It is the Standard Year 3285, 1010 years since man developed interplanetary space navigation, 447 years since neutron flux warp technology was perfected by the ship builders of Zygor, and 35 years since the creation of the neutral zone in the center of the galaxy by Zygor's Galactic Command.

Galactic Empire (GE) is a space exploration and conquest module for Worldgroup BBS systems written in C. ge-next is an effort to restart development, update, and refine the game.

Galactic Empire was written by Mike Murdock and originally released under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) in 2002.

A SourceForge project was setup in 2002 to house the GPLv2 version then moved to GitHub in 2016.

The code was ported by Bil Simser to Borland 5.01, Visual C 6, and the free Borland compiler after the Major BBS version was released by Mike.

ge-next began in 2024 by Anthony Schmidt.

Galactic Empire and ge-next are free software licensed under the GPLv2 License.