I'm curious to know exactly how did this great game originate. Is
empire a spinoff of a comercial game or did someone develop the original
idea for the game, perhaps making him the "Father of Empire?" When did
the game first appear on the internet? I know there are a lot of people
who have been critical in its development but who exactly created it?
Socialist
The two Daves and their buddies did most of the coding, and by default
I got to decide a lot of the strategic design questions since noone
else was into studying strategy like I was. Most of the interesting
stuff in the game (planes, torpedo, etc.) dates from the middle 1980s.
(since I was also into economics I stuck a market scheme into the game,
but it had to be redone later due to the teleportation problem).
The last thing I did was dream up a land unit scheme and Thomas (Scum) Ruschak
and I were working on it when I was kicked off the net a few years ago. Out
of that came the Chainsaw versions. Unfortunately land units never got
implemented right since I didn't have net access during the critical time.
When I came back to the net a year or two ago the game had been nearly ruined
by the people who came after Scum. Whether it can be saved is an open
question. Hopefully the Wolfpack code will do the trick.
By the way, the empire history files are misleading, since they were
mainly created to reward the hackers muir conscripted into doing his
work for him :-) There were a huge number of people who played a role
in the 1980s, from Gunjin (Keith Thompson) to Dreamlands (Keith Graham)
to Evil Empire (Dave Nye) to Mirkwood to Redline to Justus to Subby to
Lersing to Fodderland to Jim Griffith to ... well let's just say that
in my alcholic haze it would be better to look at Subby's hall of fame
because I would surely forget someone (and maybe we can start a new
flame war about who was who in the good old days :-)
Pat Loney (who was a newbie deity when I was already semi-retired :-)
and Steve McClure are doing great work in reviving the game nowadays.
It is still running as a file called empirium on aardvark
at uokucs.uoknor.edu.
Ken was probably a better than average computer geek, but
a terrific human being, and a great help to many people,
myself included, at OU. It was a great shock when he committed
suicide.
la...@lick.ucolick.org
http://www.ucolick.org/~lance/home.html