PLATO Empire (computer game)
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Empire is the name of a computer game written for PLATO computers in 1972. It's significant for being quite probably the first networked multiplayer arena shooter-style game. It may also be the first networked multiplayer action game (although Maze War is another possibility for this distinction).
[edit] History
The first version was written by John Daleske and Silas Warner beginning in 1972. The game was substantially revised in 1975 by Chuck Miller and Gary Fritz; by 1978, they produced Empire IV. In 1981, Steve Peltz wrote a tournament version of the game, which allowed for annual tournaments between teams. These were most often won by the Orion team.
Empire was a very popular game. Usage logs from the PLATO system at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at UIUC indicate that between 1978 and 1985, users spent about 300,000 hours playing Empire. Empire was not the most popular game; twice as many hours during the same period were spent playing a dungeon adventure games called Avatar. Empire is still played (as of 2007) on the system at www.cyber1.org.
Empire inspired many derivative games, including Trek82, Trek83, ROBOTREK, Xtrek, and Netrek. Empire was adapted for the Apple II computer by Robert Woodhead of Wizardry fame as a game called Galactic Attack. Galactic Bloodshed (GB for short) is a space-themed game of similar character.
Note that the game called Empire which is discussed in this article is not the first game named Empire to be written for the PLATO system; there was an earlier economics game which was renamed Conquest. PLATO Conquest can still (as of the late 1990s) be found on the NovaNET PLATO systems. To confuse things further, in 1982 Jef Poskanzer wrote a version of the space-battle Empire game called Conquest for VAX/VMS computers.
[edit] Game Play
Although PLATO terminals had touch panels, they did not have mice, and all control in the game is via typing. Commands involving directions to change course and fire weapons are entered as degree headings, with 0 being up, 90 to the right, 180 down, and 270 to the left. The "arrow" keys, clustered around "s", could also be used (e.g. "qw" being the same as 113 degrees). PLATO terminals had 512 by 512 pixel monochrome plasma display screens, and could use downloadable character sets to display graphics.
The object of the game is to conquer the galaxy. This galaxy contains twenty-five planets and four races. The races were the Federation (feds), Romulans (roms), Orions (oreos), and (originally) Klingons (klinks). The fourth race was changed to Kazari, just prior to publication because the game authors were worried about copyright infringement. In 1991, the fourth race name was changed back to Klingon on the NovaNET system, bur remained Kazari on the CDC systems.
Each team is given three adjacent planets as their home system. Each home system is located towards one corner of the screen, and thus has two other teams adjacent. There are two neutral worlds between each team and its two neighbors, and five more neutral worlds in the middle of the galaxy. Each planet given to a team contains 50 armies at the start of the game, while the neutral planets start of with 25 self-ruled armies.
There can be up to 30 players in the game at once, with no more than 15 players on a team. Each player is given a starship to pilot. Players dogfight each other, destroy enemy armies by bombing them, beam up friendly armies to transport them, and beam down armies to take over planets. The ships of each race have slightly different capabilities; Orion ships have the weakest weapons but are fast, Roms have the strongest weapons, but are the slowest, and Fed and Kazari ships have medium speed and strength. Ships have two kinds of weapons: phasors and photon torpedos. Phasers fire in a cone shape and do damage immediately, while torpedoes take some time to reach their target and can be dodged. Torpedoes can also be detonated before they strike. When a player is killed, they resurrect in a new ship in their home system, or in any home system that has been conquered by their team.
Although an action game, Empire can be slow to play, and moves have to be carefully and yet quickly considered. Flying from a team's home space to engage the enemy could take one to two minutes, and bombing a planet with fifty armies could take five to ten minutes. A game might take many hours, or even days, as players come and go. Yet, in intense dogfighting conditions, players have been known to type as quickly as 20 keys per second (as fast as the system would take them).
Original PLATO terminals were connected to the host system with a 1200 baud connection, and the host computers were quite slow by current standards. Performing an update of the screen could take one to two seconds with a lot of ships and torpedoes on the screen, thus screen updates happened only once every five to ten seconds, unless manually initiated by players with a "replot" command. This is completely dissimilar to the automatic updates typically encountered in action-based video games. Players have to mentally track "built up" time, estimating how far and in what direction ships and torpedoes have moved since the last screen replot. The automatic updates could be postponed, allowing ships to make large, sudden movements, nicknamed "hyperjumps", allowing skilled players to jump very close to an enemy and unload torps before the other player could react.
