''Star Trader'' is a 1974 video game and an early example of the space trading genre. The game involves players moving from star to star on a map of the galaxy, buying and selling quantities of six types of merchandise in a competition to make the most money. The game was developed by Dave Kaufman for computers in 1973, and its

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

source code was printed in the January 1974 issue of the '' People's Computer Company Newsletter''. It was reprinted in the 1977 book '' What to Do After You Hit Return''. The game was the inspiration for the multiplayer '' Trade Wars'' series, beginning in 1984, and is thought to be the antecedent to much of the space trading genre.

Gameplay

''Star Trader'' is a multiplayer space trading game, in which players trade resources between star systems in order to make the most money. The game presents a star map of the

galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

in which each player moves about trading between star systems of different levels of economic development. The players travel from planet to planet buying and selling six types of merchandise: uranium, metals, gems, software, heavy equipment, and medicine. The different levels of planet have different needs and produce different kinds and amounts of goods, which influences their prices. In the course of the game the level of development of planets can improve and new planetary systems can be discovered. Haggling over the price of goods is a central part of gameplay. The game's interface is

text-only In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...

Development

''Star Trader'' was written by Dave Kaufman in the

BASIC programming language BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. Dartmouth BASIC, The original version was created by John ...

. The source code to the game was published in the '' People's Computer Company Newsletter'' in volume 2, issue 3 in January 1974. The concept for the game is seemingly based on

Isaac Asimov yi, יצחק אזימאװ , birth_date = , birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR , spouse = , relatives = , children = 2 , death_date = , death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S. , nationality = Russian (1920–1922)Soviet (192 ...

's '' Foundation'' series of novels.

Legacy

In 1977, the game's code was reprinted in '' What to Do After You Hit Return''. ''Star Trader'' was used as the inspiration for the first game of the '' Trade Wars'' series of multiplayer space trading games in 1984, making it the ancestor of many subsequent space trader games, including '' Eve Online'', the '' Wing Commander Privateer'' series, and ''

Elite In political and sociological theory, the elite (french: élite, from la, eligere, to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. D ...

'' series. Several unrelated but similar space trading games have been released under the name ''Star Trader''. One such game was released by

Bug Byte Bug-Byte Software Ltd. was a video game company founded in 1980 by Tony Baden and Tony Milner, two Oxford chemistry graduates. It was one of the first to develop a range of 8-bit computer games during the early 1980s, for Sinclair, Commodore and ...

Software in 1984 for the ZX Spectrum and

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

, and was one of the games included with the

Softaid ''Soft Aid'' is a software compilation, released by Quicksilva in March 1985 to support the Famine Relief in Ethiopia. The software was released on Magnetic tape, tape for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 home computers. An audio recording of the ...

compilation. Another was written by S. J. Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic, and modified by John Zaitseff for Microsoft Basic under the

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

-80 operating system in 1988. Completely rewritten versions for CP/M-80, CP/M-86, MS-DOS,

Microsoft Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3. ...

and Linux/ Unix followed, with the latest release for Linux and Unix occurring in November 2019. All versions by John Zaitseff have been released or relicensed under the GNU General Public License v3.

References

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External links

The People's Computer Company Alumni Pages
People's Computer Company Alumni and History site.
Standard HP BASIC Listing #1
''Star Trader'' Game Setup Module BASIC programming language listing.
Standard HP BASIC Listing #2
''Star Trader'' Game Main Module BASIC programming language listing.
''Star Trader'' Tribute Page
Site describing the history of Star Trader.
History Of Trade Wars Variants
Timeline of the history of Trade Wars variants.
Star Traders
Versions of Star Traders for Linux, as well as for CP/M-80, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and Commodore 64. 1974 video games Space trading and combat simulators Public-domain software with source code Video games developed in the United States