Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

Posted by mwheeler 11/9/2025

Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology(vejeta.com)

176 points | 81 comments

drob518 11/9/2025|

We’re hitting that point in time when key figures in the history of early computing are starting to leave us. It’s nice to see these early applications preserved. If we can get this code off old disks and tapes and into modern cloud-based repositories, with open source licenses, we might be able to enjoy these programs for a long time, whether for actual amusement or just historical significance. The digital age is both a blessing and a curse in that so much information can be moved around so easily, but a lot of it is locked away on obsolete media that will eventually decay.

0xDEAFBEAD 11/10/2025|

Someone should start a museum where you can walk in and play these ancient games and fiddle with ancient software (probably using virtual machines and emulators for the sake of hardware preservation). They could use donations and admission tickets to fund the restoration of more and more old stuff, in a virtuous cycle.

pbalau 11/10/2025||

It is my very strong opinion that brits excel at museums.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

https://www.tnmoc.org/

https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/

0xDEAFBEAD 11/10/2025||

No doubt, but one could also argue that the UK is oversupplied with computer museums and other regions are undersupplied =)

inciampati 11/9/2025||

Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".

shagie 11/10/2025||

    “The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

AmbroseBierce 11/10/2025||

Coming soon: AI models archeologists

phs318u 11/12/2025||

I think we'll get AI model psychiatrists first.

jmclnx 11/9/2025||

Nice to see this happening, FWIW:

I uploaded a very old Star Trek Game I think from 1973. I got it from the Coherent OS people. You can get it by issuing these commands:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz' -o trek-73.tar.gz

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz.asc' -o trek-73.tar.gz.asc

and my gpg key in case you want to validate the download:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/jmcsdf.asc' -o jmcsdf.asc

vejeta 11/9/2025||

Hey John, I tried your build, just out of curiosity, something worth preserving too. I noticed it when compiling that the code also needed to be modernized, the same thing I had to do for conquer for the gpl-release.

I read in a comment below that work was already done, isn´t?

anthk 11/9/2025||

Trek lives in every OpenBSD install. And OFC with any Basic interpreter running the original game. I translated a Zmachine port into Spanish, too. ZTrek.

ilaksh 11/9/2025|||

Is it Trek or Super Star Trek?

https://github.com/philspil66/Super-Star-Trek

anthk 11/9/2025||

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/BSD_Trek

vejeta 11/9/2025|||

Hey Anthk, if you ported it to a Zmachine, does it mean is it like an interactive fiction game (aventura conversacional in spanish). Is it in the CAAD archive?

anthk 11/10/2025||

No is not a text adventure game; it just runs under the ZMachine. You have several other examples at IFDB, such as Tetris, Robots Find Kitten, Madbomber... I did internally as a translation at https://caja.texto-plano.xyz/anthk/zgames/spa/trek/ in order to provide a quick translated Trek game. Yes, I could use some Basic SST port but this made the game universally playable. It isn't a IF game because it doesn't use the INFSP6 Spanish grammar (the counterpart to the English Inform6 one). That's it, it uses raw Inform instructions.

The game is not at CAAD because they woudn't accept as it a text adventure game.

vejeta 11/10/2025||

Cool. Thanks for sharing it! I am going to play. Regarding instructions, I will find my way, but other less computer savvy users might need a README there. See you in USENET!

anthk 11/10/2025||

You can use Frotz or anything else, and as for the help, it's builtin both in Spanish and English per game edition.

https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/ztrek.z5 English version.

For instance: frotz ztrek.z5

Or Winfrotz under Windows, or Lectrote for any OS.

By pressing '9' you get the online help, in any language. Have fun.

billfruit 11/9/2025||

There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's).

Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?

vejeta 11/9/2025||

Hello, I am the author of the article. I did not know of those games you mention at the time. We used to play conquer at the AIX (Unix) that our computer labs provided for all the alumni. I have only tracked conquer's authors to obtain their permissions to relicense and preserve in a way that others could study and build upon.

billfruit 11/15/2025||

"The Book of Unix Games" by Janice Winsor is the book. Seems hard to find now.

