Page "Play-by-mail game" Paragraph 7

The commercial market for play-by-mail games grew to involve computer servers set up to host potentially thousands of players at once.

Players would typically be split up into parallel games in order to keep the number of players per game at a reasonable level, with new games starting as old games ended.

A typical closed game session might involve one to two dozen players, although some games claimed to have as many as five hundred people simultaneously competing in the same game world.

While the central company was responsible for feeding in moves and mailing the processed output back to players, players were also provided with the mailing addresses of others so that direct contact could be made and negotiations performed.

With turns being processed every few weeks ( a two week turnaround being standard ), more advanced games could last over a year.