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EverQuest

04 Jul

This article tells part of the story of MMORPGs.

It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.

Such was the case in the MMORPG space in the late 1990s. There Ultima Online demonstrated that there was an audience for a persistent fantasy world where people could live out alternative existences together through the magic of the Internet. Yet it was another game called EverQuest that turned the proof of concept into a thriving business that enthralled hundreds of thousands of players for years on end, generating enormous amounts of money in the process. For, while the first-mover advantage should not be underestimated, there’s something to be said for being the second mover as well. EverQuest got to watch from backstage as Ultima Online flubbed line after line and stumbled over assorted pieces of scenery. Then, with a list in hand of what not to do, it was able to stride confidently onto center stage to a standing ovation. No one ever said that show business is fair.


EverQuest came to evince a markedly different personality than Ultima Online, but its origin story bears some uncanny similarities to that of the older rival it demolished. Like Ultima Online, EverQuest was born as a sort of skunk-works project within a larger company whose upper management really wasn’t all that interested in it. Like Ultima Online, EverQuest enjoyed the support of just one executive within said company, who set it in motion and then protected and nourished it like the proverbial mother hen. And like the executive behind Ultima Online, the one behind EverQuest plucked a pair of designers out of utter obscurity to help him hatch the egg.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the EverQuest origin story is the name of the company where it all went down: Sony Interactive Studios America. Suffice to say that, if you were to guess circa 1996 which publisher and studio would launch a market-transforming MMORPG later in the decade, Sony would not be high in your rankings. The Japanese mega-corp was flying high at the time, with a prominent footprint in most sectors of home electronics and mainstream entertainment, but it had hardly any presence at all on personal computers. The Sony PlayStation, launched in September of 1995 in North America and Europe, was on its way to becoming the most successful single games console of the twentieth century, a true mass-market cultural sensation that broadened the demographic for videogames and forever changed the way that the public perceived them. With a mainstream pile driver like that to hand, why should Sony want to waste its time with a wonky virtual world for nerds cosplaying as dwarves and mages?

It wound up doing so thanks to one man. At the beginning of 1996, John Smedley had been working for a few years as a producer at Sony Interactive, which focused almost exclusively on sports games for the PlayStation. Just 28 years old, Smedley already had a corner office with a view and a salary to match, as he and his colleagues rode the wave of the console’s incredible early success.

There was just one problem: Smedley didn’t particularly like sports, whether they happened to be played on the field or on the television screen. He had grown up as one of the kids that the jocks made fun of, the kind who walked to school every day with a Dungeons & Dragons rule book or two under his arm. It was only thanks to opportunism and happenstance that he had wound up helming projects aimed at gamers who worshiped John Madden rather than Gary Gygax. Now, he thought that the burgeoning Internet would soon make it possible to realize an old dream of 1980s nerds like him: that of playing Dungeons & Dragons online, whenever it suited you, instead of only when you could arrange to meet in person with five or so like-minded friends — assuming you even had such friends. He had a rough blueprint for how it might work, in the form of Neverwinter Nights, a game on America Online that let you effectively play one of the old single-player SSI Gold Box CRPGS over the Internet, taking a persistent character through a series of adventures with friends and strangers. It was limited in a thousand ways, but it was, so Smedley believed, the harbinger of a whole new category of game. And, after working for so long on games he really didn’t care about, he wanted to make one that he could feel passionate about.

Smedley took his idea to his boss Kelly Flock, the newly arrived head of Sony Interactive. It was a crazy thing to propose on the face of it, having absolutely nothing to do with anything the studio had ever done before nor any of the strategic priorities of the mother corporation; the PlayStation didn’t have any online capabilities whatsoever, meaning this game would have to run on personal computers. But Sony was flush with PlayStation cash and bravado, and Flock was apparently in a generous mood. He told Smedley that he could take $800,000 and hire a team to investigate the feasibility of his idea, as long as he continued to devote the majority of his time to his primary job of churning out crowd-pleasing sports games.

Those of you familiar with the tale of Ultima Online will recognize Sony Interactive standing in for Origin Systems, and John Smedley taking the role of Richard Garriott. EverQuest’s equivalent of Raph and Kristen Koster, who swept into Origin from the obscure world of textual MUDs to create Ultima Online in their image, was a pair of friends named Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover. They were programming automation and bookkeeping systems for a San Diego plant nursery during the early 1990s, working on a single-player CRPG of their own during their off hours. They called it WarWizard. Unfortunately, it was for the Commodore Amiga, a dying platform in North America. Unable to interest a publisher in a game in an unfashionable genre for a computer that was fast disappearing, they released WarWizard under the shareware model in 1993; the following year, they made an MS-DOS port available as well. By McQuaid and Clover’s own later reports, it garnered about 1500 registrations — not bad for a shareware game, but definitely not enough to let the friends quit their day job.[1]There may be grounds to question this figure. For a game with 1500 registrations — far more than the vast majority of shareware games — WarWizard had a weirdly low online profile; there is virtually no contemporary trace of it to be found. Most of the limited interest it did generate appears to be retroactive, coming after McQuaid and Clover became known as the minds behind EverQuest. An actual registered copy that lets one complete the game didn’t turn up in public until 2009.

Undaunted, they pushed ahead with a WarWizard 2. Desperate for feedback, they uploaded a preview of the sequel to the Internet. On a lark, McQuaid appended a note: “We are releasing this demo as a business card of sorts, in order to introduce games publishers, developers, and investors to our company, MicroGenesis. If you have any question whatsoever, please contact Brad McQuaid.” This hopeful — not to say naïve — shot in the dark would change both of their lives.

For one day not long after his meeting with his boss, John Smedley stumbled across the demo, thought it was pretty impressive for the work of two guys with a day job, noticed that the two guys in question were living in Sony Interactive’s hometown of San Diego, and decided to take them up on their offer and contact them. Thus Brad McQuaid picked up his phone one rainy evening to hear a Sony producer on the other end of the line, asking him and his partner to come visit him in his slick glass-walled office downtown. It seemed too incredible to be true — but it was.

So, McQuaid and Clover, feeling uncomfortable and thoroughly out of place, were ushered by a secretary past the PlayStations in the anterooms and the NFL and MLB posters lining the walls at Sony Interactive, to see the star producer in his native habitat. What did these people want with the likes of them, two scruffy misfits hustling to make a buck peddling turn-based monster-fighting games on the shareware market? Then, as soon as the door shut behind the secretary, they felt suddenly at home. John Smedley was, they learned to their relief, one of them: a kid who had grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons in his school’s cafeteria and Ultima on his Apple II. It turned out that Smedley didn’t want them to finish WarWizard 2 for Sony Interactive; he wanted them to make something even more exciting. He explained his vision of a CRPG that you could play online, and asked them whether they’d like to help him make it. They said that they would. Smedley now learned that McQuaid and Clover were, like the Kosters over at Origin, passionate MUDders as well as semi-professional single-player CRPG developers. They knew exactly what kind of experience Smedley was envisioning, and were overflowing with ideas about how to bring it to fruition. Smedley knew right then that he’d hit pay dirt.

