Cosmic Conquest

Going through old Color Computer News magazines, I found that some of them referred to other computer magazines - like those which might target a higher-end, "university" audience. One of these was BYTE. So then I got looping through BYTE.

Over 1982, concurrently with (arguably) the best year of CoCoNews, BYTE was posting the winners of a game-writing competition. Since at the time I was, uh, eight years old I hadn't actually read any BYTE.

Most of the games were for the Apple micro-computers. As hinted, my dialect was for the (Tandy/Microsoft) CoCo. If you, presumably not an eight year old boy, know CoCo MS Basic: you could probably grok most of the Apple's. I should have been able to handle that magazine's Apple games in the middle 1980s if not in 1982, although I don't know about Microsofting them (1989?).

What strikes me now is that, although everyone read BYTE back then, few seem to have remembered the actual winner of the comp. That would be Cosmic Conquest. Problem: it's not in Basic... at all. Alan Sartori-Angus did this in some Apple dialect of Forth nobody knows anymore. You'll remember (IBM-DOS) Forth from Starflight published 1986 - and its mod/sequel/cashin, which as far as I know was the last commercial run at a Forth game.

About four years ago some mad lads brought Conquest to a modern, hobbyist Forth. That's Rick Carlino; in 2022 Wargaming Scribe reviewed that. A year later some youtuber "I Shoot DVCAM" got the sprites working on an Apple II emulator.

Some oldschool type-em-up games have passed Chronus' test. People still enjoy lunar-lander, and Zork - even Rogue. Conquest left the awards with a blue ribbon and nothing else. It is in "the history of RTS" as a sideshow if that. For the reviewer, it squeaks into the RTS genre by dint of not being turnbased; although even here, under the hood, it is turnbased.

I have no dispute with the Conquest verdict of "totally obsolete". I do, however, dispute that this game belongs with Broderbund's The Ancient Art of War. Where Conquest really belongs is behind Master of Orion (which admittedly also has Civilization DNA) and, more-obscure, Reach For The Stars.

BACKDATE 8/30