What was the largest PBM RPG ever?

Post date: 2017-12-13 23:29:57

I've recently been looking into "Net Games", play-by-postcard games run in Japan in the 90s by a company called Youentai. At their peak it seems they had around ten thousand players in a shared world. I was wondering if anything was bigger than this - I found reports that Saturnalia in the UK went up to around 3000 players, but nothing bigger.

Because PBMs are niche and from the early days of the Internet, I know this information isn't generally online and where it does exist is unlikely to be substantiated, but still curious about any information regarding large games.

Note I am not interested in the largest PBM network, something like a bunch of simultaneous games of Diplomacy, but each game has only 10 players. I'm specifically interested in games with a single shared world where all characters can interact (at least in theory). I don't care if it was physical mail or email based.

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