McQuaid and Clover were hired by Sony Interactive in March of 1996. They then proceeded to spend about six months in a windowless office far less plush than that of John Smedley, creating a design document for the game that they were already calling EverQuest; the name had felt so right as soon as it was proposed by Clover that another one was never seriously discussed. Smedley insisted that the document describe the game down to the very last detail. Here we see a marked contrast to the development process that led to Ultima Online, which came into its own gradually and iteratively, through a long string of playable design prototypes. Smedley’s background as a producer of games that simply had to ship by a certain date — the National Football League was not likely to delay its season opener in order to give that year’s NFL videogame an extra week or two in the oven — had taught him that the best way to make software efficiently was to know exactly what you were intending to make before you wrote the first line of code.

At this point, then, we’re already beginning to see some of the differences in personality between Ultima Online and EverQuest emerge. The Kosters were idealists and theorists at heart, who treated Ultima Online almost as a sociological experiment, an attempt to create a virtual space that would in turn give birth to a genuine digital society. Smedley, McQuaid, and Clover, on the other hand, had less highfalutin ambitions. EverQuest was to be a place to hang out with friends and a fun game to play with them, full stop. The more grandiose of the dreams nursed by the Kosters — dreams of elections and governments, of a real economy driven by real people playing as shopkeepers, tailors, tour guides, and construction foremen, of a virtual world with a fully implemented natural ecology and a crafting system that would let players build anything and everything for themselves — were nowhere to be found in the final 80-page design document that McQuaid and Clover presented and Smedley approved in September of 1996. They all agreed that a blatantly artificial, gamified virtual world wasn’t a problem, so long as it was fun. In these priorities lay most of what would make their game such a success, as well as most of what idealists like the Kosters would find disappointing about it and the later MMORPGs that would mimic its approaches.

In both the broad strokes and many of the details, the thinking of McQuaid and Clover was heavily influenced by an open-source MUD toolkit called DikuMUD that had been released by a group of students at the University of Copenhagen in 1991. Its relationship to other MUDs foreshadowed the relationship of the eventual EverQuest to Ultima Online: DikuMUD was all about keeping the proceedings streamlined and fun. As the game-design theorist Flatfingers has written on his blog, “it emphasized easy-to-understand and action-oriented combat over other forms of interaction [and] simplified interactions down to easily trackable, table-driven statistics.” The simplicity and accessibility of the DikuMUD engine from the player’s perspective, combined with the equal ease of setting a new instance of it up on the server side, had made it the dominant force in textual MUDs by the mid-1990s, much to the displeasure of people like the Kosters, who preferred more simulationally intense virtual worlds. This design dialog was now about to be repeated in the graphical context.

Then, too, there is one other important influence on EverQuest that we can’t afford to neglect. While McQuaid and Clover were still working on their design document, they saw 3DO’s early, halfheartedly supported graphical MMORPG Meridian 59 go through beta testing. It convinced them that first-person 3D graphics were the way to go — another point of departure with Ultima Online, which clung to an old-school overhead third-person view, just like the single-player Ultima CRPGs before it. In the age of DOOM and Quake, McQuaid and Clover judged, nothing less than immersive 3D would do for their game. And so another keystone and differentiator fell into place.

With the design document completed, Smedley found a larger room to house the project in Sony Interactive’s building and slowly put a team into place around his two wunderkinds. Some of the programmers and artists who joined them were hired from outside, while others were moved over from other parts of the company as their current projects were completed. (It turned out that Smedley hadn’t been the only closeted nerd at Sony Interactive condemned to make sports games…) As the more outgoing and assertive of Smedley’s original pair of recruits, Brad McQuaid took the role of producer and day-to-day project lead, while Steve Clover became the lead programmer as well as designer. Perhaps the most important of the newcomers was Rosie Cosgrove (now Rosie Strzalkowski), the lead artist. She shaped the game’s visual aesthetic, a blending of the epic and the whimsical, full of bright primary colors and pastels that popped off the screen. Recognizing that photo-realism wasn’t going to be possible with the current state of 3D-graphics technology, she embraced the jankiness. The graphics would become just one more sign that EverQuest, in contrast to that other big MMORPG, was all about straightforward, even slightly silly fun, with no degree or interest in sociology required.

While the team was coalescing, they had the priceless opportunity to observe the successes and tribulations of their rival virtual world from Origin Systems, which, true to the iterative approach to game development, was conducting a series of small-scale public testing rounds. A watershed was reached in June of 1997, when Ultima Online conducted a two-month beta test, its biggest one ever and the last one before the game’s official release. Needless to say, everyone on the EverQuest team watched the proceedings closely. What caught all of the interested observers by surprise — not least the idealists at Origin Systems — was the quantity of players who found their fun neither as noble adventurers nor as shopkeepers, tailors, tour guides, politicians, or construction foremen, but rather as mass murderers, killing their fellow players the second they let their guard down. It ought to have been a five-alarm wake-up call for Origin, being the first indubitable harbinger of a persistent problem that would pave the way for EverQuest to replace its older, better credentialed rival as the MMORPG du jour. But they refused to countenance the obvious solution of just making it programmatically impossible for one player to kill another.

After Ultima Online launched for real in September of 1997, the developers behind it continued to struggle to find a way of addressing the problem of player murder without compromising their most cherished ideals of a fundamentally player-driven online society. They encouraged their citizens to form police forces, and implemented small changes to try to help the law-and-order contingent out, such as printing the names of those player characters who had killed at least five other player characters in scarlet letters. None of it worked; instead of a badge of shame, the scarlet letters became a badge of honor for the “griefers” who lived to cause chaos and distress. In his own words, Raph Koster put his players “through a slow-drip torture of slowly tightening behavior rules, trying to save the emergence while tamping down the bad behavior. The cost was the loss of hundreds of thousands of players.” After a wildly vacillating start, Ultima Online stabilized by mid-1998 at about 90,000 active subscribers. That wasn’t nothing by any means — on the contrary, it represented about $1 million worth of revenue for Origin every single month — but it nevertheless left a huge opening for another game that would be more pragmatic, less ideological, and by extension less murderous, that would be more focused on simple fun.

Steve Clover signed up for Ultima Online and logged on as soon as he could do so. His first hour in the world was much the same as that of countless thousands of players to come, many of whom would never log in again.

I created my own sword. I crafted my own armor and all that. I put all this stuff on, I head out to do some adventuring, and all of a sudden the screen starts slowing down. I’m like, oh, this is weird. What’s going on? And about a hundred guys run on screen and [beat] me to death, right?

I said, that will not happen in our game. That absolutely will not happen.

So, in the emerging parlance of the MMORPG, EverQuest would be strictly a “PvE,” or “player versus environment,” game, rather than a “PvP” game.[2]After its launch, EverQuest did experiment with a few servers that allowed unrestrained PvP combat, but there proved to be little appetite for it among the player base. The most important single key to its extraordinary success was arguably this one decision to make it literally impossible to attack your fellow players. For it would give EverQuest’s world of Norrath the reputation of a friendly, welcoming place in comparison to the perpetual blood sport that was life in Ultima Online’s Britannia. Perhaps there is some political philosophy to be found in EverQuest after all: that removing the temptation to commit crime serves to make everyone a little bit nicer to each other.

