Space 1889

Year 1889, Mars, flying ships powered by wondrous wood, and the British Empire extending all the way to the canals of the red planet. This was no game afraid of big ideas.

Space 1889 by Paragon Software from 1990 is based on Frank Chadwick's tabletop RPG and builds a world where the Victorian era unfolded rather differently. Verne and Wells would recognize every corner: Mars is inhabited by ancient civilizations, the planet is covered by a network of canals, and so-called liftwood — peculiar wood with antigravity properties — makes it possible to build airships. The player moves through this steampunk world avant la lettre, long before anyone knew the word steampunk.

The gameplay is classic isometric RPG in the style of the era — character building, parties, turn-based combat, dialogue and exploration. Paragon knew their craft back then; their games had structure. But Space 1889 suffers from the transition from tabletop system to computer environment. The interface demands patience from the player — which goes by a different name these days. The combat system is functional, but not particularly elegant, and navigating between locations on the Mars map can be tedious. Anyone who got used to the Gold Box games by SSI in the nineties was pretty much at home — just in a somewhat rougher rental.

What Space 1889 carries to this day is atmosphere and setting. Few games of that era dared such genre originality. This wasn't another fantasy dungeon or laser-filled sci-fi universe. Victorian Mars with colonial politics, class differences and steam cannons in the sky — that was something. The music on SoundBlaster captured that strange nocturnal mood, the graphics were period-appropriate and hardly surprising, but the world itself breathed. The mechanics have aged, not the idea.

Today Space 1889 suits anyone who wants to feel what RPGs looked like before Baldur's Gate and company pumped blood into the genre. Also perfect for anyone with a weakness for Victorian sci-fi and doesn't mind fighting through an interface from an era when the mouse was still a luxury. Play it in your browser without installation, which in this case is genuine relief — setting up DOS configurations for this would be a feat in itself.