On Sunday, 20 July 2014 at 05:03:51 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Heh, Walter wrote a game that "inspired a great deal of the
strategic gaming genre, most notably including Civilization:"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire
Other than a couple mentions in this newsgroup, I'd never heard
of this game, now available in D:
http://www.classicempire.com/
Pretty cool reading the article about how the game got around
back then, seems like an early version of open source and maybe
the first software to ever go viral, albeit in the much smaller
computer-using community back in the '70s and '80s.
Any big errors or gaps in the historical account on Wikipedia,
Walter? I see that its descendant is now available on iOS and
Android too. :)
It's neat to see the connections between things sometimes. I've
been playing the Civilization series since I was 10 years old,
and then later in life I've come to use the programming language
designed by the same person whose almost 40 year old game
originally inspired Civilization. I didn't know that Walter made
such a large contribution to the turn based strategy video game
genre. I have to ask now, what features of other games (probably
tabletop based, given the time) did YOU take inspiration from for
the first version of Empire, Walter?