In the meantime, while Ultima Online was capturing headlines, the nascent EverQuest kept a low profile. It was seldom seen in the glossy gaming magazines during 1997 and 1998; the journal-of-record Computer Gaming World published only one half-page preview in all that time. Instead EverQuest relied on a grass-roots, guerrilla-marketing effort, led by none other than Brad McQuaid. He was all over the newsgroups, websites, and chat channels populated by hardcore MUDders and disgruntled refugees from murderous Britannia. One of his colleagues estimated that he spent half his average working day evangelizing, querying, and debating on the Internet. (Because McQuaid’s working days, like those of everyone else on the team, tended to be inordinately long, this was less of a problem than it might otherwise have been.) His efforts gradually paid off. EverQuest was voted Best Online Only Game by critics who attended the annual E3 show in May of 1998, despite having had only a backroom, invitation-only presence there. The people making it believed more than ever now that there was a pent-up hunger out there for a more accessible, fun-focused alternative to Ultima Online. They believed it still more when they moved into the public beta-testing stage, and were swamped by applicants wanting to join up. The last stage of testing involved fully 25,000 players, more than had participated in Ultima Online’s final beta.

In the midst of the run-up to launch day, John Smedley was plunged into a last-minute scramble to find a new home for his brainchild. Sony Interactive had by now been rebranded 989 Studios, a punchier name reflecting its ongoing focus on sports games. Meanwhile the Sony mother ship had begun questioning the presence of this online-only computer game at a studio whose identity was single-player PlayStation games. EverQuest would not be just another ship-it-and-move-on sports title; it would require a whole infrastructure of servers and the data pipelines to feed them, along with a substantial support staff to maintain it all and generate a never-ending stream of new content for the players. Considered in this context, the name of EverQuest seemed all too apropos. What did 989 Studios know about running a forever game? And was it really worth the effort to learn when there was so much money to be made in those bread-and-butter sports games? One day, Kelly Flock called John Smedley into his office to tell him that he couldn’t continue to feed and nurture his baby. If he wanted to keep EverQuest alive, he would have to find another caregiver.

Luckily, there was another division at Sony known as Sony Online Entertainment that was trying to make a go of it as an Internet gaming portal. Through a series of corporate contortions that we need not delve into too deeply here, Smedley’s skunk works was spun off into a nominally independent company known as Verant Interactive, with Sony Online as its chief investor.

All of this was happening during the fevered final months of testing. And yet, remarkably, the folks on the front lines were scarcely aware of the crisis at all; knowing that they had more than enough to worry about already, Smedley chivalrously shielded them from the stress that was keeping him awake at night. “I don’t remember a, ‘Hey, guys, we’re getting cancelled,'” says EverQuest “World Builder” — that was his official title — Geoffrey Zatkin. “What I remember is, ‘Hey, guys, we’re spinning out to our own studio. You’re no longer going to be Sony employees. You’re going to be employees of Verant Interactive.'” The best news of all was that Smedley was finally able to give up his hated sports games and join them full-time as the head of Verant.

EverQuest went live on March 16, 1999, a day that ought to go down in history as marking the end of the early, experimental phase of graphical MMORPGs and marking their arrival as a serious commercial force in gaming. To be sure, that original EverQuest client doesn’t look much like we expect a piece of polished commercial entertainment software to look today; the 3D view, which fills barely half the screen as a sneaky way of keeping frame rates up, is surrounded by garish-looking buttons, icons, and status bars that seemed to have been plopped down more or less at random, with a scrolling MUD-like text window that’s almost as large as the world view taking pride of place in the middle of it all. But at the time, it was all very cutting edge, making the MMORPGs that had come before it look positively antiquated in comparison. A late decision to require a 3D-accelerator card to even start the client had caused much debate at Verant. Would they be giving up too many potential subscribers thereby?

They needn’t have worried. A healthy 10,000 people signed up on the first day, and that pace was maintained for days afterward.

Like the worlds of Ultima Online and all of the early MMORPGs, EverQuest’s world of Norrath was actually many separate instances of same, each running on its own server that was capable of hosting no more than a few thousand players at one time. Verant had thought they were prepared for an onslaught of subscribers — the best of all possible problems for a new MMORPG to have — by having plenty of servers set up and ready to go. But they had failed to follow the lead of Ultima Online in one other important respect: whereas Origin Systems scattered their servers around the country, Verant ran all of theirs out of a single building in San Diego. As urban legend would have it, EverQuest consumed so much bandwidth after its launch that it disrupted Internet connections throughout the city, until more cables could be laid. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it is true that the pipes going directly into Verant’s offices at least were woefully inadequate. Everyone scrambled to address the emergency. John Smedley remembers “personally logging into the Cisco routers” to try to tweak a few more bytes worth of throughput out of the things: “I could actually work with the Versatile Interface Processor cards almost as well as any of our network engineers at the time.” Again, though, too many customers is always a better problem to have than the alternative, and this one was gradually solved.

Computer Gaming World didn’t publish its EverQuest review until the July 1999 issue. This was a surprisingly late date, even given the standard two-month print-magazine lead time, and it pointed to the emerging reality of the glossy magazines becoming estranged from their traditional readership, who were now getting more and more of their news and reviews online, the same place where they were doing more and more of their actual gaming. Nevertheless, Thierry Nguyen’s belated review for the magazine was a fair and cogent one, especially in the inevitable comparison with Ultima Online — and in another, less inevitable comparison that makes more sense than you might initially think.

Ultima Online is a world simulation; EverQuest is a social hack-and-slash. Ultima Online has more freedom built into it, and you can actually make a living off of trade skills. EverQuest is more about sheer adventure and combat, and the trade skills are useful, but you can’t really be a tailor or a baker.

EverQuest is the Diablo of 1999. An odd comparison, you say? Well, here’s how they’re alike: they both offer a very simple premise (“go forth and thwack many creatures to gain levels and loot”), and despite this simple premise (or maybe because of it), they’re both damn addictive and fun.

Diablo in a vastly larger, truly persistent world really isn’t a terrible way to think about EverQuest. While the folks at Origin Systems expected their players to make their own fun, to see what lay behind yonder hill for the sake of the journey, Verant gave theirs a matrix of pre-crafted quests and goals to pursue. While Ultima Online’s world of Britannia belonged to its inhabitants, EverQuest’s world of Norrath belonged to Verant; you just got to play in it. Happily for everybody, doing so could be a lot of fun. Sometimes the most delicious sort of freedom is freedom from responsibility.

By October of 1999, EverQuest had more than 150,000 subscribers, leaving Ultima Online in its dust. Raph Koster believes, probably correctly, that this trouncing of his own virtual world was driven as much by the “safety” of having no players killing other players as it was by EverQuest’s trendy 3D graphics. Ultima Online would finally relent and open safe servers of its own in 2000, but that was bolting the gate after the mounted murderers had already galloped through.

That same October of 1999, Microsoft launched Asheron’s Call, another 3D MMORPG that prevented its players from killing other players. Yet even with all of the ruthless marketing muscle and the massive server infrastructure of the biggest monopoly in technology behind it, it never came close to rivaling EverQuest in popularity. It would be a long time before any other virtual world would. By the end of 2000, EverQuest was closing in on 350,000 subscribers. The following year, it hit 400,000 subscribers. Its growth then slowed down considerably, but still it did not halt; EverQuest would peak at 550,000 subscribers in 2005.

In May of 2000, Verant Interactive’s brief-lived period of nominal independence came to an end, when the spinoff was absorbed back into Sony. Soon after, the old Sony Online Entertainment subsidiary was shut down, having failed to set the world on fire with its own simple online games based on television game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and Verant appropriated its name.

