Liquid War

Gameplay takes place on a 2D battlefield, usually with some obstacles. Each player (2 to 6, computer or human) has an army of particles and a cursor. The objective of the game is to assimilate all enemy particles. The players can only move their cursors and cannot directly control the particles.

Each particle follows the shortest path around the obstacles to its team's cursor. A player may have several thousands particles at a time, giving the collection of particles a look of a liquid blob. When a particle moves into a particle from a different team, it will fight and if the opponent particle fails to fight back (it is not moving in the opposite direction) it will eventually be assimilated by its attacker. As particles cannot die but only change teams, the total number of particles on the map remains constant.

The Liquid War shortest path algorithm was invented by Thomas Colcombet before the game itself in Spring 1995. The game came as a result of the algorithm, when he realized its applicability to gaming. Colcombet's friend, Christian Mauduit, enhanced the algorithm and coded the game.

0 was released on 1 July 1995. It was a "barely usable" MS-DOS game with no network support. 0 was released on 26 September 1998. It was a complete rewrite and used the Allegro library.

In 2000 a CNN article on Linux games highlighted the fun with Liquid War.

In 2002, Liquid War received the "Most Original Linux Game" award by The Linux Game Tome, and in 2003 it was nominated for the Les Trophées du Libre, an International Free Software Competition. Liquid War was also distributed by various download portals, for instance computerbild.de counted 20,000 downloads.