Iron Seed

Iron Seed

Ironseed logo (Website version)
Developer(s) Channel 7
Publisher(s) Softdisk
Distributor(s) Softdisk
Designer(s) Jeremy Stanton
Programmer(s) Robert W. Morgan III[1]
Composer(s) Andrew Sega
Engine Custom
Platform(s) MS-DOS
Release date(s) 1994
Genre(s) Space trading and combat simulator, Real-time strategy, role-playing video game
Mode(s) Single player
Screenshot of the main game screen. Top left side: 3D starmap, top right side: ship status and resources. Bottom left: message window, bottom right: interaction "cube".

Iron Seed is a 1994 DOS video game, developed and published by Channel 7. It is a real-time strategy, science fiction, space trading and combat game.

Description

The player begins with a single ship and a chosen crew. Planets are randomly generated and numerous ship designs and crew selection allow for different playing styles. Research, exploration, and diplomacy are essential elements for success. New ships, new upgrades, and ancient artifacts help the player in their efforts. Combat can be both in the form of random encounters or planned for by the player.

History

Development and release

The story and art were created by Jeremy Stanton, the code was written by Robert W. Morgan III. The music was composed by the computer musician Andrew Sega who gained reputation in the 1990s demoscene as Necros. The game was released and distributed by Softdisk in 1994.

Legacy and support

The game was written with Borland Turbo Pascal for DOS and the usual hardware at that time. Also, like many software at that time, a buggy CRT library included in Turbo Pascal was used, resulting in 'Runtime error 200' messages on CPUs faster than approximately 200 MHz.[2] This bug was finally fixed, almost 20 years after the game's original release, with a patch in 2013. Also, running the game on modern OSes and hardware needed emulation solutions like DOSBox.

Successor and source-code release

After the game was unavailable commercially for many years it was re-released as freeware around 2003 to promote the development of the successor Ironseed II/Ironseed Reborn.[3] As progress on the development of the successor and further patching of Ironseed was unlikely, the source code of "Ironseed 1" was released by the developers to the public under the GPL in March 2013. A final patch (v1.20.0016) was released with the source code, but also the forum was shut down. Later version 1.30.0001 was put on GitHub, for the first time including the graphic assets and sound effects under GPL,[4] but the commercial DMP sound module stripped out to comply with its license.[5][6] From the source code release missing is also the soundtrack, while it seems the rights on the soundtrack still belong to the developers. For instance, Morgan redistributes the soundtrack on his personal website and also the freeware release included the soundtrack.[7] On September 2013, due to availability of the source code, a FreePascal and SDL based port for Linux became available on GitHub.[8][9] In August 2015 the Ironseed.com mainsite went offline without warnings, but came back online in January 2016 under a new ironseed.net domain. In April 2016 the game was ported to the ARM-based Pandora handheld, based on the previous Linux port.[10]

Reception

Iron Seed received a Top Dog award from Home of the Underdogs, who highlighted the game's replayability through the random planets and options, and allowance of different playing styles through the various ship designs and crews. It drew comparisons with the earlier Starflight series and the later Master of Orion.[11] Ironseed was archived by the Internet Archive as Classic PC Game in 2012.[12] A TV Tropes review analyzed the included themes (tropes) in the story and background world of Ironseed.[13]

Awards

References

  1. ↑ Ironseed on redshadowsoftware.com
  2. ↑ Information about the Borland Pascal CRT bug
  3. ↑ Ironseed-Reborn on redshadowsoftware.com
  4. ↑ version.txt on karynax/ironseed "v1.30.0001: Source, graphical assets and sound effects have been released under GPL. The DMP library has been replaced with stubs."
  5. ↑ A followup update: Source has been put up on Github. on spacesimcentral.com (04 April 2013)
  6. ↑ /karynax/ironseed on github.com
  7. ↑ ironseed on redshadowsoftware by Robert W. Morgan "We also own all rights to the music."
  8. ↑ linux.org.ru
  9. ↑ ironseed_fpc by Yaroslav Salnikov "Ironseed, old dos game by channel7, changed to make it possible to compile it with freepascal compiler on Linux." (September 2013)
  10. ↑ Ironseed on pyra-handheld.com by ptitSeb (April 25, 2016)
  11. ↑ "Iron Seed review". Home of the Underdogs. Retrieved 2012-09-22.
  12. ↑ Ironseed in the Internet Archive
  13. ↑ Ironseed on tvtropes.com
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