The speakers from the stereo in the living room were placed on a table in the basement, with the computer monitor and keyboard between them. With a case (or more) of beer next to us and most of the light bulbs in the ceiling unscrewed, we'd listen to "The Planets" by Gustav Holst as we carefully selected the "universe" in which we were about to battle each other. The music would then change to Genesis - every album ever made while Peter Gabriel was in the band (with the exception of "From Genesis to Revelation," which I didn't own). Sometimes Andy would bring a new CD with something different, and THEN the Genesis music would start.

There was just one problem. Occasionally a planet would revolt. We didn't like this aspect of the game. It was like playing chess, knowing a random piece could change to your opponent's color. We had a work around. We played on a Tandy TL-2 which booted to MS DOS in ROM. In other words, it didn't boot from the hard drive, so it would come to life almost instantly. At the end of every turn we'd save the game, and if there was a revolt we'd reboot and load the saved game back in.

There was much talk about the author, Rick Raddatz, while we were booting. He seemed to have disappeared. The new version of the game he promised never appeared.  A letter to the address displayed at the end of the game went unanswered. We just wanted him to disable the revolts. We wondered what became of him. Was he even still alive?

Maybe he was on Skid Row! Yes, that must be it, years of playing Galcon and drinking beer had ruined his life. He had been destroyed by his own creation.

One cold wintery night, so cold that the snow crunched under our feet, we were setting up the game in my basement.
The Planets by Gustav Holst was playing through the speakers and we each had a beer in hand. Cheese, crackers, Doritos,  and other snacks were standing by.

While answering the questions at the beginning of the game, one of us hit a wrong key.
On the screen were the words, " Redo from start ."

This had never happened before. We stared at the screen. We both leaned closer. We looked at each other, then back at the screen. That phrase had meaning. We both rather simultaneously exclaimed, "Holy shit! Rick wrote this in QuickBASIC!!!"

With that eye opening message came the idea that perhaps the game could be cloned in QuickBASIC, without revolts.

In a real game you'd go after the entire universe and play about 40 turns or more. At some point you'd begin to attack each other, then the real battle starts. You'll each have thousands of ships. Taking your opponent's home planet will demoralize him.

Hello! It's not an "app"! It's a computer program. I hate this "app" bullcrap from Microsoft. Would they have called GWBASIC an app??

An early version. The "planets" are randomly drawn on top of the dots and each one is checked to make sure no two planets are in the same spot. Notice some of the planets are in lower case, and one is planet "caret."

In 1998 I found Rick Raddatz! The Internet was exploding and Rick had a website. There was no contact info on it. I sent an email to rick at raddatz dot com, just guessing that would be an obvious email address, and he wrote back!! I asked him to turn off the revolts and email me a new version of Galcon. He said he wrote the game in 1988 while a freshman in college. On his dorm wall was a poster of Carol Alt. (When the game is running, a message to "Look to Carol Alt for inspiration" sometimes runs across the bottom of the screen.)

Rick said the source code for the game was lost. He explained that as DOS faded away he just deleted it to close a chapter in his life. I don't know whether to believe that or not. Only ten years had gone by. Which chapter in his life would cause him to delete the source code?

Anyway, according to Rick the idea for Galcon came from a game named "Stellar Invasion," released in 1985 by Bearbyte Software, so he couldn't take credit for it.

Stellar Invasion circa 1985. More screen shots can be seen here.

I didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

The actual text is here.

That was not much help at the time, but I came up with a way to move them myself. I would have them zigzag from the attacking planet to the attacked planet, two dots per turn. The ships would move like this:

Then a second roadblock was encountered. How do you make the ships fight each other? I made an AttackPlanet subroutine, but the ships with the higher kill ratio would just wipe out the ships with the lower kill ratio. That was not how the real game worked.

Four years went by and it was now the year 2000. Microsoft had killed off DOS, and a hundred thousand DOS programs would not run in Windows anymore. The program languished on my hard drive. I couldn't even run QuickBASIC to work on it.

In 2002, unbeknown to me, DOSBox was released. Here I was trying to make some text based game work, and a REAL programmer wrote a DOS emulator that runs in Windows! The funny thing is that Bill Gates and Paul Allen (RIP), two of the richest men in the world, made their fortunes writing BASIC and MS-DOS, while DOSBox is free of charge.
 

In 2016, TWENTY YEARS after I started on the program I determined to figure out how to make the ships "fight" each other. After all, I had a working game, even if I no longer remembered how it worked.

It was kind of weird how the idea came to me. I was in work taking a break, staring out the 2nd floor loading dock door into the darkness while smoking a cigarette. Suddenly the solution seemed to be trying to come into my consciousness, already formulated, with no effort on my part to "figure it out." It popped in and then out, like a dream you can't remember. I tried to think of what the idea was, then BAM! - it came back. I ran back to my desk and wrote it down.

That night, I edited the AttackPlanet subroutine. The game was complete. We could now play our clone of Galcon and not worry about revolts.

Obviously this was not how Rick Raddatz wrote the original version. That's why Rick worked for Microsoft as a software developer and I wouldn't be qualified to work there as a janitor. Rick probably had the whole game worked out in his head like a modern day Nikola Tesla.

Well, after 20 years had passed we didn't play Galcon anymore. We keep saying we will but never do. With a working program that nobody would ever use, I went back to it in 2017 as a mental diversion.  I re-read Rick's emails from 1998. That equation he sent me looked very familiar. It turned out that his equation was actually this: