[wsterdan]

While my boss back in the early 1980s wrote a short BASIC program that ran on his Radio Shack programmable calculator, it only handled combat resolution (I think I still have a printout of the code involved). We began writing a simple version of the game in GraFORTH but never got past the layout and displaying a few of the characters. We were working in isolation in the high Arctic back then, and development stopped when the Arctic Exploration came to an end.

Commercially, I think the closest thing I ever encountered was a Science Fiction version of the game called "Galactic Gladiators" written by Tom Reamy and the follow-up "BIG" game, "Galactic Adventures" (think: TFT meets Traveller).

The basic combat and play structure appeared "strongly inspired" by Melee, while the aliens were very well-done and strongly inspired by Jack Vance's writings (even the small graphics in the manual reminded one of Melee-styled chits).

Especially appealing was the open-endedness in setting up the combat situations/layouts and the ability to create custom aliens.

I think the game can be played online if you search for it.

Personally, I would love a computer version, and actually started working on something similar to a melee-styled combat system for a web-based game on my website (some friends and I used to play Melee/Wizard a lot, but we're all in different cities or countries these days). Melee's combat system is, to me, the very best combat system ever devised, simple yet elegant. I even used it as a basis for a simplified house rule system for playing Starfleet Battles.

-- Walt Sterdan

P.S. Tom Reamy might be someone to talk to if there was any thought to adding a science fiction expansion to TFT (please! and super-hero expansion!); if anyone official wants to talk to him, I have his email address available.