The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen - Break Into Chat

The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen

By

Josh Renaud

Jun. 14, 2026

In my recent series ANSI art and webcomics, I debunked a false assertion that began in a history book and propagated across the web.

Now it’s time to solve the mystery of an old ANSI art screen that I helped propagate across the web 20 years ago.

Allow me to explain — but first, let’s go back to the year 2006.

I had come across a brand new Wikipedia article about Solar Realms Elite, the classic BBS door game.

The article was disappointing: just a short stub. I felt SRE deserved better. It was my favorite BBS game as a teenager. It had been popular enough to inspire fan fiction, and a host of imitators. To me, it was significant and notable.

So I decided to help flesh out the article, adding new details and tweaking wording. But there were big holes: the article needed sources and screenshots.

Finding quality sources proved harder than I thought. But a screenshot? I knew where to find one.

In 2006, my local BBS scene was mostly dead, but Fire Escape’s BBS Directory Headquarters remained one of its last outposts: a beacon of light in the darkness of cyberspace.

Run by Fire Escape (Beth Lunceford) and Lucis (Mark Brooks), FEHQ was one of St. Louis’s busiest boards in the mid-1990s, and hosted competitive SRE tournaments. A decade later, Fire Escape was no longer involved and the BBS was running on fumes — but it still had some active games. It was pretty much the only place I played SRE anymore.

So I opened my terminal, logged in to FEHQ, made my way to the games menu, and fired up SRE. I had always liked this title screen: a hulking space ship looming above an Earth-like planet, with "SRE" in bold 3-D ANSI art lettering.

This screen capture shows a custom SRE title screen as seen on Fire Escape’s BBS in the early 2000s.<br>I added the screenshot to Wikipedia … and then forgot about it. Life was getting busy as my family grew.

Over the years, copies of the screenshot popped on various gaming and retrocomputing websites.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I realized something was amiss.

Activist editors had deleted three BBS door game articles dear to me: Space Empire Elite, Space Dynasty, and Solar Realms Elite. In response, I created a new website, Break Into Chat, dedicated to researching the history of BBSing, particularly door games.

To accompany my first interview — with Amit Patel, the creator of Solar Realms Elite — I wanted to make a cool image by photographing SRE’s space ship title screen on a CRT monitor. But I hadn’t kept a copy of the original ANSI file. I needed to fetch it again.

Fire Escape’s BBS was defunct by then, but there was a growing number of telnet-based boards, providing new options to play Solar Realms Elite.

One after another, I connected to various BBSes and and played the game — but none of them had the space ship screen! Instead, each and every one showed this simple, all-text title screen:

This screen capture shows the default SRE title screen from the final version, v0.994b.<br>It suddenly dawned on me that, after the collapse of the BBS scene, I had kept playing SRE for years on only one board — Fire Escape’s — and that it might have been running a customized version.

I decided to consult my burgeoning collection of SRGames-related files, which now included numerous original SRE releases. Sure enough, this simple text screen was the default title screen in every release. The space ship screen I loved so much was nowhere to be found.

So I reached out to Amit: Did he recognize the space ship ANSI?

"I’m pretty sure the image wasn’t part of the original SRE distribution," he told me in 2013. "I’m not sure where that particular screen is from."

He reminded me that he had designed SRE to be customizable in several ways. Sysops could swap out the title screen with their own custom ANSI if they wanted. Or, they could go much further and reskin the entire game through the use of "flavors" (themes).

I had amassed a collection of 20 of these flavors, ranging from 90s kid stuff like "Sideways Realms from Wayside School!", "Trash Barney!" or "Animaniacs SRE" … to more natural sci-fi adaptations like "Dune Realms" or "Trek Realms."

Here are examples of custom title screens from a few of these flavors:

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The quality of these flavors varied widely. Yet, I could see how they might have appealed to sysops looking for ways make their BBSes unique from the others in town.

I examined each of the 20 flavors, but none of them included the space ship ANSI.

So if it hadn’t come from an SRE "flavor," then where did Fire Escape get the image? Who had drawn it?

I posted messages in Usenet newsgroups and on networked BBS messageboards. I tweeted. I emailed Beth and Marc. But I could not find anyone who recognized or remembered the source of the SRE space ship ANSI.

And that’s how it remained for years —...