DonHopkins 11/10/2025|||

I bought a copy of Aviator by Curt Priem and Bruce Factor, that ran on my SS2 pizzabox's GX "LEGO: Low End Graphics Option" SBus card (an 8 bit color + 2 bits monochrome overlay plane graphics accelerator):

https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...

>AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET. By CBR Staff Writer, 08 Jul 1991.

https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...

https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/aviator/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44049987

>Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved to play it. [...]

anthk 11/9/2025||

ACM, Sabre?

billfruit 11/15/2025||

It doesn't seem to be that widely known, any reason why?

mongol 11/9/2025||

When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?

fer 11/9/2025||

System/34 or System/36, the game was RACE. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRuTHz-wwk

mongol 11/9/2025||

Yes, that is how it looked like! Such nostalgia

sertyu 11/9/2025|||

Unfamiliar but probably System/34 or System/36 running SSP (System Support Program) with IBM 5250 series terminals.

Unsure about the games. Here’s an early lunar lander:

https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....

Another Lunar version:

https://undefinedvalue.com/lunar-for-c-and-rust.html

System/36 guide:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmsystem3rogrammingWi...

Possible source for games in David H. Ahl in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games.

ThrowawayR2 11/9/2025||

IBM System/34, System/36, or System/38 perhaps? Those are IBM's minicomputers available in that timeframe.

cbm-vic-20 11/9/2025||

How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."

vejeta 11/9/2025||

Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms. We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.

justin66 11/9/2025||

The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.

Tepix 11/9/2025||

Only if you haven‘t dealt with licenses. This software was published without a license.

justin66 11/10/2025|||

It's a wonder the software's authors, users, and distributors have evaded dire legal consequences all these decades.

kragen 11/10/2025||

It's a ticking time bomb that distributors are steering clear of for good reason. You are correct that current copyright law is pretty silly, but that silly law is frequently enforced by serious courts.

spot 11/9/2025||

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.

Tepix 11/9/2025||

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.

dirkt 11/10/2025|||

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

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

Tepix 11/10/2025||

Thanks!

wombatpm 11/9/2025|||

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.

Tepix 11/10/2025||

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).

hylaride 11/9/2025|||

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.

ww520 11/10/2025||

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

spacedcowboy 11/9/2025||

I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...

Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)

I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ... [1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com

cbm-vic-20 11/9/2025||

The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright

mmooss 11/9/2025|||

Is that the same Empire? The version I've seen has no BTUs. Just basics: random continents, cities produce military units, units require different numbers of turns for production, etc.

However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?

spacedcowboy 11/10/2025||

The version I played all those years ago definitely had BTUs. I remember planning ahead of time what the most efficient use of them would be, before actually doing things between updates; not to mention setting alarms to wake me up, log on, and use up the (otherwise wasted because I was at max) ones at times in the night, if I was doing something, er… sneaky :)

spacedcowboy 11/9/2025|||

TIL :)

vejeta 11/9/2025|||

LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P

PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.

Razengan 11/9/2025||

"Play-by-Mail" games could make a comeback now:

An AI could maintain the state of a world in its "mind", take text commands from a bunch of players, and update the state the next day.

anthk 11/10/2025||

AI's suck against the most simple game daemon or MUDs sendings emails over SMTP.

sombragris 11/10/2025||

Slackware offers bsd-games as part of the base distribution:

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/...

In addition, SBo (Slackware equivalent to BSD's port system with 3rd party software) offers nbsd-games, a series of classic Unix games with a ncurses interface:

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/games/nbsdgames/

It's nice to see true classics being preserved in one of those packages.

blacksmith_tb 11/10/2025|

Lots of distros should have the bsdgames package, for example Debian (and thus Ubuntu, Pop!_OS etc.): https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/bsdgames

anthk 11/9/2025|

https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/conquest-much... this?

vejeta 11/9/2025|

It is a different game, conquer is a multiplayer strategy game, loosely based on middle-earth atmosphere, nations could be: elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, there were npc nations too: lizards, nomads, etc. Conquer is still ncurses based, probably originating from the same times (the 80s). The original author, Ed Barlow, originally published the game in USENET, comp.sources.games, as conquest, but changed the name on the second release, when noticing there was already a game called conquest, probably this one.

Thanks for the link!

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