Dark Colony is a 1997 real-time strategy game. The record credits GameTek with development and lists SSI, Strategic Simulations, Inc., as publisher. It is played from a top-down view and catalogued as a single-player title.

1997 sat at the crest of the first great real-time strategy wave. Following the mid-decade hits, dozens of titles arrived sharing the same skeleton: harvest resources, build a base, field two opposing factions with contrasting units. Nearly all of them had to find a point of difference, and that difference usually came from the setting or from one unusual mechanic.

The publisher is the notable detail here. SSI had built its name on serious wargames and licensed role-playing titles, so its move into fast-paced strategy shows how strongly the genre pulled at established houses in the late 1990s. This was the period when turn-based wargaming slid towards the margins and the real-time model became the commercial default.

Technically, Dark Colony belongs to the generation still using software rendering and hand-drawn sprites on tiled maps. That look is what now separates 1990s strategy games from the three-dimensional attempts that followed, and it remains the main reason the older material has kept an audience.

1997 also changed how strategy games were played against other people. Modem and network play was ceasing to be the preserve of enthusiasts and becoming a standard feature, which fed back into design. Faction balance suddenly had to answer to human opponents rather than only to computer-run missions.

For Dark Colony, OldGame.cz lists the release year, the publisher credit and screenshots from play.