HISTORY OF IBGAMES AND FEDERATION 2
PART TWO
Matrix
An enterprising chap - an early MUD player - called Ken ran a bulletin board system in Liverpool. He wanted to put Fed on his system, so we did a deal with him whereby he ported the game to Unix for free.
Fed never really prospered on the system but it was important for two reasons. First, because it was the first time the game had been ported to another operating system, and it established the rule that the code should always been written to be ported easily. Second, because we were able to show GEnie that we had a working product - the one on Matrix. The multi-player games market has always had more vaporware than any other branch of software - as AOL would find to their cost. It was this demo that convinced GEnie to pay us to port the game to their system!
But we are getting ahead of the story.
Microlink
Microlink was primarily a business data system, but they decided they wanted to try their hand at games - presumably to use up their spare capacity outside of business hours. Alan and Ken from Matrix did the work to port the game to VMS so it could run on Microlink's VAX computers.
The trouble was, their charging model was completely unsuited to games because they charged by the 256-byte packet of information being sent down! The origin of many of Fed's minimalist commands, such as BRIEF, dates from this era.
Needless to say, Fed didn't do well on Microlink. Players had no way to tell how much they were spending so even die-hard Fed fans stayed away.
Microlink went bust soon after - but the very last thing that people were using it for was to play Fed.
Cix
Meanwhile, Fed also went up on another network in the UK - Cix, the UK equivalent of the old US BIX. Cix was the network of choice for programmers and computer professionals. The problem was that those type of people do not approve of using computers to play games. Games are frivolous and a waste of precious network resources. So this wasn't a success either.
