AOL chatroom game

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AOL battlers (although they have no official name) are computer applications intended to run along side of AOL in order to communicate with AOL chatrooms. Various uses include battles between users in the chatroom, scripts to generate special text formatting or a magic 8-ball. The programs would communicate between AOL and the program, and the programs were often written in Visual Basic. The programs were mainly used between AOL versions 3.0 and 5.0 (when dialup was common), and AOL had not yet redone their chatroom code. After AOL version 5.0 was released, AOL had changed their chatroom code enough so that these battlers ran into compatibility issues, and would face multiple issues running properly. Battlers were often run on a time based system somewhat like Active Time Battle.

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The first battler (or battler bot) created was Sailor Moon Supreme (SMS) by Ai Senshi and was first released on August 10, 1997. After SMS became popular, the program was hacked by Talon and Sailor Moon Talonic was born with a few alterations but basically the same game. Eventually other battle bots popped up. Eventually KamekSally (Neo Kamek) took on the task of totally revamping the battle bot experience and created Kamek Ultra Battle (KUB) which eventually evolved Chibot Ultra Battle (ChUB).

Many different themes were incorporated, such as Pokémon, Sailor Moon, Mario, Star Wars and much more. The most common themes were video games and anime. Commands were input with a preceding / such as /moves. Today, there are little battlers left that actually still work under the new AOL chatroom protocol. Some can be played using AIM (but not hosted), such as ChUB.