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.

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:

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 — until now.

In preparation for Part 2 my ANSI art and webcomics” series, I browsed hundreds of pieces of old school “public domain” ANSI art from the late 1980s and early 1990s, using an amazing retrocomputing research tool called Discmaster.

I had been trying to discover original ANSI comic characters. I found that PD artist Tom Bradford had drawn two original ANSI superheroes: Beaver Man and Rodent Man. Both images were included in TOM-ANSI.ARJ, an archive of his ANSI art, alongside his renditions of Batman, Robocop, and Ghost Rider.

Bradford clearly liked sci-fi, too. The collection included his drawings of the starship Enterprise from classic Star Trek, as well as Galaxy-class Enterprise-D from The Next Generation.

And there, nestled right next to them, was the space ship I had sought for so long! … Except the block 3-D letters in this version from 1991 said “GALACTIC EMPIRE” — not “SRE”.

Though several different BBS games were published with this name, it’s almost certain that “Games Galaxy” was hosting the MajorBBS version of Galactic Empire.

Bradford was a Galactic Empire super-fan. He even programmed a front-end client for the game, called Series 3, with unique options for navigating your ship and engaging in combat.

It’s highly likely that Fire Escape saw Bradford’s ANSI art and was inspired to adapt it for use as a new title screen for Solar Realm Elite on her BBS. It was a nice upgrade since the default SRE title screen was so plain.

I reached out to Fire Escape recently and she acknowledged that she did adapt existing ANSI art to use on her BBS for different purposes, such as login or welcome screens.

“I did not make them myself as I was not that talented,” she said.

She was not the only one to repurpose Bradford’s “Galactic Empire” screen.

I found that a New York-based sysop named Ahkenaton also adapted it for use in an in-game module (or IGM) for “Legend of the Red Dragon” in 1997.

Like SRE’s “flavors,” IGMs allowed programmers to customize or expand LORD. Ahkenaton freely borrowed art from various sources to produce different IGMs. For the sci-fi themed Galactic Warrors IGM, Ahkenaton adapted Bradford’s screen (with simplified typography), as well as several well-known pieces created by Drew Markham for TradeWars 2002.

So the mystery is solved.

• In 1991, Tom Bradford drew a Star Wars-like ANSI screen to advertise the Galactic Empire game on a local BBS.
• In the mid-1990s, Fire Escape replaced the “GALACTIC EMPIRE” lettering on Bradford’s screen with “SRE”, to use it on her BBS as a custom title screen for Solar Realms Elite.
• In 1997, Ahkenaton also revised the lettering to use Bradford’s screen — along with other borrowed sci-fi ANSI art — in a LORD IGM called “Galactic Warriors.”
• In 2006, I added a screenshot of Fire Escape’s custom SRE title screen to Wikipedia’s Solar Realms Elite article.

Remixing existing ANSI art like this was a common, if controversial, practice among sysops and software developers. In my next blog post, I’ll show more examples I have uncovered of sysops borrowing or revising the works of Ebony Eyes, Michael C. Ling, and others.

@online{renaud2026the,
  author       = {Josh Renaud},
  title        = {The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = jun,
  organization = {Break Into Chat},
  url          = {https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/06/14/the-mystery-of-the-solar-realms-elite-title-screen/},
  urldate      = {}
}

{{cite web |last=Renaud |first=Josh |title=The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen |website=Break Into Chat |url=https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/06/14/the-mystery-of-the-solar-realms-elite-title-screen/ |date=2026-06-14 |access-date=}}