Dial Town: A Game About Running a Small-Town Dial-Up ISP (I Should Know, I Ran One)
In 1996, when I was seventeen, I started an internet company. It was called PowerNet Online. It started at home while I was still in high school, then moved into an office on Appleton Street in Menasha, and for a few years it was how a good share of the Fox Valley (Appleton, Neenah, Menasha, Oshkosh) first got online. My dad, Tim, was co-owner. At its peak we had something like 1,500 households and businesses dialing in. I was the president, the help desk, the guy who drove out to your house when your connection died, and the one awake at two in the morning when a server fell over.
I have wanted to make a game about that, the whole feeling of it, for a long time. It is finally done. It is called Dial Town, it is free, and it lives right here on my site.
What it is
Dial Town takes place entirely inside a fake 1990s computer, a little period desktop I built called TownOS, right down to the boot screen and the modem sounds. You play the person running a small-town Wisconsin dial-up ISP from 1996 to 2002. The mail comes in. The trouble tickets pile up. Somebody can’t get online, and it is your job to figure out why. It is cozy and a little wistful, and burnout is the quiet thing running underneath all of it, because that part was real, too.
You actually fix the servers
The part I am proudest of: when a server goes down in Dial Town, you fix it for real. You open a terminal, connect to the actual machine, find the problem, edit the config file, restart the service, and watch it come back to life. There are seven different real systems in here: a Sun UNIX box, a Cisco router, a rack of modems, a firewall, a web-hosting server, each one simulated carefully enough that the commands you type are the genuine commands. If you ever poked at the little “Boot Camp” on my PowerNet tribute page and wished it were a whole game. Well, this is the whole game.
Twenty-two days, four endings
The story runs across twenty-two days and three acts, from the very first modem humming in the spare room to the last busy signal in 2002: the Y2K vigil, the cable company showing up with its flyers, the paper mill closing, hiring the teenager who is better at this than you are. How you get through it is up to you, and it ends in one of four different ways. I will not spoil them. One of them I could not write without getting a little choked up, and I am the one who wrote it.
It is fiction, but it comes from somewhere
The town in the game is invented. Foxfield, Wisconsin is not a real place, and everyone in it is made up. I did not want to put words in the mouths of real people, or hang made-up events on a real company. But the feeling is not invented at all. If you ever ran a small ISP, or called one, or just remember the exact sound of a modem trying to connect, I think you will recognize the place. (PowerNet even turns up in the game, as the friendly outfit one town over, the one you call at midnight when you need a hand.)
How to play
It is free, there are no ads, and you do not need an account or a download. It works on a phone or a computer, and if you want, you can install it like an app so it even runs offline. One tip: turn your sound on before you start. I synthesized the entire dial-up handshake from scratch (every screech and hiss of it) and the first time a customer connects, it is worth hearing.
This is, honestly, the biggest thing I have ever built for this site, the most I have packed into one of these little projects, and the closest to home. I hope it lands for you. And if you were one of the people who dialed into a small local ISP back then, on a modem, in a town like this one: thank you. This one is for you.
