Origins of Empire

[Michael Sosa]

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

[Tom Tedrick]

Peter Langston started it all. I got mixed up in it in 1983 when I was
teaching at UC Berkeley and one of my students, Dave (muir) Sharnoff
introduced me to the game. At the time it was a huge micromanagement
headache with fantasic bugs, but it was the best war game going on the
net though primitive in the extreme. Dave (Mr. Frog) Pare did a huge
coding project to translate the old code into C. My main interest was
in mobile warfare (i.e. Erwin Rommel's tactics) at the time, and strategy
in general (lines of communication, etc.) so during the 1980s I tried to
get the game to simulate various types of combat along the lines of
J.F.C. Fuller's somewhat Satanic theories about strategy. The Berkeley
versions heavily emphasized minimizing the complexity of the game without
taking out the fun of the strategic elements, since the Computer Science
dept. at Berkeley was doing a lot of research in complexity theory and
all the CS students there were indoctrinated into the complexity theory
way of looking at things.

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.

[Lance Bresee]

An addendum to the history of Empire which I would
not like to see forgotten is Ken Dowers. He and
three other people at the University of Oklahoma
University Computing Services ported the existing
code in the mid 1970's to run on a vax 11/780 under
VMS. They also transported the Moria code (developed
at UOKUCS) to the Unix environment. The game Ken and
company ended up with used memory for the map data,
and the file calls locked up the machine by overloading
the IO queues. There were no land units and no distribute,
but there was weather, and a country could get considerable
damage from storms. The weather function merely associated
each sector a numerical value between 0 and 9, with 0 being
extremely low pressure (hurricane) and calculate damage
proportional to the severity of the weather. The function was
not completely random, but would have ellipsoids generated
in a rather random manner, but which, once created, travel about
the map either increasing or decreasing in size and intensity
untill they dispersed. I thought it a very interesting addition.
Before planning an attack, you had to check the weather report.

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