MegaWars III

~ the obituary ~

The first MegaWars III cycle opened on 19 January 1984 and ran until the middle of March. I was born that year, which is the cleanest measure of distance I can give for this one. By the time I had a modem in front of me in 1998, the game was fourteen years old and had about eighteen months left in it.

Kesmai built it, with Kelton Flinn writing the thing and John Taylor working on the design alongside him. It came out of a line that started on university mainframes with Empire and DECWAR, then passed through a CompuServe game called S in 1979 that could hold eight players at once. MegaWars III took that number to a hundred and gave them roughly a thousand star systems to fight over.

The structure is the part worth keeping. A cycle ran four or five weeks of real time, with the clock inside the galaxy moving fast enough that eight hours at the terminal covered about a month of colony growth. You claimed planets and defended them against whoever was ahead. At the end somebody was declared emperor. Then the galaxy was flattened and a new cycle opened with everyone back at nothing.

What kept me out of it was never the game. CompuServe charged by the connected hour at rates that assumed an American office budget, and a Turkish phone line in the nineties metered the local call underneath that on its own counter. Two meters running at once against a war that took a month to win is not a hobby anybody in my house was going to sign off on.

~ the case file ~

~ the shape of the game ~

You could hold colonies on up to six planets and had to actually manage them, which meant reading numbers off a text screen and deciding where the next shipment went. Scout ships came with three hulls and were expected to die. None of this was explained anywhere official, so the players wrote it down themselves and passed the files around, which is how a generation of strategy guides got made before anybody had a website to put them on.

The cycle wipe is the design decision that still looks smart. Persistent worlds now spend their entire lives fighting the problem of the player who started in year one and cannot be caught. MegaWars III solved it by ending. Every month the board was cleared and the veteran and the newcomer opened the same empty map, with the veteran keeping nothing but the knowledge of what to do with it.

~ the postmortem ~

CompuServe stopped being a company in the late nineties. WorldCom took it apart in 1997 and handed the consumer online service to AOL early the following year, and what AOL wanted from it was a web product. CompuServe 2000 shipped as a browser-shaped client, and a browser-shaped client had nowhere to put a command line game that expected a terminal session to stay open for hours.

So the plug came out on 24 November 1999, fifteen years and ten months after the first cycle. Fan records name Starhawk as the emperor of the final round. A modified version had been running on GEnie under the name Stellar Emperor and went the same year, because GEnie was dying too. Kesmai itself was sold to News Corporation and then to Electronic Arts in 1999, and EA closed the GameStorm service it had been folded into two years later.

~ the long tail ~

A browser remake called MegaWars III: The Rebirth appeared in 2010, built by people who had played the original and wanted the cycle structure back. It is a small thing next to what the name meant on CompuServe, but it exists, which is more than most games from 1984 can say.

The larger inheritance is not a remake at all. Every seasonal reset in a modern competitive game is the MegaWars III cycle with better graphics and a battle pass attached. Kesmai worked out in 1984 that a persistent world stays interesting only if you are willing to destroy it on schedule, and it took the rest of the industry about twenty-five years to agree.

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