Raider Wars Ranking: S
In the mid-90s, the Internet was still young. America Online was the dominant ISP. 28.8 kbps modems were standard. Google didn’t exist yet. In such an ancient time, you’d think massively multiplayer online games couldn’t possibly exist. You’d be wrong.
A company called Interactive Magic made a free game called Raider Wars where the setting was a resource-rich region of outer space claimed by three rival factions: Vaught (green), Osis (red), and Hast (yellow/gold). You join a faction and your goal is to take over every mothership in the region with other players on your team. To do so you pick a space fighter and fly out to fight other players either attacking your team’s ships or defending theirs. To take over a mothership, you needed to use a FAS-2BA, which is a weak and slow ship with few defensive or offensive capabilities, but which is the only ship that can launch grunts into the enemy mothership’s docking bay. As such, players needed to coordinate with each other so that the person flying the FAS had cover fire.
The other ships included the quick and agile RKF-6C or the heavy MHA-1 (among others – if I recall, there were ~10 different kinds of fighters). Players really got a lot of options as to what sort of ship to fly to fit their playstyles. The graphics wouldn’t really hold up today, but they were pretty good back then. The game play was smooth and responsive and, now that I think about it, I don’t remember much lag at all even though sometimes you’d have tens of players flying around a mothership fighting one another and we’d all be on dialup. I had a great time talking to and interacting with the other players.
Raider Wars was one of my first video games and it remains one of the most fun experiences I ever had in gaming. Unfortunately Interactive Magic got absorbed by AOL toward the end of the decade and then the game servers shut down permanently.
In the mid-90s, the Internet was still young. America Online was the dominant ISP. 28.8 kbps modems were standard. Google didn’t exist yet. In such an ancient time, you’d think massively multiplayer online games couldn’t possibly exist. You’d be wrong.
A company called Interactive Magic made a free game called Raider Wars where the setting was a resource-rich region of outer space claimed by three rival factions: Vaught (green), Osis (red), and Hast (yellow/gold). You join a faction and your goal is to take over every mothership in the region with other players on your team. To do so you pick a space fighter and fly out to fight other players either attacking your team’s ships or defending theirs. To take over a mothership, you needed to use a FAS-2BA, which is a weak and slow ship with few defensive or offensive capabilities, but which is the only ship that can launch grunts into the enemy mothership’s docking bay. As such, players needed to coordinate with each other so that the person flying the FAS had cover fire.
The other ships included the quick and agile RKF-6C or the heavy MHA-1 (among others – if I recall, there were ~10 different kinds of fighters). Players really got a lot of options as to what sort of ship to fly to fit their playstyles. The graphics wouldn’t really hold up today, but they were pretty good back then. The game play was smooth and responsive and, now that I think about it, I don’t remember much lag at all even though sometimes you’d have tens of players flying around a mothership fighting one another and we’d all be on dialup. I had a great time talking to and interacting with the other players.
Raider Wars was one of my first video games and it remains one of the most fun experiences I ever had in gaming. Unfortunately Interactive Magic got absorbed by AOL toward the end of the decade and then the game servers shut down permanently.