Solar Realms Elite

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Solar Realms Elite
A title screen from Solar Realms Elite

Developer(s) Amit Patel of SRGames

Solar Realms Elite or SRE is a multi-player strategy door game for bulletin board systems[1] similar in design to its successor, Barren Realms Elite (BRE). SRE has been recognized by researchers as "advanced for its time".[2]

Gameplay

Screen capture of a Solar Realms Elite gameplay session

In Solar Realms Elite, players rule a solar empire. The goal is to become and remain the most powerful empire. Players gain strength by buying forces, and gain size by colonizing planets. Players start with several planets and a little bit of money. They must provide food and spend money to maintain the population, army, and planets, or suffer riots and civil unrest. New players are given a short period of protection, during which they cannot attack or be attacked. Players can forge alliances, interact with AI pirates, and wage war with competitors using conventional, guerilla, nuclear, chemical, and covert attacks.

SRE's user interface features many details not seen in other BBS door games, such as the ability to type large quantities in input fields using shortcuts (such as "3K" for "3000").[3]

History

A diagram posted by Amit Patel in the newsgroup alt.bbs.doors explaining the relationships between several BBS door games

SRE was written by Amit Patel in 1990.[4][5] It started as a PC clone of Space Empire Elite, [6][7] a popular BBS door game for the Atari ST written by Jon Radoff. Patel's brother, Mehul, played SEE regularly, and Patel would sometimes watch him play. But Patel has said he didn’t understand SEE's game design, and instead based SRE on ideas he had developed from years of writing his own games similar to those he found in the book "Computer Basic Games" by David Ahl.[3]

Space Dynasty, a similar BBS door game for PCs by Hollie Satterfield was also inspired by SEE. Space Dynasty was in circulation around the same time as SRE.

The last version of SRE (0.994b) was released in 1994. Patel has estimated he sold between 1,000-2,000 SRE registrations to sysops over the years he worked on the game.[8] He said the revenue helped him cover his college tuition, but not room and board.[3]

After SRE found early success, Amit Patel partnered with his brother Mehul to develop a series of similar BBS games under the banner "SRGames." In the beginning, Amit handled more of the technical duties, while Mehul ran the business side. Later they shared these duties more evenly.[3]

Amit wrote SRE in C++, while Alpha Colony VI and Barren Realms Elite were both written in Turbo Pascal. Amit wrote the infrastructure libraries for these, which Mehul used to write the game code. Later SRGames included Falcon's Eye and The Arcadian Legends, among others.[3]

The Patels sold four of their SRGames to John Dailey Software in May 1998,[9] but SRE was not included in the deal because Amit had lost the game's source code in 1996.[10]

Reception

In a 1991 review for the Carrier Detect online magazine, door game author Scott Baker hailed Solar Realms Elite as "compelling" and "one of the most enjoyable door games" he had played in a long time. He described its gameplay as "complex" but "easy to follow", while praising in-game hints and protection periods as "thoughtful" features which would help new players. His primary criticism was that the game had no graphics or animation.[11]

SRE inspired some players so much that they included it in art, stories, and newspaper columns.

In 1992 and 1993, one columnist in Texas wrote about SRE repeatedly. She had become a "computer addict" whose "strongest addiction" was playing SRE, she wrote in June 1992. She spent hours each day playing the game on four bulletin boards, and even helped one sysop pay the registration fee.[12] A few weeks later she described trying to reach out to a sysop friend, worried he might be mad after she attacked his empire in one game.[13] Later, she contrasted herself with the actress Kim Basinger, asking "Does Kim spend her days writing about soap scum and her nights playing Solar Realm Empire on a personal computer?"[14]

From 1993 to 1995, one writer published a series of SRE fan fiction stories totaling 48,000 words, which he distributed on local BBSes.[15] A few years later, a contributor to the interactive "Story-Base" website wrote a chapter involving a character waiting to play SRE turns.[16]

Legacy

Amit Patel went on to become one of Google's earliest employees, hired as an engineer in 1999. He has been credited with realizing that Google's logs of search queries could be a "broad sensor of human behavior,"[17] and with helping to popularize the company's motto "Don't be evil."[17][3][18] Today, Patel writes influential game development tutorials on his website Red Blob Games.[3]

With the dawn of the World Wide Web, many programmers tried adapting Solar Realms Elite into their own web-based games. At least six were published online in the 2000s, including Starpires by Matt Heaton, Solar Imperium by Yanick Bourbeau, Internet Imperialists by Geoffrey Wossum, Star Empire Elite by Robert Yogurt, Declan Nation by Ozz Nixon, and New Kingdoms by Stephen Urich.[19]

In a 2008 history of video games, researcher Brett Camper described SRE as "particularly advanced for its time" for offering players a range of strategy options "unseen in even most current titles in the genre." [2]

Thirty years after after its original release, SRE continues to inspire retrocomputing enthusiasts. Andrew Pamment modeled his 2013 door game Galactic Dynasty on SRE[20], and Cyningstan cited SRE and BRE as inspirations for the graphical DOS game The Anarchic Kingdom (2021)[21].

