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It became well known in 1994 with version 3, although the prior version 2.2 was already played worldwide. Up to 11 players can join, each of them leading one of the 11 possible races. These races are modeled after Star Trek, Star Wars etc. Each race has a special power. It follows the 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit & eXterminate) model: The players start with a homeworld, and have to build spaceships, explore the galaxy, colonize planets, mine minerals, build up their industry, etc.
The game has no built-in victory-condition, e.g. the players have to agree on such a victory-condition before starting a game.
The games consists of a client-program for each player, and a host-program acting as a server. The client-programs were used to view the status of the game, and give orders. Clients up to version 3.0 were DOS-programs, version 3.5 was for windows. The players send files with their turns to the machine running the host. The host processes them and creates a new status-file for each player. This can be fully automated, and the host does not need an extra license. In its time, LANs and the Internet were not generally available to the public, so VGA-Planets was played mainly by email. That means, the files with orders and game-status were transfered via e-mail, e.g. within the FidoNet-network. For this to work, there had to be regular schedule for turning in orders to the host.
A big problem of version 3 were certain technical limitations, e.g. the maximum number of 500 ships for all players, which lead to undesirable gameplay. Despite this, VGA-Planets was well established in the mailbox-scene.
Third parties had developed a lot of extensions.
At this time ( 20042004 is a leap year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 2004 calendar), and has also been designated the: International Year of Rice International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition Elections are to be held in 73 co) about 15,000 gamers are still active playing VGA-Planets.
A Version 4 is being developed, with a lot of extensions and new rules.