![]() I've received some angry emails over these. WB : Empire has caused many students to flunk out, and even a few divorces. I was not kidding when I said I almost failed a Data Structures course in 1981 because I was playing Empire. ![]() MNM : I would say you captured that control center feel with Empire, in a very immersive way. Another point of inspiration was in the movie The Battle of Britain (1968) there were scenes in the British dispatch and control center, which had a giant central map where people moved around counters representing airplanes and ships. WB : I was completely unaware of them, other than Risk and Stratego, both of which were influential for Empire. MNM : How about non-computer wargames? Were you a fan of strategy board games like all those 1970s Avalon Hill games such as Panzer Blitz or Squad Leader ? WB : Computer games I played at the time were various Star Trek games, lunar lander games, ones out of the 101 BASIC Games book, etc. So were there other one-player computer games of the time that influenced you? I personally don’t know of any wargames prior to 1978, except perhaps Chris Crawford’s Tanktics. A computer also relieved one of the burden of finding a friend who was interested enough to spend hours playing the opponent. When I finally was able to use a computer, I realized it could remove the tedium and leave the fun part. (I knew nothing of the paper wargames that were popular later.) So it got shelved. But, it turned out to be far too tedious to play. I built a game board out of a large sheet of plywood, painted it, made game pieces, etc. WB : I actually invented Empire when I was 11. But you just answered a question I was going to ask, about whether the game was the consequence of some computer science project, or the other way around. MNM : Which would bring us to talking about the D programming language, something I want to touch on in a bit. I figured I could do better than the existing ones! (Today, a second or two!) This meant I became more and more focused on optimizing the code, and so became more and more interested in compilers and languages. It ran slowly, and games where the computer played itself lasted several hours. WB: A perennial problem I had with Empire is the computers of the time simply were not powerful enough. Looking through your long list of accomplishments, Empire seems to be a bit of an outlier in your work, which has more of a focus on programming language, compiler design, and related computer science topics. MNM: Hi Walter, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with The Mad Ned Memo about your work, and the development of Empire. I asked him if he would be willing to discuss the development of Empire with The Mad Ned Memo, a request to which he graciously agreed. Forty years later, I was very surprised to have run across him in this way. I did pass that course, but no thanks to Walter. It was the first time I ever played a computer wargame, and I was instantly hooked, spending valuable time on the system’s VT100 terminals conquering cities rather than doing my data structures homework. I encountered Empire while taking classes at the University of Hartford in 1981, where it was installed on their brand-new VAX 11/780 computer. ![]() Empire contained then-groundbreaking features we still know and love today, including maps featuring cities, water and complex landmasses, fog-of-war mechanics, and a formidable computer AI that plays by the same rules you do. That program was Empire, written in 1978 for the DECsystem-10 mainframe and is one of the earliest examples of a computer wargame. The author of this response was none other than Walter Bright, compiler expert and creator of the D programming language, as well the author of the very famous program that he had referred to in his Hacker News reply. This post had some interesting discussion on Hacker News, and among these comments was one from a reader who mentioned that his oldest code was from 1978, and is still available on GitHub. I recently posted an article about resurrecting old code, and went into some detail about how I brought a program for the TRS-80 I wrote in 1982 back to life. Walter Bright (Photo courtesy Walter Bright)
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