MegaWars III

MegaWars III was a massively multiplayer empire building game written by Kesmai and run continuously on CompuServe between 1984 and 1999. It was one of CompuServe's most popular games throughout its lifetime with thousands of players joining the month-long game cycles. It was only shut down after CIS was purchased by AOL and moved to the web-based "CompuServe 2000" interface that would not cleanly support it. A modified version, Stellar Emperor ran for much of the same time period on GEnie, also ending in 1999 when that service was shut down by General Electric. A new version of Stellar Emperor, sporting a new client-server GUI, was run for a short period on Kesmai's GameStorm.

In 1979 University of Virginia 4th year students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor started work on a game for the Hewlett-Packard HP 2000F time sharing minicomputer. Known simply as S, the game supported up to eight players on directly connected 2400 baud terminals. Much of what would become MegaWars III was present in S, but greatly simplified. This included ship-to-ship combat, the galaxy layout and creation engine, and a simple planetary economics system. The game was much "smaller" however, supporting fewer players and a smaller 255-system "galaxy".

Bill Louden was in charge of games at CompuServe. In 1982 he purchased a version of DECWAR and turned it over to the programmers at Kesmai, who wrote many of CompuServe's games. While completing their doctorates, Flinn and Taylor started Kesmai, a reference to their first commercial product, Islands of Kesmai. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version that removed any potentially lawsuit-friendly names from the Star Trek universe with more generic versions.

The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR.

During this period a port supporting an experimental color computer terminal being built by Motorola and Radio Shack was completed as MegaWars II. This machine was sold only briefly, under the name "VideoTex", before being withdrawn from the market, and MegaWars II was never completed. The experimental terminal would later be used as the basis for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Returning to S, CompuServe asked the game to be tied to MegaWars, which was a big hit, and the new version emerged as MegaWars III, II being a client-server version of the original MegaWars which was not released.

During the conversion, the game was greatly expanded. The maximum number of simultaneous players was increased from eight to 100, and the galaxy contained 1000 systems. However, another feature was lost; in S the player could close with an enemy ship in space and attempt to take it over, taking that ship's cargo if they were successful.

The game first went live on CIS on 19 January 1984, with this initial game running until 15 March. This was much longer than later games, which generally settled into a one-month period. From that point the game ran continually with only minor changes until 24 November 1999, when it no longer worked due to CIS turning off the "classic" text-mode interface which was needed to run the game.