![]() Once a planet was yours, you could levy taxes and manpower from it and have it build ships for you. Each world had a potentially different population size and technology level the larger the population, and the higher the technology level, the more difficult it was to conquer the planet. The goal of the game was to conquer all 20 worlds via military force you began on Galactica, a mid-size, medium-tech world with 200 ships. To this day, their distinctive names - some historical, some invented - linger in my memory, consuming valuable neurons. There were 20 inhabited worlds in this system, each of which could be identified by its starting initial. Galactic Empire took place in the star cluster RS-232 (groan if you want to). It was a clever and engaging game, and is still very playable even today (at the end of this article I will give links to versions for playing on Macs, natively, and on other platforms by emulation.) That game was one of four, collectively referred to as the Galactic Saga. Doug Carlson, a practicing lawyer, wrote Galactic Empire for the TRS-80 in 1979. The true genesis of what I’m calling the “space opera” genre was also the genesis of one of the most successful game companies of the 1980s, Brøderbund. There are also Spacewar and its descendants, which are among the earliest games played on a graphics display. In the dark old days of mainframes and minicomputers we had, of course, various “Star Trek” style games which involved flying around a (text rendered) galaxy, shooting klingons. So instead of talking about Star Sonata directly, let’s start at the distant end of this ball of yarn, and reel it in. The one sentence description of Star Sonata is: “It’s nearly identical to Escape Velocity, except it’s online.” But of course, most people have probably never heard of Escape Velocity, so then I have to explain about the early 1980′s game Elite and how the space opera genre developed. So the big game companies are simply spending money where it will be most effective at distinguishing their product from the pack. I often complain about corporate games that blow their budget entirely on graphics and sound, but part of me understands why: it’s easier to innovate visually (or, to a lesser extent, in telling a story) than it is to develop a brand new type of gameplay that is still fun. When we describe a game as being “novel” what we’re often referring to is a novel way of combining elements of previous games. Nearly every videogame (or, for that matter, board game) one plays borrows mechanisms from one or more previous games. ![]()
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