Empire: Wargame of the Century
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| Empire: Wargame of the Century | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developers | Walter Bright Mark Baldwin |
| Publisher | Interstel Corporation |
| Platforms | Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Mac |
| Release | 1987 |
Empire: Wargame of the Century is a video game based on Empire developed by Walter Bright and published by Interstel Corporation in 1987.
Empire: Wargame of the Century is part of Interstel's Star Fleet franchise, in which Krellans are enemies.[1] While the franchise depicts interstellar war, the game's documentation describes a backstory in which the player opposes a Krellan strategy to use as few resources as possible to conquer planets. Both sides thus use World War II-era weapons such as submarines, aircraft, and armies.[2]
Development
Walter Bright in 1977[2] wrote Empire, a strategy wargame, for the PDP-10 mainframe at Caltech. In 1983 he ported the game to PDP-11 assembly language and announced it in BYTE, but sold only two copies. After learning the C programming language ("it might as well have been called EIL, for 'Empire Implementation Language'"), Bright ported Empire to the IBM PC. With low commercial expectations, he again announced it in BYTE and received many orders.[3]
Bright licensed the game to Epyx. After seeing a public domain version of the game distributed by DECUS, Trevor Sorenson of Interstel approached Bright in 1985 and took over the license in 1986. Mark Baldwin coauthored the Interstel version, Empire: Wargame of the Century, which adds escorts, patrols, faster destroyers, and cruisers and battleship bombardment. Versions appeared for Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS,[4][5] Commodore 64, Apple II, and Mac.
Interstel warned customers "Don't buy Empire! It is a Krellan plot to reduce productivity",[6] and the manual notes "Interstel assumes no responsibility for lost productivity on the part of the players".[7] The mainframe Empire had caused video game addiction at Caltech, as students failed classes while playing the game.[3]