TradeWars 1 (Sherrick)

From TradeWars Museum

Application

TradeWars   - The original game with 60 sectors.. no planets, no teams,
              not much except trading, and fighting with other players.

One of Chris Sherrick's earliest experiences in the BBS world was hacking into a TRS-80 Model 2 BBS in his hometown of Sparks, Nevada. He posted a message to the sysop about the security hole, and the two became friends. Sherrick was allowed to experiment with the BBS software, and it was here that he coded the original TradeWars. At that time, according to Sherrick, there were no multiplayer BBS doors, and he "thought it would be a neat idea to use BBS’s to play games against other people."

Asked how he conceived of TradeWars, Sherrick stated that

"The inspiration came one sleepless night, at 2am, the whole concept of the Trade Wars hit me, and I got up and wrote it all down. It was intended to be a cross between a space trading game (similar to the Star Trader game on What to Do After You Hit Return book,), the game of Risk (the combat), and Hunt the Wumpus (the map). I remember creating the original map on hex paper and rolling a dice to determine sector connections."

Sherrick states that his code was written entirely from scratch, and that, though the code was available to him, only the general ideas were drawn from Star Trader and Hunt the Wumpus.