2013 that I realized something was amiss.
Activist editors had deleted three BBS door game articles dear to me: Space Empire Elite, Space Dynasty, and Solar Realms Elite. In response, I created a new website, Break Into Chat, dedicated to researching the history of BBSing, particularly door games.
To accompany my first interview — with Amit Patel, the creator of Solar Realms Elite — I wanted to make a cool image by photographing SRE’s space ship title screen on a CRT monitor. But I hadn’t kept a copy of the original ANSI file. I needed to fetch it again.
Fire Escape’s BBS was defunct by then, but there was a growing number of telnet-based boards, providing new options to play Solar Realms Elite.
One after another, I connected to various BBSes and and played the game — but none of them had the space ship screen! Instead, each and every one showed this simple, all-text title screen:
It suddenly dawned on me that, after the collapse of the BBS scene, I had kept playing SRE for years on only one board — Fire Escape’s — and that it might have been running a customized version.
I decided to consult my burgeoning collection of SRGames-related files, which now included numerous original SRE releases. Sure enough, this simple text screen was the default title screen in every release. The space ship screen I loved so much was nowhere to be found.
So I reached out to Amit: Did he recognize the space ship ANSI?
“I’m pretty sure the image wasn’t part of the original SRE distribution,” he told me in 2013. “I’m not sure where that particular screen is from.”
He reminded me that he had designed SRE to be customizable in several ways. Sysops could swap out the title screen with their own custom ANSI if they wanted. Or, they could go much further and reskin the entire game through the use of “flavors” (themes).
I had amassed a collection of 20 of these flavors, ranging from 90s kid stuff like “Sideways Realms from Wayside School!”, “Trash Barney!” or “Animaniacs SRE” … to more natural sci-fi adaptations like “Dune Realms” or “Trek Realms.”
Here are examples of custom title screens from a few of these flavors:
The quality of these flavors varied widely. Yet, I could see how they might have appealed to sysops looking for ways make their BBSes unique from the others in town.
I examined each of the 20 flavors, but none of them included the space ship ANSI.
So if it hadn’t come from an SRE “flavor,” then where did Fire Escape get the image? Who had drawn it?
I posted messages in Usenet newsgroups and on networked BBS messageboards. I tweeted. I emailed Beth and Marc. But I could not find anyone who recognized or remembered the source of the SRE space ship ANSI.
And that’s how it remained for years — until now.
In preparation for Part 2 my ANSI art and webcomics” series, I browsed hundreds of pieces of old school “public domain” ANSI art from the late 1980s and early 1990s, using an amazing retrocomputing research tool called Discmaster.
I had been trying to discover original ANSI comic characters. I found that PD artist Tom Bradford had drawn two original ANSI superheroes: Beaver Man and Rodent Man. Both images were included in TOM-ANSI.ARJ, an archive of his ANSI art, alongside his renditions of Batman, Robocop, and Ghost Rider.
Bradford clearly liked sci-fi, too. The collection included his drawings of the starship Enterprise from classic Star Trek, as well as Galaxy-class Enterprise-D from The Next Generation.
And there, nestled right next to them, was the space ship I had sought for so long! … Except the block 3-D letters in this version from 1991 said “GALACTIC EMPIRE” — not “SRE”.
Though several different BBS games were published with this name, it’s almost certain that “Games Galaxy” was hosting the MajorBBS version of Galactic Empire.
Bradford was a Galactic Empire super-fan. He even programmed a front-end client for the game, called Series 3, with unique options for navigating your ship and engaging in combat.
It’s highly likely that Fire Escape saw Bradford’s ANSI art and was inspired to adapt it for use as a new title screen for Solar Realm Elite on her BBS. It was a nice upgrade since the default SRE title screen was so plain.
I reached out to Fire Escape recently and she acknowledged that she did adapt existing ANSI art to use on her BBS for different purposes, such as login or welcome screens.
“I did not make them myself as I was not that talented,” she said.
She was not the only one to repurpose Bradford’s “Galactic Empire” screen.
I found that a New York-based sysop named Ahkenaton also adapted it for use in an in-game module (or IGM) for “Legend of the Red Dragon” in 1997.
Like SRE’s “flavors,” IGMs allowed programmers to customize or expand LORD. Ahkenaton freely borrowed art from various sources to produce different IGMs. For the sci-fi themed Galactic Warrors IGM, Ahkenaton adapted Bradford’s screen (with simplified typography), as well as several well-known pieces created by Drew Markham for TradeWars 2002.
UPDATE: After this post was originally published, Codefenix of Constructive Chaos BBS pointed me to a second example, slightly earlier than Ahkenaton’s. Jim Webb of Lounge Software also reused Bradford’s screen prominently throughout his Lost In Space game, which was being beta-tested in October 1996. He stripped off the “Galactic Empire” lettering, and added his own “L.I.S.” logo in yellow and green.
(Some of the other ANSI art Webb included in his game looks familiar, but I haven’t researched enough to be certain it also was borrowed)
So the mystery is solved.
- In 1991, Tom Bradford drew a Star Wars-like ANSI screen to advertise the Galactic Empire game on a local BBS.
- In the mid-1990s, Fire Escape replaced the “GALACTIC EMPIRE” lettering on Bradford’s screen with “SRE”, to use it on her BBS as a custom title screen for Solar Realms Elite.
- In 1996, Jim Webb rebranded Bradford’s screen to use in his door game “Lost In Space.”
- In 1997, Ahkenaton revised the lettering on Bradford’s screen to use it in a LORD IGM called “Galactic Warriors”, along with other borrowed art.
- In 2006, I added a screenshot of Fire Escape’s custom SRE title screen to Wikipedia’s Solar Realms Elite article.
Remixing existing ANSI art like this was a common, if controversial, practice among sysops and software developers. In my next blog post, I’ll show more examples I have uncovered of sysops borrowing or revising the works of Ebony Eyes, Michael C. Ling, and others.
Other citation formats
@online{renaud2026the, author = {Josh Renaud}, title = {The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen}, year = {2026}, month = jun, organization = {Break Into Chat}, url = {https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/06/14/the-mystery-of-the-solar-realms-elite-title-screen/}, urldate = {
{{cite web |last=Renaud |first=Josh |title=The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen |website=Break Into Chat |url=https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/06/14/the-mystery-of-the-solar-realms-elite-title-screen/ |date=2026-06-14 |access-date=