THE HISTORY OF Warlords
WORDS BY ADAM BARNES
Some games are irreversibly connected to the genres they belong to. If you think of an FPS, you’ll likely think of
Doom, GoldenEye or more recently Call
Of Duty. If you think of platformers, your mind will conjure up the image of Mario or Sonic. MMOs are World Of Warcraft or Everquest, fighting games are Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, while RTS games are typified by StarCraft or Command & Conquer. If we asked you to name a turn-based strategy game, you’d likely say Civilization, X-COM or Heroes Of Might & Magic. And yet, despite earning a good deal of success and notoriety, you most likely wouldn’t think of Warlords, even if the game and its design did predate a lot of the big names that came after it.
“I think it was about 1987 when I started writing the game,” says Steve Fawkner, the creator of the Warlords series. “It was partly based on the Empire game by Mark Baldwin over at White Wolf Productions and partly based on the Dragons Of War board game by TSR.” Empire is a fairly noteworthy mention there, since it – alongside the sci-fi themed Reach For The Stars – went on to be considered the originators of the subgenre of strategy game known as ‘4X’. The term would go on to define the particular gameplay of the likes of Civilization, Master Of Orion
