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Comment by spot | Hacker News Reader

Before xtrek and eventually netrek, there was hunt: https://techtinkering.com/2009/08/11/my-top-10-classic-text-... you might think that games back then were slow but this one was fast paced mayhem. using the vi commands was perfect.

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Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire). I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?

Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.

Empire was a blast. Top players instinctively knew how ships would move and would key in commands much much faster than the display would update. One second you are in orbit, the next refresh you are dead and the planet has been taken.

Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.

Interesting. Netrek ran at 10 fps (or rather, 10 refreshes of player coordinates), nowadays I think they are moving to 60 game ticks per second (with approximate cloaked player positions getting updates less frequently of course).

You can play Empire on cyber1 [1], an emulated PLATO system.

[1] https://www.cyber1.org

Thanks!

Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.

I wasted so much late night hours on Netrek in the computer lab.

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