Comments

3 responses to “Trade Wars vs. Legend of the Red Dragon: Which was the most popular?”

1. 

   unaclocker

   Mar. 26, 2014

   TradeWars was out WAY before LORD. There was TradeWars 1000, and I think there was a smaller one before 1000, but that’s before my time. I believe TW was based on a game idea in some magazine, or so I read at one point in the past. Was Yankee Trader written by a different person? Seems like they were competing games, but nearly the same. TW2002 was revolutionary when it came out. It, to this day, has to be the largest deepest and most involved doorgame ever created. All the sectors, all the planets, spacestations, aliens, the ability to have so many people not just playing, but literally playing at the same time and interacting in real time. Man what a game.
   LORD was good, it brought a little bit of DnD to the BBS scene.One of my door games was a blatant ripoff of it’s game play style, but when there’s a winning formula, it only made sense to run with it. 😉 But yeah, EVERYBODY played LORD, whereas TW2002 had more of a niche. So LORD was more popular, but TW (all it’s varieties) had a longer life and TW2002 can win for “better game” on several fronts.

   Reply
2. 

   Jason Stevens

   Mar. 26, 2014

   Well I think it is a matter of ‘when’ you are talking about … You have trade wars in 84. and Lord in 89. Which those 5 formative years were like an eternity in BBS time.

   I also found the Pascal Source to the TW200 game, and spent a weekend porting it to C. It’s single player only, and I didn’t really try to understand the source, but rather port each procedure 1:1 as best as I could. I even preserved the insanely small data types, although because of the way Turbo Pascal Packs it’s floating point data, I wrote a small tool to dump the TW200 database to ASCII, and a simple C program to import it into the format the C runtime can Understand.. Which was interesting in it’s own right as many C compilers cannot understand eachother’s binary representation of floating point numbers – even though they were the same ‘size’ with the same MIN/MAX.

   On my lame board, I was asked to buy/install TradeWars long before someone asked for LORD. So I do own both. Although it is kind of funny that the people who own the rights to both of these are so incredibly passive aggressive about selling new licenses for the old stuff.

   Reply
3. 

   J. David Ramsey

   Apr. 9, 2014

   I first began using BBSes in early 1993, and at that time in my local-calling area, Trade Wars 2002 was the most popular door game. In fact, none of the BBSes in the area had Legend of the Red Dragon installed until sometime in the summer of that year[*]. I know it was that summer, because I remember playing it the first time right before heading out to the day’s band-camp practice, and then being distracted from learning my marching drill because I was thinking about playing the next day’s turns. Soon, LoRD appeared on virtually all of the boards that featured games.

   I started my BBS in December 1993, and launched with only two registered doors: Trade Wars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon. I quickly found what unaclocker already said above. Nearly everybody who played doors played LoRD[**], but a smaller-yet-still-large contingent remained fanatical about TW2002.

   By the time I took down my board in 1997, however, TW2002 use had dwindled significantly. LoRD, on the other hand, was still the most popular game, in terms of players-per-day. I’d point out, though, that by then, very few people seemed to regard LoRD as their favorite game, whereas a large percentage of the TW2002 players left still preferred Trade Wars over all other doors. I think the LoRD players tended to favor other games they also played, like Usurper or Exitilus.

   So, on my BBS, LoRD was easily the most popular by number of regular players. BUT… My BBS probably spent many, MANY more minutes dropped out to Trade Wars 2002 than it did to LoRD—possibly even more than any other board activity, aside from file transfers. The variability of TW2002 combined with its relatively complex strategy meant its followers would be more devoted to it than the mostly casual players of the elegant-but-predictable LoRD.

   In other words, I don’t think I can help answer the question, except maybe to pose a new one. Is something greater if it has a larger number of devotees, or is it greater if it becomes part of the general background of the experiences of nearly everyone?

   * Our calling area only had 20-30 open-access BBSes at any given time during the peak years for BBSing, so it was possible for us to be familiar with all the boards’ offerings, save some of the private boards I may not have known about.
   ** Funnily enough, the more turns-per-day LoRD was set to, the fewer daily players would play. This wasn’t so noticeable when LoRD was a fresh game, but by about early ’95—about when the novelty of the “new” v3.x features wore off—a SysOp could wreck a game by increasing the turns, especially if he/she was also running one of the similar, competing games like Usurper.

   Reply