How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process.
The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987
Picture this: October 26, 1987. The Berlin Wall still stands, the World Wide Web is just text, and software is distributed through USENET newsgroups in text files split across multiple posts. On that day, Edward Barlow posted something special to comp.sources.games :
“conquest – middle earth multi-player game, Part01/05”
That’s how Ed Barlow announced it at the time, before quickly changed the name to Conquer.
This was Conquer – a sophisticated multi-player strategy game that would influence countless others. Players controlled nations in Middle Earth, managing resources, armies, magic systems, and diplomatic relations. What made it remarkable wasn’t just the gameplay, but how it was built and distributed in an era when “open source” wasn’t even a term yet.
Chapter 0: University Days.
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