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Similar Space Trader, Elite, Spaceward Ho!, Cyber Knight, Starport: Galactic Empires | ||
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Star Trader is a 1974 video game and an early example of the space trading genre.
Contents
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Gameplay
Star Trader presents a star map of the galaxy in which the players move about and make money from trading and establishing trading routes. The players travel about the star map buying and selling six types of merchandise: uranium, metals, gems, software, heavy equipment, and medicine. The game's entire interface was text-only.
History
Seemingly based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, Star Trader was written by Dave Kaufman in the BASIC programming language. It was published by the People's Computer Company in Volume 2, Number 3 of its newsletter in January 1974.
In 1977, the game was reprinted in What to Do After You Hit Return. The Star Trader source code evolved into Trade Wars, making it the ancestor of many subsequent space trader games, including Eve Online, the Wing Commander Privateer series and Elite series.
Variants
An unrelated game of the same name was released by Bug Byte Software in 1984 for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, and was one of the games included with the Softaid compilation.
A similar game was written by S. J. Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic, and modified by John Zaitseff for Microsoft Basic under the CP/M-80 operating system in 1988. Versions for CP/M-80, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Linux followed GPLv3 licensed, with the latest release for Linux occurring in September, 2015.