80’s text-based “where in the solar system” game?

I was calling bulletin board systems (BBS) in Houston, Texas between 1982 to 1984. After that, I moved to a small town with no such systems, and other than the occasional long distance call, I wouldn’t have anything to dial again until 1987 when I moved to a less-small town.

I recall there being an online game called “Where in the solar system”. It would present a description of a planet, and you would have to guess which planet it was. I expect it was some existing program found in “GAMES IN BASIC”-type books or something. Someone had taken that game (or wrote a clone) and changed it to be “Where in Six Flags” (referring to the original Six Flags over Texas near Dallas). It would describe rides instead of planets. I recall it describing things like “you can hear screams” or “you feel vibrations.”

Does this ring any bells to anyone out there? There certainly were localized original programs running in Houston (several BBSes I dialed ran on custom software which never existed anywhere else, and I contributed a number of small programs to Apple NETWORKS BBSes which I don’t expect ever got spread around). I wonder if any of this got preserved.

I bring this up after I uncovered some old paperwork last night. I found my original hand-written instructions for the *ALL RAM* BBS I had written. I did not have a printer at the time. I also found notes for the upgraded/customized version that a friend ran in Houston (Cyclop’s Castle) and discovered it had more things added to it than I recalled. I hope to go through all my old files and scan in all my documents to preserve them, and also clone all the floppy disks I have to disk images.

It does make me wonder how much has just been lost and discarded over the years.

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