Instead of repeating myself, I’ll paste the HISTORY file from Fernandotel here:

Fernandotel is a clone of Murder Motel, a simple BBS door game that was popular for its time. Like many of its predecessors (Hamurabi/Kingdom, Star Trader/Trade Wars, Spacewar/Star Trek), Murder Motel has a long history of an original that was copied, forked, and iterated upon.

Murder Motel was originally written as a game for DMBBS, a Commodore 64 BBS. It was written by Sean Wagle and first released as a proprietary DMBBS module in 1988. It was written in BASIC.

Sheldon Pasciak cloned the Commodore 64 version of Murder Motel to the IBM PC in 1989. Pasciak maintained this version of Murder Motel for a few years before turning it over to Chuck Valecek. Valecek continued to release this variant of Murder Motel until the final version (v4.6) in 1995. This variant was written in QuickBasic, utilizing the DFrame library.

Pasciak & Valecek’s PC version of Murder Motel was originally Shareware. Later, the rights were purchased by “PCMike” who then changed the license to freeware.

Another variant, “Murder Motel 2114” was created by Austin Luminais in the mid-1990’s. It was based directly off of Wagle’s Commodore version, with some new features and a more futuristic/cyberpunk take on the game. It was released as shareware, and was programmed in Pascal using the DDPlus library.

There was a variant written for Synchronet in Javascript for the 2021 annual general meeting of the Whisky Lover’s Amateur Radio Club. It was a proof of concept only and went unreleased.

Fernandotel is mostly a faithful clone of Pasciak & Valecek Murder Motel, but takes a few cues from the other variants as well. It was created by the author as a submission for a two-week long game jam in 2023, and serves both as a museum piece (to show what BBS software was like back in the day), and as a simple demo of notcurses.

No source code from any of the prior variants was used in creating Fernandotel. All of the C code written here is 100% from scratch and has been released into the public domain for all to enjoy and learn from.

You can download Fernandotel here. Be aware that it is public domain hackerware. It is unmaintained and there is no support.