Langston on Empire vs Empire

Peter Langston & Thomas Phinney email discussion

Jan 15, 2011

[While Phinney was ask­ing around to learn more about the ori­gins of the board game, he got a quick les­son on the rela­tion­ship with the main­frame game of the same name, from the cre­ator of that game, Peter S. Langston]

PHINNEY: From what I’ve been read­ing online it seems you were the pri­mary author/​converter of the [main­frame] com­puter game “Empire” based on the Reed College home­brew board game. Do you know who cre­ated the orig­i­nal board game, or who might be able to tell me?

I ask because I have occa­sion­ally played a descen­dant of that board game, which I have been revis­ing the rules for, and I was think­ing of mak­ing them avail­able online. But I don’t want to infringe on somebody’s copyright.…

LANGSTON: First a caveat… Even though I bor­rowed the name “Empire” from the game at Reed, I didn’t actu­ally use any of the Reed game in my Empire, since I’ve never played it and have only heard the most gen­eral descrip­tions of the game (mostly parts that would be dif­fi­cult to com­put­er­ize, like the play­ers mak­ing up new rules by consensus).

So, I don’t really have as much con­nec­tion with that game as you might think. Of course I am a Reedie and I had heard of Empire while I was at Reed and I did think it was a cool idea, but that’s about it, so I never wor­ried about whether I was infring­ing on any­thing more than the name.

I’ll bet that there are 100 peo­ple who have had a hand in making/​shaping that game, and there are prob­a­bly 3 or 4 who were prime movers. You might get in touch with the Reed College Alumni Office….

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