In addition to charging its subscribers a recurring fee of $10 per month, this new edition of Sony Online discovered a valuable secondary revenue stream in boxed expansion packs for EverQuest. No fewer than ten of these were released between 2000 and 2005, introducing new regions of Norrath to explore, new monsters to fight, new races and classes to fight them as, new spells to cast, and new magic items to collect, whilst also refining the graphics and interface on the client side to keep pace with competing MMORPGs. Some argued that a paying customer was reasonably entitled to expect at least some of this additional content and refinement to be delivered as part of the base subscription package. And indeed, those looking for a measure of poetic justice here were perchance not entirely deprived. There is reason to suspect that all these expansions began in time to act as a drag on the game’s growth: the need to shell out hundreds of dollars and carry home a veritable pile of boxes in order to become a fully vested citizen of Norrath was likely one of the reasons that EverQuest’s growth curve leveled off when it did. Sony Online could still profitably sell expansions to the faithful, but those same expansions made the barrier to entry higher and higher for newcomers.

Still, the fact remains that EverQuest was for six years the most popular MMORPG of them all, in defiance of a gamer culture whose appetite for novelty was notorious. There was no shortage of would-be challengers in its space; by a couple of years into the new millennium, scarcely a month went by without some new MMORPG throwing its hat into the ring. And small wonder: to publishers, the idea of a game that you could keep charging people for was tempting to say the least. Some of the newcomers survived, some even thrived for a while with subscriber counts as high as 250,000, but none came close to matching EverQuest in magnitude or longevity. A virtual world like Norrath had a peculiar stickiness about it that wasn’t a factor with other types of games. To leave EverQuest and go play somewhere else meant to leave behind a character you might have spent years building up, and, even more poignantly, to leave behind an entire circle of online friends that you had assembled over the course of that time. This was a tough pill for most people to swallow, no matter how enticing Arthurian Britain, the galaxy far, far away of Star Wars, or a world out of Japanese anime might sound in comparison to the fairly generic, cookie-cutter fantasy world of Norrath.

The huge numbers of subscribers led to knock-on effects that EverQuest’s developers had never anticipated. Within months of the game’s launch, enterprising players began selling in-world loot on sites like eBay; soon the most successful of these virtual auctioneers were making thousands of dollars every month. “What’s crazy? Me playing for twelve hours a day or someone paying real money for an item that doesn’t exist?” asked one member of this new entrepreneurial class who was profiled in The Los Angeles Times. “Well, we’re both crazy. God bless America.”

A journalist named R.V. Kelly 2, who had never considered himself a gamer before, tried EverQuest just to see what all the fuss was about, and got so entranced that he wound up writing a book about these emerging new virtual worlds.

This isn’t a game at all, I realized. It’s a vast, separate universe. People explore here. They converse. They transact business, form bonds of friendship, swear vows of vengeance, escape from dire circumstances, joke, fight to overcome adversity, and learn here. And it’s better than the real world because there are no physical consequences for making mistakes. You can derive the same sense of satisfaction for doing things well that you find in the real world, but you don’t suffer any pain or anguish when you fail. So, the game contains most of the good found in real life, but none of the bad.

Yet there were also dangers bound up with the allure of a virtual world where failure had no consequences — especially for those whose real lives were less than ideal. On Thanksgiving Day, 2001, a young Wisconsinite named Shawn Woolley was discovered by his mother sitting in front of his computer dead, the rifle he had used to shoot himself lying nearby. The monitor still displayed the EverQuest login screen. He had been playing the game rabidly for months, to the exclusion of everything else. He’d had no job, no studies, no friends in the real world. He’d effectively uploaded his entire existence to the world of Norrath. And this had been the result. Had his lonely isolation from the world around him come first, or had EverQuest caused him to isolate himself? Perhaps some of both. One can’t help but think of the classic addict’s answer when asked why he doesn’t give up the habit that is making his life miserable: “Because then I’d have no life at all.” It seemed that this was literally true — or became true — in the case of Shawn Woolley.

This tragedy cast numbers that Sony Online might once have been proud to trumpet in rather a different light. Not long before Woolley’s death, one Edward Castronova, an associate professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton, had conducted a detailed survey of the usage habits of EverQuest subscribers. He found that the average player spent four and a half hours in the game every day, and that 31 percent played more than 40 hours every week — i.e., more than a typical full-time job. Surely that couldn’t be healthy.

Widespread coverage of the the death of Shawn Woolley ignited a mainstream conversation about the potentially detrimental effects of online videogames in general and EverQuest in particular. A father was reported to have smothered his infant son without realizing it, so distracted was he by the world of Norrath on his computer screen. A couple was reported to have left their three-year-old behind in a hot car to die, so eager were they to get into the house and log into EverQuest. Parents said that their EverQuest-addled children behaved “as if they had demons living inside them.” Wives told of life as EverQuest widows: “I do not trust him [to be alone] with our daughter, simply because when I am here she will be crying and he will not do anything about it.”

The stories were lurid and doubtless quite often exaggerated, but the concern was valid. Unlike the debates of the 1980s and 1990s, which had principally revolved around the effects of videogame violence on the adolescent psyche and had relied largely on flawed or biased studies and anecdotal data, this one had some real substance to it. One didn’t need to be a Luddite to believe that playing a single videogame as much as — or to the exclusion of — a full-time job couldn’t possibly be good for anyone. Elizabeth Woolley, the mother of Shawn Woolley, became the face of the Everquest opposition movement. She was certainly no Luddite. On the contrary, she was a computer professional who had laughed at the hearings on videogame violence conducted by Joe Lieberman in the United States Senate and likewise dismissed the anti-game hysteria surrounding the recent Columbine school shootings that had been carried out by a pair of troubled DOOM-loving teenagers. All that notwithstanding, she saw, or believed she saw, a sinister intentionality behind this addictive game that its own most loyal players called EverSmack or EverCrack: “I know the analysis that goes into a game before they even start writing the code; everything is very intentional. And people would go, ‘Ah, that’s so funny, how addicting.’ And I’m like, no, it’s not funny at all.”

She wasn’t alone in vaguely accusing Sony Online of being less than morally unimpeachable. According to one reading, popular among old-school MUDders, the EverQuest team had co-opted many of the ideas behind MUDs whilst tossing aside the most important one of all, that of a truly empowered community of players, in favor of top-down corporate control and deliberate psychological manipulation as a means to their end of ever-increasing profits. One of the earliest academic treatments of EverQuest, by Timothy Rowlands, posits (in typically tangled academic diction) that

from the outset, EverQuest’s designers, motivated by profit, were interested in trying to harness (read co-opt, commoditize) the sociality that had made the virtual worlds of MUDs so successful. Resisting the linearity of older single-player games in which the players move their avatars through a series of predetermined levels, MMOs present a space in which the hero narrative, predicated upon the potential for climax — though present in the form of quests and the accumulation of avatar capital — is ultimately unrealizable. Because the aim is to keep subscribers playing indefinitely, even the arbitrary end points (level caps) are without closure. In Campbellian language, there can be no epiphany, no moment of apotheoses as the hero overcomes his trials…

For me, the existential hamster wheel described by Rowlands — himself a recovering EverQuest addict — smacks a bit too much of the life I lead offline, the one that comes down to, to paraphrase Roy Rogers, just one damn thing after another. Combine this with my awareness of the limitations of online socializing, and we can perhaps begin to see why I’ve never been much interested in MMORPGs as a gamer. Literary type that I am, if offered a choice between a second life on the computer and an interactive story of the kind that I can actually finish, I’ll take the story — the one with the beginning, middle, and end — every single time. I can’t help but think that I may have been lucky to be born with such a predilection.

