who wrote many of CompuServe's games. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version after replacing any potentially lawsuit-friendly references to the Star Trek universe with more generic references. The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR. Kesmai also worked on an extensively updated version to be known as MegaWars II, the original retroactively becoming MegaWars I. Among other features, MegaWars II was able to run in a client–server mode and was intended to be used with graphical front-ends running on a variety of popular home computers. However, the imminent release of MegaWars III ended these plans, and MegaWars II was abandoned. In 1985 Louden left CompuServe to form GEnie at General Electric. Kesmai re-scrubbed the system for use on GEnie, producing Stellar Warrior. Like MegaWars, Stellar Warrior ran for years, and was finally killed when GEnie was shut down in 1999. Other versions On May 27, 2011, the University of Texas published the source code of Decwar. The source code is hosted at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and GitHub. A clone of Decwar called decwars.com was written in golang by Harris Newman and runs in the cloud. Commands were modeled on the original game with minor variations, except the game supports unlimited players. Later the CIS (CompuServe Information Service) version of Decwar was released to the public by The University of Texas. This version was highly modified to run on CIS's version of TOPS-10. Merlyn Cousins (Drforbin) later reverse engineered the source back to a form which would run on standard TOPS-10 and simh. This code is archived at the Briscoe Center for American History. The source is also available on GitHub. Description The basic aim of DECWAR was to take control of a "universe" consisting of a 79 × 79 "sector" grid (in v2.3, it was smaller in earlier versions) containing a number of planets, bases and black holes. One change from the original Star Trek were the planets, which could be captured and fortified to create additional bases. Players could join either the Federation