I became a SysOp of my own BBS when I was 12, using my parents' fax line. I was soon hooked into a network of local BBSs which allowed me to use FrontDoor to receive inter-BBS mail on a daily basis, and this provided a conduit into FidoNet and NANet. For me, this was truly the precursor of the internet. With FidoNet I could communicate with people on BBSs anywhere in the world, and small file attachments could even be sent. Then there were the inter-BBS matches of Barren Realms Elite and Falcon's Eye, where the denizens of one BBS would compete against teams of players from other BBSs. People had a great sense of loyalty to the BBSs they logged onto regularly, and some good friendships developed between the SysOps and their users.
Now, I too am a game developer, and games like Trade Wars 2002 (my personal favourite back then) will always be an influence on me, because these games were 100% about design and gameplay. There were a lot of great BBS games and a lot of poor ones. When all you had was ASCII (or later, extended ANSI) graphics, you really needed a creative knack to make a game that people could get addicted to.