Subject: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
Fellow veterans of the Unix wars,
On October 26, 1987, Edward Barlow posted something special to comp.sources.games: "conquest ? middle earth multi-player game, Part01/05"
I was looking if that newsgroup was still active, but I don?t find it on
my server and probably full of spam nowadays...so it seems proper that I
tell this story here.
If you were there in those days?navigating USENET with tin or rn,
compiling software from shar archives, playing strategy games on green
or blue terminals? this story is for you.
This story is about the Unix Game: CONQUER - "the middle earth style multiplayer strategy turn based game". A shell based game where we could
see the maps with ASCII characters.
Let me indulge a little bit before continuing with sharing my feelings,
I feel like closing a circle coming back to USENET to post this, like finishing nethack...or like Indiana Jones before returning an old relic
to its original placement where it should belong.
Some years later, in 1994, I was a freshman in the Universidad de
Sevilla Spain, and spent quite too much time, more than I should, on the computer labs, falling in love with Unix and the games of the time.
I remember seeing the copyright lines and reading the names of the
authors: Edward Barlow and Adam Bryant appearing on the login screen of "conquer", and already thinking that the were the elders of the past.
Well, years later I still managed to get a copy of the source game that someone salvaged from the AIX machine we used on the university and I
managed to set a game for all our my peers, in the early 2000,
youngsters from Computer Sciences were still used to login through
telnet and ssh and play.
Years passed, and what started as a simple relicensing project in 2006
became a 20-year quest that brought me face-to-face with the ghosts of
our digital past. I tracked down the creators of Conquer across decades,
from Ed Barlow's casual "copyleft didnt exist when i wrote it" to Adam
Bryant mysteriously reappearing in 2011 after finding my blog posts
through search engines.
The journey revealed more than code?it uncovered the brilliant mind of
Richard Caley, one of the contributors for some utilities for conquer to
be able to print the maps, whose "Caleyisms" from Edinburgh still make
people laugh decades after his untimely dissapearing in 2005. His wit:
"What's a shell suit?" / "Oil company executive." The man behind FreeBSD contributions and speech synthesis research, preserved forever in the
digital amber of archived newsgroups.
But this isn't just nostalgia. This has served me to relicense the code
as GPL 3, get in contact with C again, to modernize the codebase (a
little bit: just some of the build tools). And also experiment a little
bit with GitHub Actions and automate its packaging for Debian and APK
with Melange.
The full story?complete with digital detective work, legal archaeology,
and the technical renaissance?is documented here:
https://vejeta.com/reviving-classic-unix-games-a-20-year-journey-through-software-archaeology/
This post to alt.folklore.computers feels like the proper completion of
a circle that began in comp.sources.games 38 years ago. Some of you were
there when Ed Barlow first shared his creation. You understood that
sharing cool things with the community wasn't just what you did?it was
who you were.
The games live on: GitHub repos (
https://github.com/vejeta/conquer &
https://github.com/vejeta/conquerv5),
and I have also started a third project:
https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web, where the ncurses output thanks
to `github.com/tsl0922/ttyd` makes the game playable on a web server preserving that authentic
terminal experience we remember.
Sometimes the best way to learn cutting-edge technology is by applying
it to preserve computing history. The threads connecting 1987 USENET to
2025 GitHub are stronger than we think.
--
Juan Manuel M‚ndez Rey (vejeta)
vejeta@gmail.com
Software Archaeologist
https://vejeta.com
"Sometimes the best way to learn cutting-edge technology
is by applying it to preserve computing history"
-=- CONQUER: From USENET 1987 to Modern CI/CD 2025 -=-
^^^^ .... ~~~~ ++++ @@@@@@ #### ****
MOUNT SHIRE RIVER ROHAN NETHACK GONDOR MORDOR
[E] Elves [H] Humans [O] Orcs [D] Dwarves
"conquer ? middle earth multi-player game, Part01/05"
-- Ed Barlow, comp.sources.games, 1987
Now GPL v3 licensed | GitHub: vejeta/conquer{,-v5}
20-year relicensing quest: 2006-2025
--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)