Empire Classic (computer game)

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This article is about the computer game. For other uses, see Empire (disambiguation).

Empire originated under the name Civilization on an HP2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College. It was written in interpreted BASIC and utilized extensions to the operating system. When the host computer was retired, the source code to Civilization was lost. Subsequently, two of its authors each independently wrote a new version of the game, both named Empire.

The game is turn-based, with players giving orders at their convenience, and in some versions then executed simultaneously by the game server at set intervals ranging from a few hours to once per day. The gameworld consists of "sectors", which may be designated as agricultural, industrial, etc. There are dozens of unit types requiring a variety of raw and manufactured materials for their creation. "Blitz" games may last a few hours, typical games a few months, and some larger games up to a year.

[edit] Peter S. Langston version

Peter Langston's version was developed while he was on staff at Harvard University using Bell Labs UNIX and the C programming language on a PDP 11/45.

Derivatives of this program include:

Xerox Development Environment (XDE) Empire on Xerox computer workstations
BSD Empire
PSL Empire
- PC Empire by Gordon Storga for DOS
- Amiga Empire for the Commodore Amiga
Wolfpack Empire

[edit] Ben Norton version

This version of Empire was written in 1984 in Pascal on an HP3000 and released to the HP3000 Contributed Library. It was enhanced by Norton until 2003; as of 2007 it may still be played at hp3000.empireclassic.com^{[dead link]}. It is also known as Empire Classic, or alternatively as HP Classic Empire and HP Empire Classic. Since 2003, enhancements and bug fixes have been added by others, and a list of the changes resides at hp3000.empireclassic.com/rev_hist.txt^{[dead link]}. Instead of the dead link, the temporary IP address is [1].

In 2003, the game was ported to the C++ programming language for the Linux operating system, and a subsequent Java client/server version was produced.