vms-empire 1.10 released
<p>There&#8217;s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore/expand/exploit/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion.</p>
<p>Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games?  It was Walter Bright&#8217;s game &#8220;Empire&#8221; from the early 1970s.  You can read about it at <a href="http://www.classicempire.com/">his page on Classic Empire</a>.</p>
<p>Since 1994 I&#8217;ve maintained an early Empire workalike written by Chuck Simmons in 1987 to run under the now-extinct VMS operating system; it was ported to Unix immediately, and remains to my best of knowledge the only open-source version or variant of Empire available.</p>
<p>Walter Bright does not acknowledge this version&#8217;s existence on his Empire page, which is fair because he didn&#8217;t write it and probably doesn&#8217;t consider it to be &#8220;Empire&#8221; at all.  But it is close in gameplay and style to the earliest of Bright&#8217;s versions, except for being able to display its crude character-cell maps in color (I added that back when color terminals were cutting-edge technology).</p>
<p>If you love Civ or MOO, try this out for a look at what the computer 4X game was like before pixel graphics.  The display and command interface are primitive by today&#8217;s standards, but the AI and general gameplay have held up surprisingly well. It&#8217;s instructive to see how many of the core tropes of later 4X games are already present in this one.</p>
<p>You can get version 1.10 of VMS-Empire <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/vms-empire/">here</a>.</p>
