Mehul Patel was the creator of some of the most influential and revolutionary
BBS games of all time including
Barren Realms Elite,
Solar Realms Elite, and
Falcon's Eye. The games were based on the same type of interface, and were designed with an almost identical look and feel. Also, they were
InterBBS capable which was quite an acheivement in and of itself. After developing
Falcon's Eye, however, Mehul began losing interest in the
dial-up BBS world and began a project he called "
Earth".
Earth 2025 was his first web-based game, built in
Borland Delphi in six weeks and hosted on his
Solarianet.com site. At first his target audience was 500 users, but within weeks thousands were playing the online
BRE clone. As of this writeup,
Earth 2025 has well over 50,000 regular players.
Utopia was his next project, and was essentially a clone of
Falcon's Eye with many
teamwork-type enhancements taken from
BRE that weren't implimented in Earth. Utopia was even more popular than it's predacessor, with over 60,000 active users as of this writeup.
Other games he's created include an online
Fantasy Baseball game which has a userbase of more than 40,000.
Over time
Solaria became
Echelon became
Swirve.com. Earth 2025, Utopia, Fantasy Baseball, and other assorted
web-fluff (such as '
greeting cards') are the products that Swirve.com offers today.
As a side note,
Barren Realms Elite and
Falcon's Eye are now owned by
John Dailey Software. They can still be downloaded, registered, and installed on your favorate
BBS software (
WWiV?
PCBoard?
Oblivion/2? I certainly hope not
WildCat or
TriBBS...).
Gameography:
See also:
Door game,
Solaria