Resurrecting Conquer: A Game from the 1980s
[Juan] describes himself as a software engineer, a lover of absurd humor, and, among other things, a player of Nethack. We think he should add computer game archaeologist to that list. In the 1990s, he played a game that had first appeared on USENET in 1987. Initially called “Middle-earth multiplayer game,” it was soon rebranded with the catchier moniker, Conquer.
It may not seem like a big thing today, but writing multiplayer software and distributing it widely was pretty rare stuff in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In 2006, [Juan] realized that this game, an intellectual predecessor to so many later games, was in danger of being lost forever. The source code was scattered around different archives, and it wasn’t clear what rights anyone had to the source code.
[Juan] set out to find the original authors [Edward Barlow] and [Adam Bryant]. Of course, their e-mail addresses from USENET were long dead. With persistence, he finally found [Barlow] in 2006. He was amenable to [Juan] porting the code over, but didn’t know how to contact [Bryant].
[Juan] continued to leave posts and follow up leads. He did eventually find [Bryant], who read one of the posts about the project and offered his permission to GPL the code. This was in 2011, nearly five years after the release from [Barlow]. He also discovered there was a third author who was also game. Unfortunately, [Richard Caley] had already passed away, so there was no way to obtain his release.
You can compare the original version with the new updated version from [Juan]. A software accomplishment worthy of Indiana Jones.
We love digging through old code. Especially for software that was especially influential.