Lest we be tempted to take all of this too far, it should be noted that EverQuest in its heyday was, however psychologically perilous it might or might not have been, a potential problem for only a vanishingly small number of people in relation to the population as a whole: by the metrics of television, movies, or even others forms of gaming, 550,000 subscribers was nothing. Nevertheless, the debates which EverQuest ignited foreshadowed other, far more broad-based ones to come in the fast-approaching epoch of social media: debates about screen time, about the grinding stress of trying to keep up with the online Joneses, about why so many people have come to see digital spaces as more attractive than real ones full of trees and skies and flowers, about whether digital relationships can or should ever replace in-person smiles, tears, and hugs. Meanwhile the accusations of sinister intent which Elizabeth Woolley and Timothy Rowlands leveled against EverQuest’s designers and administrators were, even if misplaced in this case, harbingers of games of the future that would indeed be consciously engineered not to maximize fun but to maximize engagement — a euphemism for keeping their players glued to the screen at all costs, whether they wanted to be there in their heart of hearts or not, whether it was good for them or not.

Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.

By the time those subjects really came to the fore, however, EverQuest would no longer be the dominant product in the MMORPG market. For in 2004, another game appeared on the scene, to do to EverQuest what the latter had done to Ultima Online half a decade earlier. Against the juggernaut known as World of Warcraft, even EverQuest would battle in vain.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books EverQuest by Matthew S. Smith, Video Game Worlds: Working at Play in the Culture of EverQuest by Timothy Rowlands, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova, Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Legend of the Syndicate: A History of Online Gaming’s Premier Guild by Sean Stalzer, Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One by Raph Koster, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: The People, the Addiction, and the Playing Experience by R.V. Kelly 2, and The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David T. Courtwright. Computer Gaming World of December 1997, July 1999, and June 2000; Retro Gamer 263.

Online sources include “Better Together: Stories of EverQuest“ by David L. Craddock at ShackNews, “The Game Archaelogist: How DikuMUD Shaped Modern MMOs” by Justin Olivetti at Massively Overpowered, and “Storybricks + DikuMUD = Balance in MMORPGs” at Flatfingers’s theory blog. The truly dedicated may want to listen to aLovingRobot’s 50-plus hours (!) of video interviews with former EverQuest developers. And, although it’s quite possibly the most insufferable thing I’ve ever watched, the documentary EverCracked has some interesting content amidst the constant jump cuts and forced attempts at humor.

Where to Play It: EverQuest is not what it once was in terms of subscriber numbers, but it’s still online under the stewardship of Darkpaw Games, a sort of retirement home for aged MMORPGs.

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 There may be grounds to question this figure. For a game with 1500 registrations — far more than the vast majority of shareware games — WarWizard had a weirdly low online profile; there is virtually no contemporary trace of it to be found. Most of the limited interest it did generate appears to be retroactive, coming after McQuaid and Clover became known as the minds behind EverQuest. An actual registered copy that lets one complete the game didn’t turn up in public until 2009.
↑2 After its launch, EverQuest did experiment with a few servers that allowed unrestrained PvP combat, but there proved to be little appetite for it among the player base.
 
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Posted by on July 4, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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This Week on The Analog Antiquarian

27 Jun

The Voyage of Magellan, Epilogue: Sailor of Eternal Fame

 
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Posted by on June 27, 2025 in Uncategorized

 

Alpha Centauri

20 Jun

This article tells part of the story of the Civilization series.

In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.

At that time, the two men were working for MicroProse Software, for whom they had just completed Civilization II, with Reynolds in the role of primary designer and programmer and Briggs in that of co-designer, producer, and soundtrack composer. They had brought the project in for well under $1 million, all that their bosses were willing to shell out for what they considered to be a game with only limited commercial potential. And yet the early sales were very strong indeed, proof that the pent-up demand for a modestly modernized successor to Sid Meier’s masterstroke that Reynolds and Briggs had identified had been very, very real. Which is not to say that they were being given much credit for having proved their managers wrong.

MicroProse’s executives were really Spectrum Holobyte’s executives, ever since the latter company had acquired the former in December of 1993, in a deal lubricated by oodles of heedless venture capital and unsustainable levels of debt. Everything about the transaction seemed off-kilter; while MicroProse had a long and rich history and product portfolio, Spectrum Holobyte was known for the Falcon series of ultra-realistic combat flight simulators, for the first version of Tetris to run on Western personal computers, and for not a whole lot else. Seeing the writing on the wall, “Wild Bill” Stealey, the partner in crime with whom Sid Meier had founded MicroProse back in 1982, walked out the door soon after the shark swallowed the whale. The conjoined company went on to lose a staggering $57.8 million in two years, despite such well-received, well-remembered, and reasonably if not extraordinarily popular games as XCOM, Transport Tycoon, and Colonization. By the spring of 1996, the two-headed beast, which was still publishing games under both the Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse banners, was teetering on the brink of insolvency, with, in the words of its CEO Stephen M. Race, a “negative tangible net worth.” It would require a last-minute injection of foreign investment capital that June to save it from being de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.

The unexpectedly strong sales of Civilization II — the game would eventually sell 3 million copies, enough to make it MicroProse’s best seller ever by a factor of three — were a rare smudge of black in this sea of red ink. Yet Reynolds and Briggs had no confidence in their managers’ ability to build on their success. They thought it was high time to get off the sinking ship, time to get away from a company that was no longer much fun to work at. They wanted to start their own little studio, to make the games they wanted to make their way.

But that, of course, was easier said than done. They had a proven track record inside the industry, but neither Brian Reynolds nor Jeff Briggs was a household name, even among hardcore gamers. Most of the latter still believed that Civilization II was the work of Sid Meier — an easy mistake to make, given how prominently Meier’s name was emblazoned on the box. Reynolds and Briggs needed investors, plus a publisher who would be willing to take a chance on them. Thankfully, the solution to their dilemma was quite literally staring them in the face every time they looked at that Civilization II box: they asked Sid Meier to abandon ship with them. After agonizing for a while about the prospect of leaving the company he had co-founded in the formative days of the American games industry, Meier agreed, largely for the same reason that Reynolds and Briggs had made their proposal to him in the first place: it just wasn’t any fun to be here anymore.

So, a delicate process of disentanglement began. Keenly aware of the legal peril in which their plans placed them, the three partners did everything in their power to make their departure as amicable and non-dramatic as possible. For instance, they staggered their resignations so as not to present an overly united front: Briggs left in May of 1996, Reynolds in June, and Meier in July. Even after officially resigning, Meier agreed to continue at MicroProse for some months more as a part-time consultant, long enough to see through his computerized version of the ultra-popular Magic: The Gathering collectible-card game. He didn’t even complain when, in an ironic reversal of the usual practice of putting Sid Meier’s name on things that he didn’t actually design, his old bosses made it clear that they intended to scrub him from the credits of this game, which he had spent the better part of two years of his life working on. In return for all of this and for a firm promise to stay in his own lane once he was gone, he was allowed to take with him all of the code he had written during the past decade and a half at MicroProse. “They didn’t want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators,” writes Meier in his memoir. On the face of it, this was a strange attitude for his former employer to have, given that Civilization II was selling so much better than any of its other games. But Brian Reynolds, Jeff Briggs, and Sid Meier were certainly not inclined to look the gift horse in the mouth.

