Trade Wars

Trade Wars is a series of popular computer games dating back to the early days of personal computing. Inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, the board game Risk, and the original space trader game Star Trader, Trade Wars was the first multiplayer game of the space trader genre. During the height of its popularity in the early 1990s, Trade Wars was the preeminent BBS game, played by tens of thousands of users around the world.

The first game with the title, "Trade Wars" by Chris Sherrick, was developed in BASIC for the TRS-80, and immediately ported 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.

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. High school student Dylan Tynan ("Sorcerer" and "Alex and Droogs"), worked with Mosley during the rewrite, serving as the primary tester, as well as contributing source fixes and additional features. 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 which contains the information on all of the warp points in the game) as Trade Wars 2002.

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