Taipan!

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Taipan! is a turn-based strategy computer game for the Apple II and TRS-80 which was created in 1982. It was created by Art Canfil and the company Mega Micro Computers. It was published by Avalanche Productions.

Taipan! was inspired from the novel Tai-Pan released by James Clavell. The game places the player in the role of a trader in the Far East. He owns a ship, which may or may not have guns for defense against pirates as the game begins.

The goal is to accumulate wealth through trade and possibly also through booty won in battles against pirates. As soon as the player's net worth reaches one million (in the game's ambiguous currency), the player has the option to retire.

The basic strategy of the game is to buy goods at a low price and sell them at a higher price. The goods available for trade are opium, silk, arms, and general cargo. The silk, arms, and general cargo have no special features; opium is special in that it can be confiscated at random points, resulting in a fine for the player. This makes dealing in opium riskier than dealing in the other goods; however, it is in general the most profitable item for trade.

The player may trade at any of seven ports: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Saigon, Manila, Singapore, and Batavia. One of these, the port at Hong Kong, is the player's home port. Here he has access to ship repair, a money lender, and a bank. Often in Hong Kong, the local extortionist Li Yuen often asks if you would like to "donate" money to the Sea Goddess. If the player refuses to donate often enough, Li Yuen sends a fleet of hostile ships that proves to be much more difficult than being attacked by ordinary pirates.

If the player overpays the moneylender, he then has "negative debt". This "negative debt" will accumulate interest very quickly, and will count towards the player's net worth. As the game's vocabulary of number words ends at "trillion", this can cause the game to display garbage instead of the player's correct net worth. The player also has the option of borrowing money from a gangster, or paying the gangster protection money which may or may not reduce the frequency of pirate attacks.

[edit] Newer concepts of the game

• Taipan! for Windows
• Dope Wars created in 1984 by John E. Dell
• Drugwars a TI Calculator game
• Sea Trader: Rise of Taipan by Jaleco for the Game Boy Advance
• Tradewinds (game) for the PC
• Taipan-0.9, an ncurses based version for Unix type systems. Also compiles on Linux and MS-DOS.