They decided to call their new company Firaxis Games, a name that had its origin in a piece of music that Briggs had been tinkering with, which he had dubbed “Fiery Axis.” Jason Coleman, a MicroProse programmer who had coded on Civilization II, quit his job there as well and joined them. Sid Meier’s current girlfriend and future second wife Susan Brookins became their office manager.

The first office she was given to manage was a cramped space at the back of Absolute Quality, a game-testing service located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, just a stone’s throw away from MicroProse’s offices. Their landlords/flatmates were, if nothing else, a daily reminder of the need to test, test, test when making games. Brian Reynolds (who writes of himself here in the third person):

CEO Jeff Briggs worked the phones to rustle up some funding and did all the hard work of actually putting a new company together. Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds worked to scrape together some playable prototype code, and Jason Coleman wrote the first lines of JACKAL, the engine which these days pretty much holds everything together. Office-manager Susan Brookins found us some office furniture and bought crates of Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper to stash in a mini-fridge Brian had saved from his college days. We remembered that at some indeterminate point in the past we were considered world-class game designers, but our day-to-day lives weren’t providing us with a lot of positive reinforcement on that point. So, for the first nine months of our existence as a company, we clunked over railroad tracks in the morning, played Spy Hunter in the upstairs kitchen, and declared “work at home” days when Absolute Quality had competitors in the office.

Once the necessary financing was secured, the little gang of five moved into a proper office of their own and hired more of their former colleagues, many of whom had been laid off in a round of brutal cost-cutting that had taken place at MicroProse the same summer as the departure of the core trio. These folks bootstrapped Firaxis’s programming and art departments. Thanks to the cachet of the Sid Meier name/brand, the studio was already being seen as a potential force to be reckoned with. Publishers flew out to them instead of the other way around to pitch their services. In the end, Firaxis elected to sign on with Electronic Arts, the biggest publisher of them all.

The three founding fathers had come into the venture with a tacit understanding about the division of labor. Brian Reynolds would helm a sprawlingly ambitious but fundamentally iterative 4X strategy game, a “spiritual successor” to Civilization I and II. This was the project that had gotten Electronic Arts’s juices flowing; its box would, it went without saying, feature Sid Meier’s name prominently, no matter how much or how little Meier ultimately had to do with it. Meanwhile Meier himself would have free rein to pursue the quirkier, more esoteric ideas that he had been indulging in ever since finishing Civilization I. And Briggs would be the utility player, making sure the business side ran smoothly, writing the music, and pitching in wherever help was needed on either partner’s project.

Sid Meier has a well-earned reputation for working rapidly and efficiently. It’s therefore no surprise that he was the first Firaxis designer to finish a game, and by a wide margin at that. Called simply Gettysburg! — or rather Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! — it was based upon the battle that took place in that Pennsylvania city during the American Civil War. More expansively, it was an attempt to make a wargame that would be appealing to grognards but accessible enough to attract newcomers, by virtue of being real-time rather than turn-based, of being audiovisually attractive, and of offering a whole raft of difficulty levels and tutorials to ease the player into the experience. Upon its release in October of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine called it “a landmark, a real-time-strategy game whose unique treatment of its subject matter points to a [new] direction for the whole genre.” For my own part, being neither a dedicated grognard nor someone who shares the fascination of so many Americans for the Civil War, I will defer to the contemporary journal of record. I’m sure that Gettysburg! does what it does very well, as almost all Sid Meier games do. On the broader question of whether it brought new faces into the grognard fold, the verdict is more mixed. Meier writes today that “it was a success,” but it was definitely not a hit on the scale of SSI’s Panzer General, the last wargame to break out of its ghetto in a big way.

To the hungry eyes of Electronic Arts, Gettysburg! was just the appetizer anyway. The main dish would be Alpha Centauri.

The idea for Alpha Centauri had been batted around intermittently as a possible “sequel to Civilization” ever since Sid Meier had made one of the two possible victory conditions of that game the dispatching of a spaceship to that distant star, an achievement what was taken as a proof that the nation so doing had reached the absolute pinnacle of terrestrial achievement. In the wake of the original Civilization’s release and success, Meier had gone so far as to prototype some approaches to what happens after humanity becomes a star-faring species, only to abandon them for other things. Now, though, the old idea was newly appealing to the principals at Firaxis, for commercial as much as creative reasons. They had left the rights to the Civilization franchise behind them at MicroProse, meaning that a Firaxis Civilization III was, at least for the time being, not in the cards. But if they made a game called Alpha Centauri that used many of the same rules, systems, and gameplay philosophies, and that sported the name of Sid Meier on the box… well, people would get the message pretty clearly, wouldn’t they? This would be a sequel to Civilization in all but its lack of a Roman numeral.

When he actually started to try to make it happen, however, Brian Reynolds learned pretty quickly why Sid Meier had abandoned the idea. What seemed like a no-brainer in the abstract proved beset with complications when you really engaged. The central drama of Civilization was the competition and conflict between civilizations — which is also, not coincidentally, the central drama of human history itself. But where would the drama come from for a single group of enlightened emissaries from an earthly Utopia settling an alien planet? Whom would they compete against? Just exploring and settling and building weren’t enough, Reynolds thought. There needed to be a source of tension. There needed to be an Other.

So, Brian Reynolds started to read — not history this time, as he had when working on Civilization II, but science fiction. The eventual manual for Alpha Centauri would list seven authors that Reynolds found particularly inspiring, but it seems safe to say that his lodestar was Frank Herbert, the first writer on the list. This meant not only the inevitable Dune, but also — and perhaps even more importantly — a more obscure novel called The Jesus Incident that Herbert co-wrote with Bill Ransom. One of Herbert’s more polarizing creations, The Jesus Incident is an elliptical, intensely philosophical and even spiritual novel about the attempt of a group of humans to colonize a planet that begins to manifest a form of sentience of its own, and proves more than capable of expressing its displeasure at their presence on its surface. This same conceit would become the central plot hook of Alpha Centauri.

Yes, I just used the word “plot.” And make no mistake about its significance. Of the threads that have remained unbroken throughout Sid Meier’s long career in game design, one of the most prominent is this mild-mannered man’s deep-seated antipathy toward any sort of set-piece, pre-scripted storytelling in games. Such a thing is, he has always said, a betrayal of computer games’ defining attribute as a form of media, their interactivity. For it prevents the player from playing her way, having her own fun, writing her own personal story using the sandbox the designer has provided. Firaxis had never been intended as exclusively “Sid Meier’s company,” but it had been envisioned as a studio that would create, broadly speaking, his type of games. For Reynolds to suggest injecting strong narrative elements into the studio’s very first 4X title was akin to Deng Xiaoping suggesting to his politburo that what post-Cultural Revolution China could really use was a shot of capitalism.

