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A Talk with Computer Gaming Pioneer Walter Bright About Empire
Discussion on the Development of the Great-Granddaddy of all Computer Wargames
I recently posted an article about resurrecting old code, and went into some detail about how I brought a program for the TRS-80 I wrote in 1982 back to life. This post had some interesting discussion on Hacker News, and among these comments was one from a reader who mentioned that his oldest code was one from 1978, and it is still available on GitHub.
The author of this response was none other than Walter Bright, compiler expert and creator of the D programming language, as well the author of the very famous program that he had referred to in his Hacker News reply. That program was Empire, written in 1978 for the DECsystem-10 mainframe and is one of the earliest examples of a computer wargame. Empire contained then-groundbreaking features we still know and love today, including maps featuring cities, water and complex landmasses, fog-of-war mechanics, and a formidable computer AI that plays by the same rules you do.
I encountered Empire while taking classes at the University of Hartford in 1981, where it was installed on their brand-new VAX 11/780 computer. It was the first time I ever played a computer wargame, and I was instantly hooked, spending valuable…