[steamodon]

For me it was a similar game, Stars![0] I got the shareware demo along with several other games on a floppy included with some computer magazine I randomly purchased at the mall. Got my brother and across-the-street neighbor hooked on it and we'd have days-long hot seat games during the summers. Later on I discovered the actual boxed version and bought it on the spot.

It is probably the oldest game I still play occasionally (it runs fine in Wine). In a weird coincidence, in the 201Xs my best friend and I were reminiscing about old games and it turned out he played it in his youth as well, so we fired up our respective copies and got several PBEM (well s/email/Google Drive) games going.

One of my favorite things about it is tweaking scripts to optimize the game economy each time I get another round of obsession with the game. It will dump detailed game data into TSV specifically for parsing by other tools.

If anyone is interested, you can still get legit software keys for it [1].

[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!>

[1]: <https://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Get_Stars!>