Ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between, I have found My Holy Grail.

I can positively identify two games which defined my love of two specific video game genres. The first is Phantasie, an SSI RPG that I played straight into the ground on the C64. The second is the BBS door game TradeWars 2002.

A few years back I found that the Phantasie Trilogy had been released through GOG, so that was an instabuy for me, Bob, and now I can relive those youthful days when I commandeered the home computer all day, every summer.

TW2002 has been harder to revisit, because although there are many, many space-trading sims, all of them have built copiously on top of TW2002’s basic mechanics, pushing modern treatments into massively overblown and technical projects that stray far from the bare-bones simplicity of the original.

Until now.

Warp to Sector One is — by the dev’s own admission — as close to TW2002 as he could get without creating a 1:1 copy. Honestly, practically the only deviation here is that instead of a purely ASCII interface, W2S1 is like a graphical client on the traditional TW2002 gameplay (it’s not actually, though).

I cannot stress enough how goddamn similar this is to the TW2002 I know and love (and actually own a 6-seat license for in case anyone is interested). Everything that I would have had to have written down on paper in Ye Olden Days is now recorded for me on screen, but in such a way as to retain some of the sense of playing in a term emu. The map takes up most of the screen, and displays connected systems. Left-clicking on a system will move, and right-clicking on a system brings up a context action menu allowing for docking, landing, hailing, scanning, and so on. For purists, commands can be typed into the command line at the bottom of the map screen.

Several ancillary panels provide statistical data such as ship info, map tracking, financial transactions, operational stats, fleet management, and more. In TW2002, all of this would need to be recorded by hand and while I’m not against that kind of gameplay in today’s day and age, I’m more conscious about paper use so it’s nice to have the game record it for me.

You’ll know this is an homage to TW2002 when docking at a station. Keeping the “trade” in “Trade Wars”, there are only three commodities to buy and sell: ore, organics, and equipment. Certain stations will also allow for the purchase of fighters and to take on colonists which can be deployed to planets.

Colonizing planets for myself, I can create TW2002 archetypes such as mining colonies, AG colonies, manufacturing centers, and even the desirable fortress.

This is also the second game I’ve obtained recently that has not only had that throwback vibe, but also really went all in by including options for tweaking the skeuomorphic CRT.

The gameplay of both TW2002 and W2S1 is pretty vapid by today’s overwrought standards. This is not a 40-hour-to-complete-120-hours-with-sidequests sci-fi game. It’s entirely about moving from sector to sector, buying low, selling high, getting into fights, and earning as much money as I can. That’s it. That’s all it does, and that’s pretty much the product I have been chasing for decades now, even to the point where I tried several times to make such a product myself. Now that someone else has done it I can finally stop with the occasional, intrusive thoughts that maybe I should get back to that.