Trade Wars 2002

You start the game in the Terra sector with a Merchant Cruiser, the cheapest ship available. The basic way to get money in the game is by trading. Buy low, sell high. Then buy a better ship, more fighters (your main weapon), more shield, etc. You'll gain money and experience by trading goods and attacking ships, and maybe later be able to create planets.
There is a lot of people in the Universe, like Aliens, other traders and Federation ships.

The highest goal in TW2002 is to create a Corporation. You'll then be able to recruit other players, create planets and Citadels, and so, make much more money.
Another feature in the game is the Good/Evil freedom. If you choose to attack Federation ships and Ports, your Reputation will go down and you will become a feared pirate. You will have access to the Underwold, with its Mafia and bounty hunters.

Trade Wars 2002 is turn-based. That means most actions, like warping to another sector or landing on a planet, take turns. Your turns reset every hour or day, depending of the BBS.

If you want to try this marvellous game, you can log on :
combatalley.dynip.com (on the telnet port 23)
There are plenty of other servers with Trade Wars 2002, simply Google for "TW 2002 servers".

Martech Software is located at : www.martech.net and their telnet BBS is at :
loft.martech.net (but it may be down, I didn't try it.)

Ok, the Martech Software website is dead *sniff*. I'll look around but I doubt this company is still alive.

Update - randombit says: You can buy a license from eisonline.com - a bunch of us at work have been playing just recently. :)

An intensely strategic, political, and highly-addictive BBS game I played years ago in which backstabbing your space-faring corporate partners and running off with all the loot was quite common (and fun!). This was necessary on occasion to spice up the game a bit when either the other players were trailing too far behind your corporation to pose a serious threat, or your fellow teammates became all too comfortable sitting atop their piles of riches.

The most incredible thing about this game is that once you get into it, it effectively ceases to be text-based. Your imagination begins to fill in more and more until that random jumble of multi-coloured ASCII characters coalesces into intergalactic warships screaming towards you at hyper-speed! Even now (at least seven years later), I can barely remember what the screen actually looks like--I can only recall the vivid mental imagery the game conjured up for me during my online adventures.

Captain Zyrain was the bane of my existence back then... I'm still bitter...

Here is a quote from David Adams, game designer:

"There are a lot of differences between the game we are making and the original, and most of these are byproducts of converting the idea to the modern age. For instance, our game is real time, the original was turn-based. Our game is full 3D, the original was ASCII. These are some pretty big differences. What we tried to do is isolate the spirit of the original game--those aspects that appealed to us on a conceptual level--and incorporate as many of them as possible"

Early reports about this game indicate that it will be a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with thousands of people playing in a particular "shard".