Trade Wars
Encyclopedia
Trade Wars is the title, with some variations in spelling and capitalization, of a series of computer games dating back to the early days of personal computing. Based on influences from Star Trek
, Star Wars
, and early BBS
strategy games, Trade Wars was an early example of the appeal of online game
s. During the height of its popularity in the early 1990s, Trade Wars was the preeminent BBS game, played by tens of thousands of computer enthusiasts around the world.
for the TRS-80
, and immediately ported to the IBM PC
for the Nochange BBS system in 1984. Though other space trading games appeared earlier, including "DECWAR
" 1974 and "MegaWars
" 1983, Sherrick states that he was unfamiliar with either game, and conceived his game as a cross between Dave Kaufman's BASIC program "Star Trader
" 1974, the board game "Risk
", and Gregory Yob's "Hunt the Wumpus
" 1972.
Because Sherrick released his earliest versions with a free license, many variations of the game appeared over the next few years, including TWV - Galactic Armageddon, Yankee Trader
, and TW2 (a development of the original by John Morris who took over from Chris Sherrick).
The most definitive version was the TradeWars 2002
series (Gary Martin, John Pritchett, 1986). TW2002 was designed originally as a WWIV
chain
(a way of calling external programs which was a part of Turbo Pascal 3 - and one that often required the source code to work, which is why so many people were able to get copies) in September 1986 by a sysop with the handle
"Lord Darkseid" (his BBS was called Apokolips, and he was apparently a DC Comics
fan). Its original name was TW2 for WWIV - and it shared no source code with the Sherrick version, which was written in Basic. Another WWIV sysop - B0b "OM" Mosley - made additional modifications, including porting the code to Turbo Pascal 4.x specifications, numerous bug fixes, a series of cosmetic changes to allow the game to reflect a Star Trek
theme, and development of a map editor that allowed for both larger maps and the ability to randomly generate new maps as well as reinitialize the game's databases to reflect the new map data. After two years of development, Mosley released the source code for the game and editor, which allowed fellow WWIV sysop Gary Martin to make his own changes to the included source code. Gary's first version was Trade Wars 2001, and it contained many of the base features. It also used exactly the same TWSECT.DAT file (the file with contains the information on all of the warp points in the game) as Trade Wars 2002.
While TW2001 was well received, Gary (who was a Traveller
game master) decided to expand the game further. In addition to the port in Sector 1 where you could buy fighters/shields/holds, another port was added called the Stardock where you could buy new types of ships. Over a period of time, feature after feature was added, so that Trade Wars 2002 V0.96 was a very different game than Trade Wars 2002 V1.00. TW2002 V1.00 was released in June 1991. One of the major design choices made was influenced by changes in the BBS software — WWIV author Wayne Bell had rewritten the WWIV BBS System using Turbo C instead of Turbo Pascal. This meant that classic Chain
programs would no longer work, and Trade Wars 2002 V2 used a general purpose door
library which allowed the game to be run under other brands of BBS software for the first time.
TW2002 V1, V2, & V3 were BBS mainstays throughout the 1990s. In 1998, Gary Martin sold the Trade Wars license to John Pritchett. John and his company, EIS, developed a stand-alone game server, TWGS, which has allowed Trade Wars to survive beyond the BBS era.
Since the basics of the game structure are numerical, these games are not reliant on high resolution graphics or rapid processing, which makes them ideally suited to low-resource computing platforms.
Today, classic Trade Wars is primarily hosted by Windows NT/2000/XP computers running the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS), which accepts incoming telnet connections and launches the Trade Wars ASCII game. Trade Wars is also run by many of the surviving BBSs, and variations have been ported to the web
, cell phones, and the Palm OS
. A major on-line game based on Trade Wars 2002 was under development in the early 2000s under the name "TW: Dark Millennium", later renamed "Exarch". When the developer, Realm Interactive, was acquired by their publisher, NCsoft
Austin (Richard Garriott
/Destination Games
), development of "Exarch" was discontinued. What started as TW: DM was eventually released by NCsoft as "Dungeon Runners
".
