Initgame

Initgame was a channel/script/game on EFNet on IRC. The earliest Initgame channel reference on usenet/Google Groups dates from mid July 1991.

In concept, initgame is basically a version of Twenty Questions. The "It" person would change their IRC Nick to the initials of a famous person, followed by 4 status flags: Gender (Male/Female), Nationality, Alive/Dead, and Real/Fictional. For instance, George Washington would be written as 'GW_MADR', for "Male, American, Dead, Real" (Non-American would be indicated with an 'N', and Fictional with an 'F').

LogicBot was the original and primary script that dealt with the in-channel status and logging of the games. However the author (Jaguar, a student at MIT) left, and the latest codebase of LogicBot became inaccessible. Both Logicbot and its successors were very complex, and quite possibly the most complex on IRC prior to the EFNet user explosion circa 1996.

LogicBot features included a recap of questions asked and the subsequent responses. The bots would also respond to certain words or phrases in the channel (like "GO!" to start the round). There was in practice no limit to the number of yes-no questions that participants could ask-but after the first few dozen the players would start asking for "hings" (an intentional misspelling of the word 'hint'), used to gather a real response from the "It" person without triggering the initgame bot. As with all IRC channels, the in-jokes and verbiage were fairly esoteric.