tw2002.html

---
layout: page
title: "telnet://tw2002"
description: "TradeWars 2002"
header-img: "img/header/tradewars-2002.png"
---
<section>
  <h2>What is Trade Wars 2002?</h2>
  <p>According to <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars">Wikipedia</a>:
  <blockquote>
    Trade Wars is a series of popular computer games dating back to the early days of personal computing. Inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, the board game Risk, and the original space trader game Star Trader, Trade Wars was the first multiplayer game of the space trader genre. During the height of its popularity in the early 1990s, Trade Wars was the preeminent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_door#Door_games">BBS game</a>, played by tens of thousands of users around the world.
  </blockquote></p>
  According to the <a href="http://www.tradewars.com/default.html">official TW2002 website</a>:
  <blockquote>
  Released in 1986, TradeWars was among the earliest
multiplayer online games. As of 2013, TradeWars has been hosted on over 21,000 different sites in 59 different countries, with some sites hosting the game continuously for over 25 years. In 1995, when there were 400 active MUD sites, TradeWars was running on over 14,000 different sites. That same year, when popular MUD LambdaMOO hosted 10,000 players, over 70,000 played TradeWars.
</blockquote>

</section>

<section>
  <h2>Getting Started</h2>
  <p>Connecting to the Trade Wars 2002 (tw2002) server is accomplished over telnet. This can be accomplished via the command line (terminal) or a telnet client.</p>

  <p><a href="telnet://ec2-54-89-68-13.compute-1.amazonaws.com:2002">Click here to launch game</a> or connect manually to <code>telnet tw2002.jdstraughan.com</code> on port <code>2002</code>.</p>
  <p><strong>Full command</strong></p>
  <p><code>telnet tw2002.jdstraughan.com 2002</code></p>
  <h3>How to play</h3>
  <p>The best way to get started is to just hop in a game and start playing around. When you get lost, you can alway view the menu by sending a<code>?</code>.</p>
  <p>There is still an active <a href="http://www.classictw.com/">forum for TW2002</a>, many <a href="http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Gypsy%27s_Big_Dummy%27s_Guide_to_TradeWars_Text">guides</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlZZhQhIW1E">tutorials</a>, the infamous <a href="http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Document:TradeWars_2002_Bible">TradeWars Bible</a>, and in-game help. TradeWars even has <a href="https://twitter.com/TradeWars">an active Twitter account</a>!</p>
</section>

<section>
  <h2>Mac Users</h2>
  <p>The default settings on Mac terminals have issues that impact gameplay.</p>

  <p>First, you will need to set the backspace character to be recognized by the game. Follow the <a href="http://chad.glendenin.com/macosx-backspace.html">instructions here to update terminal</a>.</p>

  Next, you will want to need to add a terminal profile to properly parse the ANSI graphics in the game. <a href="https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/OS_x_ansi">Follow this tutorial</a> to configure your Terminal app.
</section>

<section>
  <h2>Coming Soon</h2>
  <p>I will continue to make updates to this page as time allows. This was a super quick write-up to get the game server announced, and this guide could use some help. You are welcome submit pull requests via the <a href="https://github.com/JDStraughan/jdstraughan.github.io">GitHub repository</a>. Happy trading, and see you at the Stardock!</p>
</section>