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
, Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
, and early BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
strategy games, Trade Wars was an early example of the appeal of online game
Online game
An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology, but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
s. During the height of its popularity in the early 1990s, Trade Wars was the preeminent BBS game, played by tens of thousands of computer enthusiasts around the world.
History
The first game with the title, "Trade Wars" by Chris Sherrick, was developed in BASICBASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
for the TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
, and immediately ported to the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
for the Nochange BBS system in 1984. Though other space trading games appeared earlier, including "DECWAR
Decwar
DECWAR is a multiplayer computer game first written in 1978 at the University of Texas at Austin for the PDP-10. It was developed from an earlier two-player version, WAR, adding multi-terminal support for between one and eighteen players. WAR and DECWAR are essentially multiplayer versions of the...
" 1974 and "MegaWars
MegaWars
MegaWars was a series of real-time online multiplayer space empire building games which were hosted on CompuServe in the 1980s and lasted well into the 1990s. The original MegaWars I was a port of Decwar, originally developed at the University of Texas at Austin...
" 1983, Sherrick states that he was unfamiliar with either game, and conceived his game as a cross between Dave Kaufman's BASIC program "Star Trader
Star Trader
Star Trader was one of the original computer games of interstellar trading. Seemingly based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, Star Trader presents a star map of the galaxy in which the players move about and make money from trading and establishing trading routes...
" 1974, the board game "Risk
Risk (game)
Risk is a strategic board game, produced by Parker Brothers . It was invented by French film director Albert Lamorisse and originally released in 1957 as La Conquête du Monde in France. Risk is a turn-based game for two to six players...
", and Gregory Yob's "Hunt the Wumpus
Hunt the Wumpus
Hunt the Wumpus is an early computer game, based on a simple hide and seek format featuring a mysterious monster that lurks deep inside a network of rooms. It was originally a text-based game written in BASIC...
" 1972.
Because Sherrick released his earliest versions with a free license, many variations of the game appeared over the next few years, including TWV - Galactic Armageddon, Yankee Trader
Yankee Trader
Yankee Trader, by Alan Davenport, is a "door" text-based game released in 1990 from the BBS era, which ran on MS-DOS BBSes. It is similar to TradeWars 2002 and was originally released in 1987 as Trade Wars 1000. One year later, Trade Wars 2002 adopted most, but not all of Yankee Trader's...
, and TW2 (a development of the original by John Morris who took over from Chris Sherrick).
The most definitive version was the TradeWars 2002
TradeWars 2002
TradeWars 2002, also known as Trade Wars 2002 or TW2002, is a space game developed starting in 1984 and continuing through the 1990s by Gary Martin for play as a BBS door game, with later versions developed by John Pritchett both for BBS and, starting in 1998, a devoted game server called TWGS...
series (Gary Martin, John Pritchett, 1986). TW2002 was designed originally as a WWIV
WWIV
WWIV was a popular brand of bulletin board system software from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The modifiable source code allowed a sysop to customize the main BBS program for their particular needs and aesthetics...
chain
Chain
A chain is a sequence of connected links.Chain may also refer to:Chain may refer to:* Necklace - a jewelry which is worn around the neck* Mail , a type of armor made of interlocking chain links...
(a way of calling external programs which was a part of Turbo Pascal 3 - and one that often required the source code to work, which is why so many people were able to get copies) in September 1986 by a sysop with the handle
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
"Lord Darkseid" (his BBS was called Apokolips, and he was apparently a DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
fan). Its original name was TW2 for WWIV - and it shared no source code with the Sherrick version, which was written in Basic. Another WWIV sysop - B0b "OM" Mosley - made additional modifications, including porting the code to Turbo Pascal 4.x specifications, numerous bug fixes, a series of cosmetic changes to allow the game to reflect a Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
theme, and development of a map editor that allowed for both larger maps and the ability to randomly generate new maps as well as reinitialize the game's databases to reflect the new map data. After two years of development, Mosley released the source code for the game and editor, which allowed fellow WWIV sysop Gary Martin to make his own changes to the included source code. Gary's first version was Trade Wars 2001, and it contained many of the base features. It also used exactly the same TWSECT.DAT file (the file with contains the information on all of the warp points in the game) as Trade Wars 2002.
