Trade Wars is a series of video games dating back to 1984.

History

The first game with the title, Trade Wars, by Chris Sherrick, was developed in BASIC for the TRS-80 Model II, and soon ported, by Sherrick, to the IBM PC for the Nochange BBS system in 1984. Sherrick 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). But Martin's next effort, the TradeWars 2002 series, would become arguably the most popular variant of TradeWars.

In 1988, the author of WWIV, Wayne Bell, ported his BBS software in Turbo C. This major change meant older chain programs would no longer work, so beginning in March 1989, Martin embarked on a total rewrite of TW2001. He added numerous new features, such as the StarDock, where players could interact with each other, buy new ships, and watch "movies" (ANSI art animations). A fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation at this time, Martin decided to give his game a more consistent Star Trek theme, and established the Ferrengi as the game's main antagonists.

Gameplay

Though specifics vary between versions, 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 star bases.

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 computers running the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS), which accepts incoming telnet connections and launches the Trade Wars ANSI 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.

Reception

Computer Gaming World in 1993 rated Trade Wars two points out of three, stating that for many players "there is no

other on-liner than Trade Wars ... This game will be around for a while, in one form or another".

The editors of netgames called TW2002 "perhaps the granddaddy of all BBS games" in 1994, the same year Pritchett has said was the peak of the game's popularity, with an estimated 70,000 active TradeWars players.

Trade Wars is cited as an influence by game developers including Paul Sage, lead designer of Ultima Online, Josh Johnston, lead programmer of Jumpgate, Eric Wang, producer of Earth & Beyond, and Pete Mackay, a designer of Star Citizen.

Reviewers have compared many games to TradeWars, including EVE Online, and Spore.

A major online 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), the development of Exarch was discontinued. What started as TW: DM was eventually released by NCsoft as Dungeon Runners.

See also

  • Space combat simulator

References

  • Official TradeWars Museum
  • TradeWars tribute website
  • EIS, owner and developer of classic TradeWars
  • Official EIS TradeWars forum
  • History of Trade Wars 2002 - John Pritchett
  • A list of other ancient versions; alas none of the actual files have been archived here