Break Into Chat blog articles

See also

References

  1. ↑ Camper, Brett (2021). "Shareware Games". In Wolf, Mark J. P. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2nd ed.). ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-4408-7019-4. BBS door games ... such as Solar Realms Elite (1990) ... pioneered multiplayer networked play long before other platforms.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Camper, Brett (2008). "Shareware Games: Between Hobbyist and Professional". In Wolf, Mark J. P. (ed.). The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond. ABC-CLIO. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-313-33868-7. Solar Realms Elite ... was particularly advanced for its time. ... The range of evaluative axes allows players to explore a variety of strategies unseen even in most current titles in the genre.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Patel, Amit (2 Feb 2013). "Amit Patel, creator of Solar Realms Elite". Break Into Chat (Interview). Interviewed by Renaud, Josh. self-published. Retrieved 17 August 2025.
  4. ↑ Patel, Amit. "SRE: Design Notes". Retrieved 19 October 2012.
  5. ↑ Patel, Amit. "Solar Realms Elite 0.995: Documentation". Retrieved 19 October 2012.
  6. ↑ Patel, Amit (9 August 1993). "Re: SRE" (USENET). Newsgroup: alt.bbs.doors. Retrieved 31 December 2012.
  7. ↑ Patel, Amit (16 January 1999). "Solar Realms Elite" (USENET). Newsgroup: alt.bbs.doors. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  8. ↑ Patel, Amit (31 August 2014). "BBS Door History / Amit Patel Interview". GameBanshee (Interview). Interviewed by Birnbaum, Jon. Retrieved 27 May 2018.
  9. ↑ Elizabeth (14 May 1998). "SRGames". Newsgroup: alt.bbs.doors. Usenet: 6jfgu4$jg2$2@winter.news.erols.com. Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  10. ↑ Dailey, John. "John Dailey Software Frequently Asked Questions". John Dailey Software. Retrieved 19 October 2012.
  11. ↑ Baker, Scott (November 1991). "Solar Realms Elite (SRE), Version 0.098". Carrier Detect. I found SRE to be a compelling game with a few flaws. I would suggest that as a sysop, you put it up and see what your users think of it.
  12. ↑ Van Slyke, Susan (3 June 1992). "Beware, computer viruses can be caught by humans". The Orange Leader. Orange, Texas. Hey, running empires on four different boards is no day at the beach. I have to figure out whether to buy ore planets, or food planets or petroleum planets.
  13. ↑ Van Slyke, Susan (24 June 1992). "Wrong number leaves hapless caller lost in space". The Orange Leader. Orange, Texas.
  14. ↑ Van Slyke, Susan (23 Mar 1993). "If it weren't for Kim, I could enjoy my birthday". The Orange Leader. Orange, Texas.
  15. ↑ Renaud, Josh (13 Feb 2013). "Solar Realms Elite memories". Break Into Chat. Retrieved 9 Sep 2013. But after writing up my 'authoritative' account of how that Knight's Armor game went down, I decided to change course and begin writing fiction about emperors battling it out. ... By the time I finished writing SRE: The Finale in 1995, the entire 'SRE Text Series' comprised about 48,000 words.
  16. ↑ Gladiator (David Tisinai). "The Shadows Out of Time: Question Reality". Story-Base. Michael F. Haspil. Archived from the original on 6 February 2002. Retrieved 27 September 2025.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Levy, Stephen (2011). In the Plex (1st ed.). Simon & Schuster. pp. 45–46, 143–144. ISBN 9781416596585. Amit Patel felt that when it came to corporate values, the phrase ['Don't be evil'] said it all; follow the commandment, and the rest should flow. ... Now he had a new crusade. He would imprint the phrase onto Google's corporate subconscious.
  18. ↑ Moses, Asher (16 April 2008). "Don't Be Evil or don't lose value?". Sydney Morning Herald. Mayer explained that Don't Be Evil was coined in 1999 by one of Google's first engineers, Amit Patel, who shared a work cubicle with Mayer.
  19. ↑ Patel, Amit. "SRE: Clones". Retrieved 27 September 2025.
  20. ↑ Pamment, Andrew (16 November 2013). "Galactic Dynasty README.md". Retrieved 3 Oct 2025. Galactic Dynasty is a BBS Door Game for Windows and Linux, similar to Solar Realms Elite but much simpler and with InterBBS support.
  21. ↑ Cyningstan (23 May 2021). "Inspirations behind The Anarchic Kingdom". Retrieved 3 Oct 2025. It was partly inspired by some old BBS door games: Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite. These games had scrolling text interfaces, and had players lobbing missiles and other things at each other in order to steal each other's territory and destroy each other's military, much like you do in The Anarchic Kingdom.

Downloads

External links

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