MegaWars III

In 1979 University of Virginia 4th year students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor started work on a game for the Hewlett-Packard HP 2000F time sharing minicomputer. Known simply as S, the game supported up to eight players on directly connected 2400 baud terminals. Much of what would become MegaWars III was present in S, but greatly simplified. This included ship-to-ship combat, the galaxy layout and creation engine, and a simple planetary economics system. The game was much "smaller" however, supporting fewer players and a smaller 255-system "galaxy".[3]

Bill Louden was in charge of games at CompuServe. In 1982 he purchased a version of DECWAR and turned it over to the programmers at Kesmai, who wrote many of CompuServe's games. While completing their doctorates, Flinn and Taylor started Kesmai, a reference to their first commercial product, Islands of Kesmai. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version that removed any potentially lawsuit-friendly names from the Star Trek universe with more generic versions.

The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR.

In 1985 Louden left CompuServe to form GEnie at General Electric. Kesmai re-scrubbed the system for use on GEnie, producing Stellar Warrior. Like MegaWars, Stellar Warrior ran for years, and was finally killed when GEnie was shut down in 1999.

Returning to S, CompuServe asked the game to be tied to MegaWars, which was a big hit, and the new version emerged as MegaWars III, II being a client-server version of the original MegaWars which was not released.

During the conversion, the game was greatly expanded. The maximum number of simultaneous players was increased from eight to 100, and the galaxy contained 1000 systems. However, another feature was lost; in S the player could close with an enemy ship in space and attempt to take it over, taking that ship's cargo if they were successful.

The game first went live on CIS on 19 January 1984, with this initial game running until 15 March. This was much longer than later games, which generally settled into a one-month period. From that point the game ran continually with only minor changes until 24 November 1999, when it no longer worked due to CIS turning off the "classic" text-mode interface which was needed to run the game.

Louden, who had been instrumental in setting up Kesmi on CIS, convinced General Electric to start a similar service on their machines, naming it GEnie. Many of the Kesmi games were ported to the new systems, although with minor changes to the names and theming in keeping with the new service. On GEnie, MegaWars III became Stellar Emperor. The game was modified from the original, the most notable change being the removal of the ship customization system and its replacement with a fixed set of pre-rolled designs. Like the original, this version of Stellar Emperor shut down in 1999 when the GEnie service ended.

The game was saved from completely disappearing when Kesmi opened their own online service, GameStorm. Stellar Emperor ran on this service, but now used a 2D graphical client that made many of the interactive portions of the game a point-and-click affair. However, this did not save it for long; Electronic Arts purchased Kesmi in 1999, and shut the service down in 2001.

The loss of MegaWars III has let to a number of efforts to revive the game in various forms. MegaWars III, The Rebirth is a browser based reincarnation of MegaWars III played on CompuServe and Stellar Emperor played on GEnie in the 1980s. Rebirth was created by David Baity, a well-known player of the original MegaWars III. Greatly enhanced performance eliminated all limitations to the number of players. Additionally, third party applications could easily be integrated into the game and several have been written. The initial release of Rebirth took place in 2010.