VGA Planets

Tim Wisseman was working as a lumberjack in the mountains near Bass Lake, California when VGA Planets took off. He’d been writing multiplayer space games since 1983, starting with a real-time combat program on a four-terminal school computer, eventually producing VGA Planets 1.0 in 1992 and uploading it to the only local BBS in his area – a bulletin board designed to sell houses and land, with no games section. Version 3.0 followed in 1993, spread through FIDOnet, and suddenly people everywhere were playing a space strategy game written by a logger in the Sierra Nevada foothills. One of the first commercially successful indie games, sold for $15 shareware.

The game put up to eleven players in control of rival races in a cluster of star systems, starting from a home world and expanding outward through colonisation, mining, and fleet construction. The races were openly modelled on familiar science fiction franchises – Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica – without the licences to match. Each had distinct ships, special abilities, and strategic profiles. The Cyborgs could assimilate native populations into colonists. The Robots specialised in minelaying. The Birdmen excelled at cloaking and espionage. Picking a race meant committing to a particular style of play for a campaign that could last months.

The infrastructure that supported this in 1993 was dial-up bulletin board systems. Players connected to a BBS, downloaded their turn file, processed their orders using the client program, and uploaded the result. The host ran resolution at scheduled intervals. As the internet became more accessible the game migrated to email, which is where the term play-by-email came from in this context. There was no central server, no matchmaking, no live connection. You submitted your orders and waited, sometimes for days, to see the outcome. The asynchronous gap between submission and resolution was where most of the game’s social texture lived – the diplomacy conducted through messages sent outside the game, the alliances negotiated over email, the betrayals timed for maximum effect.

Combat resolved automatically based on ship stats and pre-issued mission orders. You couldn’t intervene once fleets engaged. Preparation was the entirety of your tactical contribution: ship loadout, formation, mission type, positioning. Logistics constrained everything – ships had finite fuel, starbases were the only locations for repair and construction, and supply lines across a large map required their own protection. Computer Gaming World acknowledged the clunky interface and lack of single-player AI in 1993 and 1994 while still recommending it to anyone who enjoyed space strategy, calling it four stars out of five and noting that Wisseman’s continual improvement of the product justified the investment.

The faction asymmetry drove most of the diplomacy. A player running a race with strong early expansion but weak combat eventually needed to trade or negotiate for protection. A player running a combat-heavy race needed access to colonies with the right minerals to sustain their fleet construction. These dependencies created reasons to cooperate and equally clear reasons to betray a partner once the immediate need was met. Campaigns generated specific stories in a way that single-player games couldn’t replicate – particular betrayals, improbable comebacks, coalitions that held for thirty turns before fracturing. The combination of asynchronous play and faction asymmetry produced the kind of emergent narrative that modern game designers still chase.

VGA Planets Nu launched in 2010 as a web-based rebuild of version 3, accessible through a browser without the installation requirements and file transfer process of the original. It remains the most common way to play the game. The core design is unchanged from what Wisseman uploaded to a property listings BBS in 1992 and that is either a significant argument for the quality of the underlying design or a missed opportunity for development, depending on your perspective. Neptune’s Pride, Subterfuge, and similar asynchronous multiplayer strategy games that emerged in the following decades owe an obvious debt to what VGA Planets proved was possible with limited technology and no publisher backing.

Wisseman is still listed with a PO Box in North Fork, California. The game is still running.