When they would shoot at you, the gun barrel would flash. So during gunfights, the screen drew a very basic torso of police officers (however many were chasing you) and each one holding a gun. Another reason for choosing the TRS-80 was that it was easier to to do a block graphic of officer hardass. The stuff with officer hardass and the various events in the program (columbian freighter busted) that caused prices to go up or down were the fun part that I just kept adding to make the game more interesting.Īt the time, the computer classroom had maybe 3 or 4 TRS-80’s and only one Apple so I chose the TRS-80. So the two novel twists were of course doing the buying and selling drugs rather than wheat, and travelling from place to place to get the fluctuation in price rather than waiting a day on the market for the price of flax to go up □ The rest of the game fell into place from those basics. I thought this was a decent game, but could be made more interesting and it was enough to give me the idea for Drug Wars. You could buy and sell wheat, flax, barley, etc over a period of time and hopefully make money on it. I think something about the Chicago mercantile exchange. Anyway, Tripp had a game for that computer that was a commodities trading program. It was a big green screen box and it had the old huge 8″ floppy drives (That’s all I can remember about it that computer). A classmate of mine named Tripp Johnson (actually his father) had a nice computer that I think was a TRS-80 clone. I had to write a program for my sophmore computer class at Shasta High School (1982-1983). Tell me about the circumstances of coming up with Drug Wars where you were at school, where the inspiration came from, why you implemented it like you did. I provide them to give the proper history to the beginning of the Dopewars Program. Here is the result of those quick questions. I asked if I could forward some questions to him, just for the sake of history, and he said OK. Ironically, he was doing some computer work for an anti-drug/drug education group. Dell at length on the phone one day, and we discussed BBSes in general and the history of Dopewars/Drugwars, as well as his own history. Naturally, his life went in other directions, but one of his students had noticed a plea I’d put up for his contact information. Towards the end of production, however, I recieved a very nice surprise: John Dell himself, coming to me to let me know that he was THAT John Dell, and he had in fact created Drug Wars, 20 years earlier. While addressing other issues, I made an effort to contact him. The “Dope Wars” door is in fact based off of an earlier DOS game called “Drug Wars”, which has an authorship by “John E. The graphics are better, and the gameplay has been tweaked, but the core in the same. The “Dope Wars” (or “Dopewars”) game was popular enough that it exists to the modern day, called “Pimpwars” and other variations. Similarly, I didn’t include more than a bit of information on Door programs, and didn’t list a ton of other ones that constituted strong memories and experiences for folks.Īmong these programs was a door called “Dope Wars”, an economic game where you sold drugs around New York City (sometimes modified for other locations) to gain monetarily while also on the run from the cops and other issues facing a hard-working drug dealer. Probably the most debatable of these were terminal programs while I considered having something about the programs used to connect to BBSes (which got complicated to a greater degree in the early 1990s), I ultimately decided against it. A lot of this has gone (and will go) into the BBS Documentary Library.Īmong these subjects were a host of external programs that were vital but also tangental to the BBS experience. Cinematic limitations prevented me from throwing everything I learned on the screen, but there was still a lot of neat stuff I pulled up. The research for the documentary took me in many different directions, as I reached out trying to find out any and every possible subject people might be interested in.
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