This game was designed as a pen-and-paper game by Richard Bartle.
The rules were taken from Duel Purpose fanzine (written by Mike Lean) and then scanned, OCRed, and edited by Andrew Buchanan March 3, 1993.
Martin Gregory found the rules in " The Games Cabinet" and adapted them for play-by-email, writing the original Firetop Mountain server.
Steve Andrewartha was enthusiastic at the critical moment, and most importantly found a possible home for the game.
Richard Rognlie kindly gave it a chance at life by agreeing to run it on his PBEM server (pbmserv@vtsu.prc.com), and now on his new server (fm@gamerz.net).
Mel Nicholson and Terje Bråten had ideas about how the server could be improved and contributed code to suit, along with some bug fixes to the existing code.
John Williams, after getting the all time top score, did a major upgrade to the code to make it possible for multi-player battles to take place. Terje took this code and breathed life into it by adding a new challenge system and many enhancements.
Dom Gallagher and Andy Kurnia proof-read the rules, and corrected a million typos! Andy Kurnia also contributed some new code. Robin Gyver keeps finding and fixing yet more problems in the rules, proving that no rule book is ever complete.
Orignal Rules in HTML format by Dom Gallagher.
Martin & Terje now maintain the game at Richard Rognlie's gamerz.net site.