LineWars 1

What is it?

LineWars 1 was my first ever shareware PC game. I started working on it in 1987 after I had played the PC version of Elite (Trade Mark of Acornsoft Ltd., originally by Ian Bell and David Braben) for a long time and eventually got bored with the CGA 4-color 320x200 graphics while my PC at the time had EGA 16-color 640x350 graphics capability.

I spent a long time studying the PC version of Elite and programming similar space flight routines but using EGA graphics. I was not so interested in the trade features of Elite, so I created a simple space arcade game where you could fight against an opponent via a modem connection.

I released LineWars 1 (the latest version was 1.52) as shareware in 1989 and got it included into PC-SIG disk number 1764. Since the game does not work properly even on 486 machines, not to mention current Windows machines, the game can nowadays safely be forgotten. It was the starting point for LineWars II, though.

If for some peculiar reason (nostalgia, perhaps?) you wish to see the game in action, you can actually play it online at https://www.pcjs.org/disks/pcx86/shareware/pcsig08/1501/ by searching the page for disk 1764 and clicking on "Load Disk" (thanks to Robert Van Etta for this info). Alternatively, you can also download the game (along with all the other disks in the full PC-SIG CD-ROM) from https://archive.org/details/cdrom-pcsig12.