Trade Wars
a series of computer games
Trade Wars is a series of video games 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.
History
The first game with the title, Trade Wars, by Chris Sherrick, was developed in BASIC for the TRS-80 Model II, and soon ported, by Sherrick, to the IBM PC for the Nochange BBS system in 1984. Sherrick conceived his game as a cross between Dave Kaufman's BASIC program Star Trader (1974), the board game Risk, and Gregory Yob's Hunt the Wumpus (1972).
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 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 bug fixes, adding new features, and incorporating thematic elements from disparate sources like Star Trek and Superman.
“Trade Wars” enters the record as a series of computer games. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Trade, Wars and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Trade Wars” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Trade, Wars and series provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7832012. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1974, 1972 and 1986.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trade Wars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.