Seth Robinson

Robinson Technologies is an independent video game developer, located in Japan. It was founded by Seth Robinson. The company produced the BBS door games Legend of the Red Dragon, Planets: The Exploration of Space and Growtopia, an experimental multiplayer creative sandbox created as a collaboration with Hamumu Software and released in 2013 for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac.

In 1989, Seth Robinson created a game that he called Legend of the Red Dragon, or LORD, in an effort to attract new users to his Amiga-based BBS that he ran at the time. He was only 14 years old at the time. He later ported the game to a disk operating system and would allow others to port the game to other operating systems and BBS platforms.

The game exemplified how simple a game could be while still being fun. It is a text-based menu-driven fighting game, allowing players to take on the role of a potential dragon-slayer. It featured multiplayer options if its BBS host had multiple nodes (or phone lines). The gameplay style that it featured was in many ways a predecessor to the MMORPG genre. The game would later feature a form of graphical menus, created and displayed by RIPTerm.

Another feature of the game was In Game Modules, or IGMs. These were little add-ons to the game, allowing for expansion. IGMs could be written by anyone and allowed for a lot of gameplay to be added on. Some IGMs even allowed "mischievous" game play, almost allowing players to cheat. Robinson only released a single IGM of his own, called Barak's House.

Shortly afterwards, Robinson released a game called Planets: The Exploration of Space. Commonly referred to as Planets: TEOS, it was a space trading game that had players flying to various kinds of planets, buying, selling, and trading items in order to make money. The game allowed fights that were very similar in style to LORD, allowing players to attack others when they were offline. Players could also attack planets in order to take control of them. Robinson describes the game as "kind of like LORD mixed with Tradewars".

...
Wikipedia