Modem Wars by Dan Bunten (DOS and C64, 1988)

The name was program. The main feature of Modem Wars was that two people could play against each other over a modem. Multiplayer functions had been common in early PC games, but they involved two people sitting in front of the same computer, either taking turns or having their own set of keys on each side of the keyboard. A nice example for a game operating like this is 7 Colors. On the old 8-bit machines it was even easier, they had at least two joystick ports, the Atari 800 even had four. But Modem Wars was, along with Reichart Kurt von Wolfsheild's Fire Power, the first game where two players could sit each in front of their own computer and play over a telephone line.

Modem Wars was one of my favorite games to develop and to play (second only to M.U.L.E.). It was the last of my designs published by EA. (Ironically, I quit them because Trip wouldn't let me do M.U.L.E. for the Nintendo because he said EA wasn't going to do cartridge games. This is the company that now makes more than half their revenue from cartridges!) Modem Wars came out '88 and was the last C64 title I did and the first PC one (platforms were shifting again). War as we wanted it called (or Sport of War was our working title) was inspired by playing soldiers in the dirt with my brothers when I was a kid. It didn't have any of the complicated rules and relationships wargames at the time had and it ran in real-time without turns or pauses. It was just click on a unit (or group) to select it and click on it's destination. The unit would shoot at any enemy it encountered but that was about it. I had the simple infantry, artillery and cavalry mix from the Napoleonic era as well as hills where your guys saw further and forests where they didn't. It was the first of my online games (if 2 players being connected via modems qualifies) and it was the first time a major publisher published such a product.

What I though was neat was that players' each had full time active use of their own machines (all my previous multi-player games included either turns or multiple inputs and shared output on one screen). This kind of play was a real kick for us the first time we tried and as it has turned out now it's a kick for a lot more folks now that modems and ways to connect are much common. In fact that was Modem Wars biggest problem—the lack of modems in '88. By the time they started showing up en masse in the '90s, Modem Wars was out of the EA catalog and out of date. (It was written when EGA was the new thing and a mouse was very rare on a PC).

There were several neat things about the game that I carried forward. The interface while exceedingly simple—click to select, click to set destination—also had more advanced options. If you double clicked, you could get a menu that let you do more sophisticated things like create your own groups, tell them to dig-in, etc. In addition, I like the way there were various features that allowed different players to use their own skills to compete. Not since M.U.L.E. was I able to build that kind of aspect into a game. In Modem Wars there was the battle planning and strategy involved in managing your armies. But there was also eye-hand coordination in the drones (slow flying buzz bombs) that players could fly and the missiles (fast rockets) that shot them down. In addition there was a radar-like display that players could pick out hidden units if they were good at pattern and change recognition. And with the spy type unit there was subterfuge and counter-espionage. What all this meant was that various aspects of a player and their unique combination of skills meant that each person had their own specialized style of play. Another thing that I thought was cool came as a consequence of the fact that Modem Wars was written to work with 300 baud C64 modems and hence very little data could be sent between the players. Each machine had to run independently and the only info sent between them was what is called the deltas. Since the robots all behaved under very strict rules, the deltas in this design were limited to the commands from the players. Nothing about the screen or interface of the other player was shared. If a player for instance gave a unit a destination, nothing about the process of clicking and positioning the cursor was sent, just the result. This took only four bytes—one each for: the move command, the unit ID#, the destination X and the destination Y. This meant that the time thinking about what to do and the time giving the unit it's new command could be reduced to 4 bytes. This meant that the entire game could be stored in only 4K! And since the game engine had to run on it's own with only those deltas at the right times, you could turn the process into a way to replay the game by just running the game out of the stored data rather than the inputs from the players. This Game Film, as we called it, turned out to be a really popular feature. It allowed players to look at what happened from any perspective (theirs, their enemy's or omniscient) and to slow it down or even pause it. Frequently this was the first chance players had to see much of what was going on during the battle since they were only aware of their own robots and the few enemy ones within range. I was amazed how people used this opportunity the game films offered to rationalize their loss and to create stories out the intense and ephemeral experience of the battle. These two things are both things that players need to make their play more meaningful and I hadn't realized it till the pitiful C64 modem forced me to learn them. Now, when I give talks about designing multi-player games at conference I tell them that if we want to make multi-player games that people can really enjoy, we have give them a way to save face as well as ways to make legends out of their best performances. (I ended up including this feature in both Command HQ and Global Conquest).

The most frustrating thing about this game was trying to get the intensity factor just right. In the days before Doom, people weren't accustomed to adrenaline rushes that lasted several minutes. That reminds me of another neat thing about the game—it had a time limit after which a winner was declared (30 minutes was the longest game). This seemed (and still seems) like a good idea. Anyway, back to the intensity issue. I was convinced by several of the reactions from reviewers and play-testers that part of Modem Wars problem (you always thinks a game has problems when it doesn't sell as well as expected) was that it was too intense. The next two games where attempts to slow things down to get more market. That seems foolish now but such is life.

I'm currently working as a consultant for a company who is implementing a new 8 player version of this design for the internet through Mplayer and I'm hoping it'll be out in late '97. In the meantime you're welcome to the old version if you promise not to be too hard on it (it's almost a decade behind the state of the art) because despite it's surface it has a good heart.—Dani Bunten

Appreciations

It painted a surprisingly accurate picture of where the RTS genre would eventually end up, T. Byrl Baker thinks:
Some consider Dune 2 to be the most influential real-time strategy game. Others claim it was the 1970s mainframe version of Empire that laid the groundwork for RTS games as we know them today. That debate will never be satisfactorily settled, but we can honestly say that the RTS game that deserved the title of being ahead of its time is Electronic Arts' Modem Wars.
Two thumbs up, Home of the Underdogs concludes after quoting Brian Moriarty:
1988's Modem Wars was the first game released by a major publisher to support modem-to-modem multiplay. A futuristic synthesis of toy soldiering and football, Modem Wars was a technical tour de force, offering a surprisingly brisk interactive experience within the severe constraints of 1200-baud modems. Many of the latency and synchronization challenges faced by today’s network game engineers were solved first by Modem Wars.