And yet Meier and the others around Reynolds let him get away with it, just as those around Deng did. They did so because he had proven himself with Colonization and Civilization II, because they trusted him, and because Alpha Centauri was at the end of the day his project. They hadn’t gone to the trouble of founding Firaxis in order to second-guess one another.

Thus Reynolds found himself writing far more snippets of static text for his strategy game than he had ever expected to. He crafted a series of textual “interludes” — they’re described by that word in the game — in which the planet’s slowly dawning consciousness and its rising anger at the primates swarming over its once-pristine surface are depicted in ways that mere mechanics could not entirely capture. They appear when the player reaches certain milestones, being yet one more attempt in the annals of gaming history to negotiate the tricky terrain that lies between emergent and fixed narrative.

An early interlude, delivering some of the first hints that the planet on which you’ve landed may be more than it seems.

Walking alone through the corridors of Morgan Industries, you skim the security reports on recent attacks by the horrific native “mind worms.” Giant swarms, or “boils,” of these mottled 10cm nightmares have wriggled out of the fungal beds of late, and now threaten to overwhelm base perimeters in several sectors. Victims are paralyzed with psi-induced terror, and then experience an unimaginably excruciating death as the worms burrow into the brain to implant their ravenous larvae.

Only the most disciplined security squads can overcome their fear long enough to trigger the flame guns which can keep the worms at bay. Clearly you will have to tend carefully to the morale of the troops.

Furthermore, since terror and surprise increase human casualties dramatically in these encounters, it will be important to strike first when mind-worm boils are detected. You consider ordering some Former detachments to construct sensors near vulnerable bases to aid in such detection efforts.

Alpha Centauri became a darker game as it became more story-oriented, separating itself in the process from the sanguine tale of limitless human progress that is Civilization. Reynolds subverted Alpha Centauri’s original backstory about the perfect society that had finally advanced so far as to colonize the stars. In his new version, progress on Earth has not proved all it was cracked up to be. In fact, the planet his interstellar colonists left behind them was on its last legs, wracked by wars and environmental devastation. It’s strongly implied if not directly stated that earthly humanity is in all likelihood extinct by the time the colonists wake up from cryogenic sleep and look down upon the virgin new world that the game calls simply “Planet.”

Both the original Civilization and Alpha Centauri begin by paraphrasing the Book of Genesis, but the mood diverges quickly from there. The opening movie of Civilization is a self-satisfied paean to Progress…

…while that of Alpha Centauri is filled with disquieting images from a planet that may be discovering the limits of Progress.

Although the plot was destined to culminate in a reckoning with the consciousness of Planet itself, Brian Reynolds sensed that the game needed other, more grounded and immediate forms of conflict to give it urgency right from the beginning. He created these with another piece of backstory, one as contrived as could possibly be, but not ineffective in its context for all that. As told at length in a novella that Firaxis began publishing in installments on the game’s website more than six months before its release, mishaps and malevolence aboard the colony ship, which bore the sadly ironic name of Unity, led the colonists to split into seven feuding factions, each of whom inflexibly adhere to their own ideology about the best way to organize human society. The factions each made their way down to the surface of Planet separately, to become Alpha Centauri’s equivalent of Civilization’s nations. The player chooses one of them to guide.

So, in addition to the unusually strong plot, we have a heaping dose of political philosophy added to the mix; Alpha Centauri is an unapologetically heady game. Brian Reynolds had attended graduate school as a philosophy major in a previous life, and he drew from that background liberally. The factions’ viewpoints are fleshed out largely through a series of epigrams that appear as you research new technologies, each of them attributed to one of the seven faction leaders, with an occasional quote from Aristotle or Nietzsche dropped in for good measure.

Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
Strategy Session

The factions are:

  • Gaia’s Stepdaughters, staunch environmentalists who believe that humanity must learn to live in harmony with nature to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the ruination of Earth.
  • The Human Hive, hardcore collectivists whose only complaint about Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution is that it didn’t go far enough.
  • Morgan Industries, hardcore capitalists whose only complaint about Ayn Rand is that she didn’t go far enough.
  • The University of Planet, STEM specialists who are convinced that scientific and technological progress alone would correct all that ails society if people would just let it run unfettered and go where it takes them.
  • The Lord’s Believers, a fundamentalist sect who are convinced that God will deliver humanity to paradise if we all just pray really hard and abide by a set of stringent, arbitrary dictates.
  • The Spartan Federation, who train their children from birth to be hardened, self-sacrificing warriors like the Spartans of old.
  • The Peacekeepers, the closest thing to pragmatists in this rogue’s gallery of ideologues; they value human rights, democracy, dialog, and consensus-building, and can sometimes seem just as wishy-washy and ineffectual in the face of militant extremism as the earthly United Nations that spawned them.

Unlike the nations that appear in Civilization I and II, each of the factions in Alpha Centauri has a very significant set of systemic advantages and disadvantages that to a large extent force even a human player to guide them in a certain direction. For example, the Human Hive is excellent at building heavy infrastructure and pumping out babies, but poor at research, and can never become a democracy; the University of Planet is crazily great at research, but its populace has little patience for extended wars and is vulnerable to espionage. Trying to play a faction against type is, if not completely impossible for the advanced player, not an exercise for the faint of heart.

There is a lot of food for thought in the backstory of a ruined Earth and the foreground story of an angry Planet, as there is in the factions themselves and their ideologies, and trust me when I say that plenty of people have eaten their fill. Even today, more than a quarter-century after Alpha Centauri’s release, YouTube is full of introspective think-pieces purporting to tell us What It All Means.

Indeed, if anything, the game’s themes and atmosphere resonate more strongly today than they did when it first came out in February of 1999, at which time the American economy was booming, our world was as peaceful and open as it has ever been, and the fantasy that liberal democracy had won the day and we had reached the end of history could be easily maintained by the optimistic and the complacent. Alas, today Alpha Centauri feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.

The original Civilization was ahead of the curve on global warming, prompting accusations of “political correctness” from some gamers. Paying heed to the environment is even more important in Alpha Centauri, since failing to do so can only aggravate Planet’s innate hostility. The “Eco-Damage” statistic is key.

That said, we must also acknowledge that Alpha Centauri is disarmingly good at mirroring the beliefs of its players back at them. Many people like to read a strong environmentalist message in the game, and it’s not hard to see why. Your struggles with the hostile Planet, which is doing everything it can to protect itself against the alien parasites on its surface, is an extreme interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis about Earth, even as Alpha Centauri’s  “transcendence” victory — the equivalent of Civilization’s tech victory that got us here in the first place — sees humanity overcoming its estrangement from its surroundings to literally become one with Planet.

For what it’s worth, though, in his “Designer’s Notes” at the back of the Alpha Centauri manual, the one message that Brian Reynolds explicitly states that he wishes for the game to convey is a very different one: that we ought to be getting on with the space race. “Are we content to stew in our collective juices, to turn inward as our planet runs inexorably out of resources?” he asks. “The stars are waiting for us. We have only to decide that it’s worth the effort to go there.” Personally, although I have nothing against space exploration in the abstract, I must say that I find the idea of space colonization as the solution to the problem of a beleaguered Planet Earth shallow if not actively dangerous. Even in the best-case scenario, many, many generations will pass before a significant number of humans will be able to call another celestial object their permanent home. In the meantime, there is in fact nothing “inexorable” about polluting our own planet and bleeding it dry; we have the means to stop doing so. To steal a phrase from Reynolds, we have only to decide that it’s worth the effort.

