Shadow Island Games -- pbm.com

I had never heard of PBM (play-by-mail) or PBEM (play-by-email) games before finding this site. It was apparently sort of a big thing. You would send in you moves via an email and then it would email you the results of your move in the game. There were lots of games, but Olympia: The Age of Gods looks like it was the most active.

There is a lot to unpack here and discover about the Old Web from this site.

Apparently, pbm.com was such an established high quality webspace that blekko.com (2010 -2015), a now defunct human-curated search engine that focused on trusted handpicked sites and a 'slashtag' filtering system, that it had pbm.com's games list in its index.

There is mention of another now defunct site of the early aughts. Topix.net, which became .com in 2007 after a $1m domain purchase (2004 -2018), a news aggregator originally and later also local forums for over 90k+ towns across the US.

The Links page is a treasure trove of goodies to explore. Also, the source code for Olympia was opened sourced May 5, 2009, which seems to be the last time that page was updated. Some of the links in the games list still have active communities, with one site I clicked on having new posts dated 2025.

Domain registered:

*April 22, 1994

*Note: This puts pbm.com among the earliest wave of commercial domains on the internet.