Subtrade

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Subtrade
Boxart
Developer(s)	Century Interactive
Publisher(s)	Boeder Software
Designer(s)	Felix Unger, Niels Kokkelink
Platform(s)	Commodore Amiga, MS-DOS
Release date	1993 (Amiga), 1994 (MS-DOS)
Genre(s)	Turn-based strategy
Mode(s)	Single player, Multi player
Media	Varied
Input methods	joystick, keyboard, gamepad

Subtrade is a multiplayer video game developed in 1993 by the German developer Century Interactive. Its gameplay is strongly based on the popular video game M.U.L.E.. Therefore, it is considered to be a M.U.L.E.-clone. The game has originally been written for the Amiga, it was later ported to MS-DOS.

[edit] General information

The video game Subtrade is about 4 colonists (players) building up an economy on the planet Irata (Atari backwards). The objective of the players is to become the richest colonist within 12 game turns. The idea is copied from the 10 year older title M.U.L.E.. The gameplay of Subtrade is to a large extent similar to M.U.L.E.. However, there are a few differences to the original. The most notable is the transfer of the setting to a sub-oceanic world.

Subtrade was developed in 1993 because the platforms that could run the original M.U.L.E. (mainly the Atari 400/800 and the Commodore 64) were slowly disappearing. Unlike today, there were no convenient emulators available to run old software on current machines. Due to the arising demand of players for a port of M.U.L.E. to newer systems and Electronic Art's refusal to develop it, several companies decided to develop unlicensed M.U.L.E.-clones on their own. Besides Traders, Subtrade is the only M.U.L.E.-clone that has been commercially released for 16-bit home-computers.