History of TradeWars Variants
From TradeWars Museum
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As interest in online game history started to grow in the early 2000s, John Pritchett, co-author of TradeWars 2002, noticed that TradeWars, and BBS games in general, were not well represented in online game timelines such as the one compiled by Raph Koster at his Online Worlds Timeline. He contacted Koster and suggested that TradeWars deserved a mention. Koster expressed interest in the game's history, and asked for additional information from Pritchett. This inspired him to research his own timeline, devoted not only to Martech's TradeWars, but to all TradeWars variants. Upon completing his timeline, he submitted it to Koster, who integrated it with his own. It has since been cited numerous times on websites and in books about online gaming history. This generated more interest in the game, and Pritchett was soon contacted by many of the game's early developers. This allowed him to improve and expand his research, so that the current version of the timeline is far more accurate and informative than the one originally mirrored at Koster's site, the BBS Documentary archive, and in several books.
The success of this process inspired Pritchett to dig deeper into the history of the game, and eventually sparked the creation of this wiki, the TradeWars Museum, which opened in May 2010, 26 years after the original TradeWars was written. One area of the museum is, in fact, a recreation of the original TradeWars timeline, but integrated with the museum content through wiki links.
