If It's 1984, It Must Be Megawars
Jason Scott, who is known both for his BBS Documentary and for the epochally necessary Textfiles.com, and who is currently preparing a documentary about text adventures, has started a new scanning project, Digitize.textfiles.com.
Thus far, there's only a few files online, and many are computer (rather than game!) related, but there's already some gems up - a brochure for 1981's Microsoft Adventure, "a rebrand of the original Crowther and Woods adventure", and best of all, a booklet for Compuserve's Megawars.
This is described by Jason as: "Brochure for Compuserve's Megawars, one of the first massively-multiplayer online games, allowing game players to trade and fight enemies in space; includes space map, as well as information on many other games available to Compuserve users." Here's some good info on Megawars, which was originally heavily Star Trek-related, and was put onto Compuserve in 1983 by Kesmai, those online game grandaddies who were eventually sold to EA (as all companies eventually are) in 1999.
Comments
I still think that painting of the cover of Megawars is the single best game cover, ever.
Posted by: Jason Scott | March 18, 2006 12:57 PM
Our company, Macalot Software (for fun) wrote the first GUI for megawars called MacWars, circa 1986-87. It was a Mac only app, was turned down by Compuserve as a supporting product for MegaWars and eventually went from shareware to free d/l on compuserve, I believe there were over 230 downloads with one client actually paying. I still have alot of the original documentation to the game.
Posted by: craig smith | April 3, 2007 5:46 PM
Craig,
Could you drop me a line regarding Megawars ? I would love to see the info you have on the game - I use to play religiously in college and would love to have more info and possibly find some of the players from that era.
Thank you in advance.
~Keith Lockhart
Posted by: Keith Lockhart | October 7, 2007 7:08 PM
Keith, just stumbled back into here and saw your post....I can't find your email here anywhere, email me please. Heck i have the drawings and some manuals, etc, just saw them the other month.
craig
Posted by: craig smith | March 14, 2008 9:21 PM
dang, guess the email we enter to post doesn't have a link for you anywhere. I hate to post my email in public here. Call me at my work....724 843 1160 10 am to 6 pm M-F and 10-3 pm sat. eastern time.
craig
Posted by: craig smith | March 14, 2008 9:25 PM
Come join our recreation of Mega Wars III
www.megawars3.com
Posted by: Spectrum | December 10, 2008 6:14 PM