History
The game was originally released in 1992 but became well known in 1994 with version 3, although the prior version 2.2 was already played worldwide. Version 3 allows up to 11 players to join, each of them leading one of the 11 possible races; in version 4 this limit has been removed, and several instances of the same race can be played independently by different players.
The predefined races are modeled after Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, though custom races can be created with special tools. Each predefined race has some special powers and specific fields of expertise (for example: Cyborgs can assimilate native races into colonists; Robots are expert minelayers; Birdmen excel at spy tactics and cloaking).
VGA Planets follows the 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit & eXterminate) model: The players start with a homeworld, and have to build spaceships, explore the galaxy, colonize planets, mine minerals, build up their industry, etc. The game has no built-in victory condition: the players have to agree on one before starting a game.
In May 2010 a new project was approved by Tim Wisseman called VGA Planets "Nu" to rebuild the version 3 game on to modern web-based technology. The Nu project was developed over the course of 2010 and was released for live games in November 2010.
Read more about this topic: VGA Planets
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)