Civil War

Development

This game first saw the light of day on mainframes in 1968 and thus is one of the first war sims in computer game history.

It was originally programmed by L. Cram, L. Goodie and D. Hibbard, three students in Lexington High School, Massachusetts. A two-player mode was added later by G. Paul and R. Hess, and this version was included in David Ahl's classic book 101 Basic Computer Games. The BASIC listing was copied by home computer geeks throughout the 1970s.

IPCO was one of the first distributor of games for the IBM PC, most of them being PC adaptations of other BASIC mainframe classics of the 1970s. The code of their version seems to be based on David Ahl's, but simplified and shortened by 20 lines: the multiplayer mode as well as some other options of the original are missing, like the ability to replay battles and select them randomly.