Oh the time I used to waste. Back in the good ol' fashoned BBS days, this game was a big hit on MBBS systems. The point of the game was to tediously trade items, steal from space ports, join corps, populate planets, buy ships, buy weapons, attack the enemy, and ultimately rule the galaxy and instill fear into the hearts of the other players.

An intensely strategic, political, and highly-addictive BBS game I played years ago in which backstabbing your space-faring corporate partners and running off with all the loot was quite common (and fun!). This was necessary on occasion to spice up the game a bit when either the other players were trailing too far behind your corporation to pose a serious threat, or your fellow teammates became all too comfortable sitting atop their piles of riches.

The most incredible thing about this game is that once you get into it, it effectively ceases to be text-based. Your imagination begins to fill in more and more until that random jumble of multi-coloured ASCII characters coalesces into intergalactic warships screaming towards you at hyper-speed! Even now (at least seven years later), I can barely remember what the screen actually looks like--I can only recall the vivid mental imagery the game conjured up for me during my online adventures.

Captain Zyrain was the bane of my existence back then... I'm still bitter...

Those of you who remember this little gem of a BBS game may be interested to know that Realm Interactive is developing a new Online RTS called Trade Wars: Dark Millenium. I beleive it was announced back in April of 2001.

Here is a quote from David Adams, game designer:

"There are a lot of differences between the game we are making and the original, and most of these are byproducts of converting the idea to the modern age. For instance, our game is real time, the original was turn-based. Our game is full 3D, the original was ASCII. These are some pretty big differences. What we tried to do is isolate the spirit of the original game--those aspects that appealed to us on a conceptual level--and incorporate as many of them as possible"

Early reports about this game indicate that it will be a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with thousands of people playing in a particular "shard".