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Trade Wars is a series of dating back to 1984. The video games are inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, the board game Risk, and the original space trader game Star Trader.
Because Sherrick released his earliest versions with a free license, many variations of the game appeared over the next few years, including TWV - Galactic Armageddon, Yankee Trader, and TW2 (a development of the original by John Morris who took over from Chris Sherrick).
In September 1986, James T. Gunderson, a sysop known by the handle "Lord Darkseid", ported TradeWars to Turbo Pascal 3 for use on WWIV BBSes. Like most games for WWIV at this time, Gunderson's TradeWars implementation was written as a Chain loading or sub-program. This enabled sysops to install the game without recompiling WWIV, but it required Gunderson to distribute the game as source code, rather than as compiled code. He called his version TW2 for WWIV, and it shared no source code with the Sherrick version, which had been written in Basic.
A succession of sysops and users modified Gunderson's version, making , adding new features, and incorporating thematic elements from disparate sources like Star Trek and Superman.
WWIV sysop Gary Martin also obtained this the source code, which he later described as a "hot mess" that "crashed all the time." In an effort to stabilize the game, he overhauled the core source code, and released his new version as Trade Wars 2001 in late 1986. Only 14 sysops paid to register TW2001. But Martin's next effort, the TradeWars 2002 series, would become arguably the most popular variant of TradeWars.
In 1988, the author of WWIV, Wayne Bell, ported his BBS software in Turbo C. This major change meant older chain programs would no longer work, so beginning in March 1989, Martin embarked on a total rewrite of TW2001. He added numerous new features, such as the StarDock, where players could interact with each other, buy new ships, and watch "movies" (ANSI art animations). A fan of at this time, Martin decided to give his game a more consistent Star Trek theme, and established the Ferengi as the game's main antagonists. TradeWars 2002 v1.00 was released in June 1991. No longer just a WWIV chain, TW2002 was a standalone program that could run with almost any BBS software.
TW2002 v1, v2, and v3 were BBS mainstays throughout the 1990s. In 1998, Gary Martin sold the Trade Wars license to John Pritchett, who had written Tradewars 2002 v3 and its gold expansion. John and his company, EIS, developed a stand-alone game server, TradeWars Game Server, which has allowed Trade Wars to survive beyond the BBS era. Martin and Pritchett together have sold more than 28,000 TW2002 registrations between 1990 and 2025.
Since the basics of the game structure are numerical, these games are not reliant on high resolution graphics or rapid processing, which makes them ideally suited to low-resource computing platforms.
Today, classic Trade Wars is primarily hosted by Windows NT/2000/XP computers running the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS), which accepts incoming telnet connections and launches the Trade Wars ANSI game. Trade Wars is also run by many of the surviving BBSs, and variations have been ported to the web, , and the Palm OS.
The editors of netgames called TW2002 "perhaps the granddaddy of all BBS games" in 1994, (1994). 9780679755920, Michael Wolff & Company. ISBN 9780679755920 the same year Pritchett has said was the peak of the game's popularity, with an estimated 70,000 active TradeWars players.
Trade Wars is cited as an influence by game developers including Paul Sage, lead designer of Ultima Online, Josh Johnston, lead programmer of , Eric Wang, producer of Earth & Beyond, and Pete Mackay, a designer of Star Citizen.
Reviewers have compared many games to TradeWars, including EVE Online, Jumpgate,
and Spore.
A major online game based on Trade Wars 2002 was under development in the early 2000s under the name TW: Dark Millennium, later renamed Exarch. When the developer, Realm Interactive, was acquired by their publisher, NCsoft Austin (Richard Garriott/Destination Games), the development of Exarch was discontinued. What started as TW: DM was eventually released by NCsoft as Dungeon Runners. Trade Wars: Dark Millennium Q&A - PC News at GameSpot
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