Illusion is a derivative of Telegard Version 2.5g. It was originally created (or more accurately, "modded") by Kyle Oppenheim and Jeff Christman (Also known as "Archer" and "Liquid Concept"). After version 1.63g is released, Christman leaves the team to be replaced by Billy Ma ("Synthetic Time").

Illusion BBS does not have released source code, ironic considering the software itself is based from released source code. From the documentation of 2.01: "SOURCE CODE - The Source Code for Illusion is not available to the general public under any circumstances. The Telegard 2.5g source code has been floating around. We don't plan on making the same mistakes." This position is accompanied by unusually draconian restrictions in the liscensing for Illusion BBS (or IBBS, as it was sometimes called): "Illusion is not a public domain program and is not free...The Illusion Development Team only guarantees that Illusion will occupy disk space... Illusion may NOT be modified in any respect, for any reason, including, but not limited to, decompiling, disassembling, or reverse engineering of this program.... Lastly, Illusion is BETA SOFTWARE! This means that old versions no longer be supported at ANY GIVEN TIME. We try to include vonversion programs (if needed) with each new version of Illusion, but we don't save them from old versions. Beta software also means versions are released with bugs, but hopefully the features outweight them."

The last version of Illusion BBS is v2.03, and Billy Ma goes out of his way to indicate that the software absolutely isn't Y2K compliant.