Galactic Raiders

History

Unfortunately, Galactic Raiders may go down in history known only as the predecessor to Galactic Empire. A pity, because the game itself was very good and challenging in its own right. Galactic Raiders was the first real-time space battle game for The Major BBS, and one of the few "big" add-ons for the very early commercial versions of The Major BBS.

Later, as Mike Murdock evolved his designs and ideas for the project, he realized that a new game with many more additional facets and features would be a better direction. Hence, Galactic Empire.

But all wasn't over for Raiders – he did continue to evolve the game a bit, adding new ships (even a few not available in Empire), and more varied weapons. The Cyberquad were added, as well, to provide NPC action on every system, even at non-peak hours.

Eventually, Raiders development ended, and the source code may be lost. The games did co-exist for a short while, so there is still hope that someone still has a copy of this game.

From Mike Murdock: Galactic Raiders was inspired by a game I played while at college on a mainframe Univac-1100 system. This system had old TTY-33 teletype terminals (pre crt) and obviously a text only interface. The game consumed many hours I should have better spent studying and had quite a following in the underground hacker world.

Game Information

Galactic Raiders is an action game. It has many of the features of the larger Galactic Empire game, including, real-time user versus user space warfare, ships which navigate in real time, and the dreaded Cybertron robot ships.

Galactic Raiders differs from Galactic Empire in that it has none of the economic simulation, or planets to explore or conquer. Additionally it has new types of ships and several new weapons systems, including jammers, and mines. And just when you thought it was safe to explore the universe, you meet the even more deadly Cyberquad.

Gameplay

Galactic Raiders is a text-based multi-user action game. All events are presented in real-time to the user's ANSI/ASCII terminal. Commands are given on a command line, and occasionally, menus are present. Shortcuts for commands are available to allow for quick typing, or for easier macro programming.