Empire was first developed on an HP2000C computer in BASIC at the evergreen state college in Olympia Washington in 1973. The original version was played and modified for a decade before being lost. That original version was written by Ben Norton with lots of help from Peter Langston. Other major contributions were made by Mike Rainwater, Chas Douglass, Greg Starling and Eric Robinson. This version of Empire was starting in 1982 as a personal project of Ben Norton, with contributions by Steve Sagi, Russ Glaeser, Randy Groves, Steve Winter, Robert Imel and Eric Robinson. Empire 2.0 was the first public release (Detroit 1986). Empire 2.5 is the second release (Orlando 1988). Empire 3.9 is the last release on the HP3000 platform by a mythical programmer.
(name removed due to privacy and age of developer)