An Old School Game TradeWars 2002 With a New Life

From TradeWars Museum

This is a reprint of the OLGn.net article.

An Old School Game TradeWars 2002 With a New Life
Posted by Qwerty in Featured, PC News on July 24th, 2007

Take the way back machine and go back to 1984. That was the time when going on line was connecting using a phone line and a SLOW modem to dial up a local BBS (Bulletin Board System) and everything was done in ANSI graphics. I can remember dialing up a local BBS in St Louis Called “The Grotto” they had about 20 lines at the time and most of them full 24/7. Most BBS’s at the time all had chat rooms, forums, file downloads and Games. The Games area was the place I could be found every day. There was trivia, mazes, puzzles and Early RPG games. I started joining some of the RPG game to see what it was all about. Playing Legend of the Red Dragon , Falcon’s Eye , Exitilus , DrugWars , Barren Realms Elite. Then I found it the HOLY GRAIL of games, Trade Wars 2002 or TW2002.

TW2002 is a space game developed in the mid 1980s by Gary Martin as a BBS doors game, with later versions developed by John Pritchett. As a player you fight to gain control of resources (fuel ore, organics, equipment, space sectors and colonists) and travel the galaxy trading or robbing them for money. You could upgrade your spaceship with better weapons and defenses to fight for control of planets and star bases. You also have the never ending fight of Good Vs Evil.

Your alignment was positive (good) alignment, earned by good deeds, such as posting bounties on space pirates and destroying evildoers. Or negative (evil) alignment is the end result of evil deeds for example destroying planets, robbing space ports, and dumping colonists into space, you know the fun stuff. Players can form corporations (With the same alignment) to share planets, ships, and other resources. You also only got so many turns a day to use as needed. The less turns per day (regenerating so many at the top of the hour), the harder the game was to play. Everything you did, from traveling from sector to sector to landing on a planet or attacking other players, all cost turns. You really had to plan out what you wanted to do with your turns for any given day.

If you ran out of turns you were stuck in the sector, sitting in open space waiting for the next hour to come around. You were sitting duck for anybody to come by and Cap you. (Capture your ship and you get auto automatically put into an escape pod if you’re lucky, they also take all your cash on hand) It is a great game of strategy, planning and lots of team work.

Since the internet has replaced the BBS system they have mostly died out. But, I am here to tell you TW2002 has moved away from being a BBS / Doors Game. Its now called TWGS (Tradewars Game Server) TWGS is a stand-alone game server capable of hosting up to 25 separate games of TW2002 over a TCP/IP connection. The full version allows up to 100 simultaneous online players with up to 500 players active in each game. It has everything you loved about TW2002 along with some new things. Like custom planets, ships, and NPC aliens. If you have never played try it out, it’s free to play and all you need is an ANSI Telnet program and some time. One of the best places to get started looking for How to play information, TradeWars Helpers (an ANSI Telnet script program to make trading and other tasks easier SWATH or TW-ATTAC) games servers or even tournaments people are hosting is The StarDock or ClassicTW. Do your self a favor and try the game out, you will be glad you did.