The Great Galactic Conflict, or GGC for short, was a turn based Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) which was available in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

around 1985. The game was accessed through a text based dialup service from Telecom Australia (later Telstra Australia) known as

Viatel Viatel is a Dublin-based telecoms operator. Viatel was founded in 1991 by Martin Varsavsky. In 1994, it went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Four years later, Varsavsky sold his stake in Viatel for US$200 million and left the company. I ...

. Briefly, the game mechanic required players to enter their moves during a one-week period. Once a week the

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs. The "engine" terminology is similar to the term "software engine" used in the software i ...

would process all entered moves and compute a result which became the basis for the following week's moves. An entire game took 10 weeks and GGC games were played 3 times. GGC moves were heavily influenced by negotiations between players which formed a significant portion of the game play. In 1988 the winner of the game was eligible to receive a prize of $2500. The game was written by Ian Davies for Microtex 666 from 1983 to 1984.{{cite web, url=http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ian-davies/7/379/27, title=Ian Davies GGC was engineered to support 1000 players, but peaked at around 600. Back end software running on DOS-based PCs would take several hours to determine the collective outcome of the players' moves. Viatel's "bulk update protocol" was used to upload and distribute the new game state to the players.

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Australian games Massively multiplayer online games