DISCOVER THE ORIGINS OF STARLORD, MIKE SINGLETON’S EPIC STRATEGY GAME THAT WAS OVER TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING.
STARTING AS A PLAY-BYMAIL (PBM) WARGAME, THEN REINVENTED ON THE DIAL-UP MICRONET SERVICE, BEFORE FINALLY BECOMING A COMPUTER GAME PUBLISHED BY MICROPROSE
In the early Eighties, the late programmer and game designer, Mike Singleton, was playing an American PBM game called Starweb. That game ignited Mike’s desire to create something similar and the result was Starlord, which Mike funded with royalties from his Sinclair ZX81 Games Pack No. 1. The Starlord
PBM began in spring 1981 with six participants, and in July 1982, Mike gave up his teaching job to write computer games and run the PBM fulltime after its popularity soared.
Games of Starlord ran concurrently, with up to 50 players in each. Every player began by controlling one base star, one command ship and 50 starships, in a galaxy containing a thousand random stars. Stars not controlled by real players were controlled by the Empyr, with up to ten ships assigned to each star. At the start, the position of emperor was vacant. However, hundreds of computer-controlled ships protected the throne star, and its location was only revealed when players visited a ‘key star’. Other types of star provided fuel, weapons and information among other things. Player’s base stars were randomly positioned throughout the galaxy, with no player starting in range of the throne star or another player.
Starlord was moderated on Mike’s 32k Commodore PET computer. It took three months to write, taking many of the ideas from Starweb and improving them. Mike advertised Starlord in PBM magazines like Flagship, emphasising the game’s features and the added incentive that new players got the rules and their first print-out for free. Mentioning that the emperor played for free until deposed helped convince others to give it a try. The Starlord advert offered a “regular turn-around of two weeks”, and an express version where players had one week to dispatch their orders. A game turn cost £1.25, and players received a command ship status report, colour battle reports and customised sheets for sending their next orders. Mike’s Integrex CX80 inkjet printer also produced a colour tactical star-map, showing player positions.
One of Starlord’s earliest customers was Pete Moreland, who a few years later worked on the publisher’s side for many of the computer games that Mike produced over the following decade. “I used to speak on the phone to Mike’s parents when he was too disorganised to process the turns!” recalls Pete fondly. Thankfully, it did not put him off the game. “In many ways I’m still trying to recapture the delights of playing
Starlord play-by-mail today,” he adds wistfully.
Mike’s Starlord PBM made it across to
North America a few years later, where it was published and moderated by Flying Buffalo Inc, the same company that ran Starweb and who also, confusingly, published another PBM called
Starlord in the Seventies.
Mike planned to create a new PBM called Atlantis, but those ideas were instead incorporated into his computer strategy game
The Lords Of Midnight, published in 1984.
Despite this shift away from PBMS, the general principles of Starlord were kept alive by Mike’s Starnet, which ran on a
BBC Micro, hosted by Micronet via the viewdata dial-up service Prestel. Using a modem, players connected to Prestel and navigated to the Starlord page to play. In addition to the standard Prestel subscription, Starnet cost 99p to join and
25p per turn. The cost was automatically added to the player’s monthly bill. Starnet’s trial launch in early 1984 with two dozen players did not go smoothly, as Micronet’s press officer Peter Probert revealed, “We did have incredible problems with Starnet and we had the choice of starting again from the beginning or ditching the whole thing.”
It turned out that the game had difficulties that Mike Singleton did not have time to fix. Mike’s code was given a thorough overhaul by Starnet player Lawrence Kirby, known in the game as GUDIL or GROMB, before finally relaunching in late December 1985 with new features and revised simpler rules. Game turns were processed three times per week, and thanks to the Starlord chatline on Micronet, players could message each other or have the occasional pub meet to discuss tactics. Players formed temporary alliances and focused their efforts on specific starships, planets or sectors.
Mike Singleton’s passion for PBMS did not diminish. With the Starlord PBM retired, and
Starnet running on Micronet, Mike began working on a new computer game called
Dark Sceptre that would run concurrently as a PBM. Various other distractions, most notably Firebird’s Star Trek game, meant that Dark Sceptre was delayed, but Mike insisted that the PBM version was finished first. Dark Sceptre was the first product to come from Maelstrom Games, formed specifically by Mike to manage the Dark Sceptre PBM, which ran off a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with Microdrives. The PBM was advertised by Maelstrom in the summer of 1986. To participate, the player needed access to a ZX Microdrive, as the turns were saved onto Microdrive cartridges.
The Dark Sceptre PBM player would control half a dozen or so characters in a fantasy world where the player who grabbed the eponymous dark sceptre ruled the world, and others would attempt to kill them and take control themselves. The player would plan and save their next moves. They could run a separate program on the cartridge to show the possible future outcome of their decisions, prior to sending the cartridge to Maelstrom and their moves being processed and sent back by return post.
The bulk of the Dark Sceptre code for the PBM and the computer game was written by subcontracted development team Consult Computer Systems, who worked on three Mike Singleton games in total, War In Middle Earth and Throne
Of Fire for Melbourne House, in addition to Dark Sceptre for Beyond. However, as development entered the crunch period in 1987, Consult hit a creative brick wall and was struggling. Recent Maelstrom recruit Dave Gautrey and Mike Singleton ended up fixing the issues the best they could, in just a few short weeks.
The Dark Sceptre PBM failed. The idea of sending a Microdrive cartridge in the post and waiting for the outcome was out-dated by the late Eighties. Running a PBM via Microdrives was a strange business decision and was doomed from the outset. The stand-alone Dark Sceptre game fared much better, published in late 1987 for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad
CPC by Firebird, which had purchased Beyond in late 1985. In contrast, the PBM version run by Maelstrom Games was quickly forgotten.
Throne Of Fire and War In Middle Earth were Mike’s 8-bit swansong. Whirligig, published by Firebird, was Maelstrom’s first attempt at producing solid-shaded 3D on 16-bit computers. It was a technical exercise that produced a strange, unsatisfying arcade game. However, by the time Whirligig was underway, Mike had turned Maelstrom Games into a full-on software development team, recruiting several programmers, artists and musicians.
Maelstrom’s next two productions were a hugely ambitious solid-shaded 3D strategic game called Midwinter and the other was a space-based strategy game called… Starlord.
Mike Singleton’s detailed Starlord
specification document included many of the original PBM concepts and then expanded on them. Forming alliances through marriage, becoming leader of a religious cult, declaring religious wars… they were all in there. The aim, as it was with the previous Starlord and Starnet
games, was to gain control of the throne star and become emperor. The specification hinted at winning strategies, so if the player could locate and control four data stars, they could tap into enemy computer systems and download their military strategies prior to a battle. They could then run them in a simulator and replay the battle until they devised a winning strategy.
Midwinter and Starlord were signed by Microprose (UK) and Telecom Soft respectively, but when Microprose purchased Telecom Soft in May 1989, Maelstrom was happy to unify under one publisher. Development on Starlord began on the Atari ST. Programmer Dave Gautrey created the strategic computer simulator, which displayed the galaxy and the stars within. The player’s spaceships, represented by arrows, followed orbital paths based upon a series of predefined orders. If an enemy ship got close then the spaceship would attack the nearest target, before turning back to its original orders, all driven by a programming language of simple commands, all icon driven.