While TW2001 was well received, Gary (who was a Traveller
Traveller (role-playing game)
Traveller is a series of related science fiction role-playing games, the first published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop and subsequent editions by various companies remaining in print to this day. The game was inspired from such classic science fiction stories as the Dumarest saga series by...
game master) decided to expand the game further. In addition to the port in Sector 1 where you could buy fighters/shields/holds, another port was added called the Stardock where you could buy new types of ships. Over a period of time, feature after feature was added, so that Trade Wars 2002 V0.96 was a very different game than Trade Wars 2002 V1.00. TW2002 V1.00 was released in June 1991. One of the major design choices made was influenced by changes in the BBS software — WWIV author Wayne Bell had rewritten the WWIV BBS System using Turbo C instead of Turbo Pascal. This meant that classic Chain
Chain
A chain is a sequence of connected links.Chain may also refer to:Chain may refer to:* Necklace - a jewelry which is worn around the neck* Mail , a type of armor made of interlocking chain links...
programs would no longer work, and Trade Wars 2002 V2 used a general purpose door
BBS door
A door is a computer program, on a bulletin board system, that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. From the 1990s on, most BBS software had the capability to...
library which allowed the game to be run under other brands of BBS software for the first time.
TW2002 V1, V2, & V3 were BBS mainstays throughout the 1990s. In 1998, Gary Martin sold the Trade Wars license to John Pritchett. John and his company, EIS, developed a stand-alone game server, TWGS, which has allowed Trade Wars to survive beyond the BBS era.
Gameplay
Though specifics vary from one version to another, in general the player is a trader in a galaxy with a fixed set of other players (either human or computer). The players seek to gain control of resources: usually fuel, ore, food, and equipment, and travel through sectors of the galaxy trading them for money or undervalued resources. Players use their wealth to upgrade their spaceship with better weapons and defenses, and fight for control of planets and starbases.Since the basics of the game structure are numerical, these games are not reliant on high resolution graphics or rapid processing, which makes them ideally suited to low-resource computing platforms.
Today, classic Trade Wars is primarily hosted by Windows NT/2000/XP computers running the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS), which accepts incoming telnet connections and launches the Trade Wars ASCII game. Trade Wars is also run by many of the surviving BBSs, and variations have been ported to the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, cell phones, and the Palm OS
Palm OS
Palm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...
. A major on-line game based on Trade Wars 2002 was under development in the early 2000s under the name "TW: Dark Millennium", later renamed "Exarch". When the developer, Realm Interactive, was acquired by their publisher, NCsoft
NCsoft
NCsoft is a South Korea-based online video game company, which has published massively multiplayer online role-playing games including Lineage, City of Heroes, Wildstar, Exteel, Guild Wars and Aion.-History:...
Austin (Richard Garriott
Richard Garriott
Richard Allen Garriott is a British-American video game developer and entrepreneur.He is also known as his alter egos Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa...
/Destination Games
Destination Games
Destination Games was a computer game development company created in April 2000 by Richard Garriott, Robert Garriott and Starr Long, following their departure from Origin Systems. Destination was founded in Austin, Texas to develop massively multiplayer online role-playing games...
), development of "Exarch" was discontinued. What started as TW: DM was eventually released by NCsoft as "Dungeon Runners
Dungeon Runners
Dungeon Runners was a medieval fantasy, often satirical MMORPG developed and published by NCsoft. It featured gameplay similar to the Diablo series of games.- Development :...
".