What is Takamo?
The PBM T akamo is a play-by-mail game that was developed in 1982 by four college students at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. While sitting around the student union one day, Bill Hayes, a journalism major, introduced his friends Al Edeker, Bill Bunselmeyer, and Randy Ritnour to play-by-mail games. Ritnour liked the concept and began to develop a science fiction game. The first version was completely hand-moderated. Ritnour recruited a group of friends to play, and all agreed to meet every Tuesday evening at a local Mexican restaurant to receive turn results and write new orders for their fledgling interstellar empires. Alliances were forged, wars were fought, and the first nicknames created: Biologicals were called “Squishies” by the Cybers. Cybernetics gained the honored title “Buckethead.” Although loads of fun, it became painfully obvious that a hand-moderated game of the scale envisioned by the participants was physically impossible. Fortunat