PLATO Empire (computer game)
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There have been a number of computer games named Empire; please see Empire (computer game) for links to information on the games not relevant to this article.
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. Around 1988, Felix S. Gallo and Andrew Shapire made some significant updates; their version is Empire 7, written on the NovaNET PLATO systems.
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 2006) 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
PLATO systems did not have mice, and only some had joysticks, thus 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. PLATO terminals had 512 by 512 pixel monochrome display screens, and used downloadable character sets to display graphics.
The object of the game is to conquer a 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.
Each team is given three adjacent planets as their core area. Each core area 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.
Normally there can be up to 32 players in the game at once; some versions allowed for 60 players divided into four 15-person teams. 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 and could cloak, 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 can't be easily dodged, while torpedoes take some time to reach their target and can be dodged. Torpedoes can also sometimes be detonated by their intended target before they strike. When a player is killed, they resurrect in a new ship near a friendly planet.
PLATO terminals were typically connected to their host systems using 1200 baud modems, and the host computers were quite slow by current standards. Thus, although an action game, Empire can be slow to play, and moves have to be carefully and yet quickly considered. On the original systems, flying from a team's home space to engage the enemy could take three minutes, and bombing a planet with fifty armies took about five minutes. A 15 on 15 player game might take six hours. Yet, in intense dogfighting conditions, players have been known to type as quickly as 300 (short) words per minute.
Performing an update of the screen created a notable delay as the new information was downloaded and rendered, thus screen updates happened only once every few seconds, unless manually initiated by players with a "replot" command. This is completely dissimilar to the automatic frame rates 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 "hyperspace", allowing skilled players to jump into safe places in the dogfight and attack.
