I feel I have to defend Mr. Dell on one point; he definitely wrote Drug Wars, and he definitely was the source for the family tree of Dopewars and Pimpwars that came after. That he lays specific claim to and without evidence to the contrary, that’s what I think the case is.

I’ll also hasten to point out this is me going to Mr. Dell and asking him about all this and what it’s about and the rest, not him spontaneously coming to a history site and painting himself as the hero in the center of a programming epic.

That aside, I agree with your statement; it definitely seems on the face of it that Drug War’s mechanics rise from Taipei. Implementation was obviously different (programmed by Mr. Dell) but the core mechanics are definitely almost exact.

That said, there’s no reason to point the finger at Mr. Dell or even accuse him of a fuzzy memory. Even in his recounting of events, he mentions three other influences: Mr. Robathan, Tripp Johnson, and a commodities program.

It is entirely possible that any of these folks could have given the young John Dell some ideas for his program that ended up in his work. If we go along this route, the commodities program, written in the time of the early 1980s when game mechanics were swapped around with great swagger and frequency, sounds like the prime suspect; written between the publishing of Taipei (1982) and 1984, it could have lifted elements from its predecessor, which Dell then lifted into Drug Wars.

He never claims he invented it wholecloth out of his head, just that he ultimately programmed Drug Wars, as a school project, with the help of some friends and for fun, and was then surprised at how far it travelled afterwards.

Dopewars is in fact a reimplementation of an earlier trading game by Art Canfil, called Taipan!, a 1982 Apple ][ (and TRS-80) game by Mega-Micro computers. The original is available in disk image form, here:

http://www.apple2.org.za/mirrors/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/games/file_based/escape_taipan_u-boatcommand.dsk.gz. A more recent port of the game to the Infocom z-machine is here: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1828. The underdogs entry is here: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3024. Another retrospective, with images, here: http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/apple/tai.htm

While I don’t want to doubt John Dell’s memory — after all, he was just in High School at the time — I find some of the particular symmetries between the two programs (Borrowing from the loan shark, the number of places one can visit being the same, the way combat is resolved) to be too analogous for this to be mere coincidence. Basically, if he came up with these game mechanics without seeing Taipan!, then I am Marie of Roumania.

regards,
peterb