Rick Carlino

Personal blog of Rick Carlino, senior software engineer at Qualia Labs, co-founder of Fox.Build Makerspace. Former co-founder of FarmBot.

Resurrecting a 40 Year Old Forth Strategy Game

UPDATE: /u/tmrob4 has created an updated, more playable fork of the game here.

The game Cosmic Conquest was published in the December 1982 issue of BYTE Magazine as a Forth program that readers could type into their Apple II computers.

Despite its role as one of the first-ever real-time strategy games, there were no playable demos or even a screenshot available of the game online. Although the game was by no means forgotten, it had seemingly disappeared from the modern internet.

This week, with the help of Forth developers from the /r/Forth community, we created a “40th Anniversary Edition” of the game that you can play on modern Forth systems.

The fully playable game source can be found here.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it on sites like Hacker News or Lobsters.