But enough with the ideology and the politics, you might be saying — how does Alpha Centauri play as a game? Interestingly, Brian Reynolds himself is somewhat ambivalent on this subject. He recalls that he set aside a week just to play Civilization II after he pronounced that game done, so thrilled was he at the way it had come out. Yet he says that he could barely stand to look at Alpha Centauri after it was finished. He was very proud of the world-building, the atmosphere, the fiction. But he didn’t feel like he had quite gotten the gameplay mechanics sorted so that they fully supported the fiction. And I can kind of see what he means.

To state the obvious: the gameplay of Alpha Centauri is deeply indebted to Civilization. Like, really, really indebted. So indebted that, when you first start to play it, you might be tempted to see it as little more than a cosmetic reskin. The cities of Civilization are now “bases”; the “goody-hut” villages are now supply pods dropped by the Unity in its last hours of life; barbarian tribes are native “mind worms”; settler engineers are terraformers; money is “energy credits”; Wonders of the World are Secret Projects; etc., etc. It is true that, as you continue to play, some aspects will begin to separate themselves from their inspiration. For example, and perhaps most notably, the mind worms prove to be more than just the early-game annoyance that Civilization’s barbarians are; instead they steadily grow in power and quantity as Planet is angered more and more by your presence. Still, the apple never does roll all that far from the tree.

Very early in a game of Alpha Centauri, when only a tiny part of the map has been revealed. Of all the contrivances in the fiction, this idea that you could have looked down on Planet from outer space and still have no clue about the geography of the place might be the most absurd.

Where Alpha Centauri does innovate in terms of its mechanics, its innovations are iterative rather than transformative. The most welcome improvement might be the implementation of territorial borders for each faction, drawn automatically around each cluster of bases. To penetrate the borders of another faction with your own units is considered a hostile act. This eliminates the weirdness that dogged the first two iterations of Civilization, which essentially saw your empire as a linked network of city-states rather than a contiguous territorial holding. No longer do the computer players walk in and plop down a city… err, base right in the middle of five of your own; no longer do the infantry units of your alleged allies decide to entrench themselves on the choicest tile of your best base. Unsurprisingly given the increased verisimilitude they yielded, national borders would show up in every iteration of the main Civilization series after Alpha Centauri.

Other additions are of more dubious value. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed. It proved a time-consuming nightmare to implement in this uni-planetary context. And, as Reynolds admits, it’s doubtful how much it really adds to the game. All that time and effort could likely have been better spent elsewhere.

When I look at it in a more holistic sense, it strikes me that Alpha Centauri got itself caught up in what had perchance become a self-defeating cycle for grand-strategy games by the end of the 1990s. Earlier games had had their scope and complexity strictly limited by the restrictions of the relatively primitive hardware on which they ran. Far from being a problem, these limits often served to keep the game manageable for the player. One thinks of 1990’s Railroad Tycoon, another Sid Meier classic, which only had memory enough for 35 trains and 35 stations; as a result, the growth of your railroad empire was stopped just before it started to become too unwieldy to micro-manage. Even the original Civilization was arguably more a beneficiary than a victim of similar constraints. By the time Brian Reynolds made Civilization II, however, strategy games could become a whole lot bigger and more complex, even as less progress had been made on finding ways to hide some of their complexity from the player who didn’t want to see it and to give her ways of automating the more routine tasks of empire management. Grand-strategy games became ever huger, more intricate machines, whose every valve and dial still had to be manipulated by hand. Some players love this sort of thing, and more power to them. But for a lot of them — a group that includes me — it becomes much, much too much.

To its credit, Alpha Centauri is aware of this problem, and does what it can to address it. If you start a new game at one of the two lowest of the six difficulty levels, it assumes you are probably new to the game as a whole, and takes you through a little tutorial when you access each screen for the first time. More thoroughgoingly, it gives you a suite of automation tools that at least nod in the direction of letting you set the high-level direction for your faction while your underlings sweat the details. You can decide whether each of your cities… err, bases should focus on “exploring,” “building,” “discovering,” or “conquering” and leave the rest to its “governor”; you can tell your terraforming units to just, well, terraform in whatever way they think best; you can even tell a unit just to go out and “explore” the blank spaces on your map.

Is the cure worse than the disease?

Sadly, though, these tools are more limited than they might first appear. The tutorials do a decent job of telling you what the different stuff on each screen is and does, but do almost nothing to explain the concepts that underlie them; that is to say, they tell you how to twiddle a variety of knobs, but don’t tell you why you might want to twiddle them. Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself. The same applies to most of the automated unit functions. The supreme booby prize has to go to the aforementioned “explore” function. As far as I can determine, it just causes your unit to move in a random direction every turn, which tends to result in it chasing its tail like a dog that sat down in peanut butter rather than charging boldly into the unknown.

This, then, is the contradiction at the heart of Alpha Centauri, which is the same one that bothers me in Civilization II. A game that purports to be about Big Ideas demands that you spend most of your time engaged in the most fiddly sort of busywork. I hasten to state once again that this is not automatically a bad thing; again, some people enjoy that sort of micro-management very much. For my own part, I can get into it a bit at the outset, but once I have a dozen bases all demanding constant attention and 50 or 60 units pursuing their various objectives all over the map, I start to lose heart. For me, this problem is the bane of the 4X genre. I’m not enough of an expert on the field to know whether anyone has really come close to solving it; I look forward to finding out as we continue our journey through gaming history. As of this writing, though, my 4X gold standards remain Civilization I and Master of Orion I, because their core systems are simple enough that the late game never becomes completely overwhelming.

Speaking of Master of Orion: alongside the questionable idea of custom-built units, Alpha Centauri also lifts from that game the indubitably welcome one of a “diplomatic victory,” which eliminates the late-game tedium of having to hunt down every single enemy base and unit for a conquest victory that you know is going to be yours. If you can persuade or intimidate enough of the other factions to vote for you in the “Planetary Council” — or if you can amass such a large population of your own that you can swamp the vote — you can make an inevitability a reality by means of an election. Likewise, you can also win an “economic” victory by becoming crazy rich. These are smart additions that work as advertised. They may only nibble at the edges of the central problem I mentioned above, but, hey, credit where it’s due.

Aesthetically, Alpha Centauri is a marked improvement over Civilization II, which, trapped in the Windows 3.1 visual paradigm as it was, could feel a bit like “playing” a really advanced Excel spreadsheet. But Alpha Centauri also exhibits a cold — not to say sterile — personality, with none of the goofy humor that has always been one of Civilization’s most underrated qualities, serving to nip any pretentiousness in the bud by reminding us that the designers too know how silly a game that can pit Abraham Lincoln against Mahatma Gandhi in a nuclear-armed standoff ultimately is. There’s nothing like that understanding on display in Alpha Centauri — much less the campy troupe of live-action community-theater advisors who showed up to chew the scenery in Civilization II. The look and feel of Alpha Centauri is more William Gibson than Mel Brooks.

While the aesthetics of Alpha Centauri represent a departure from what came before, we’re back to the same old same old when it comes to the actual interface, just with more stuff packed into the menus and sub-menus. I’m sure that Brian Reynolds did what he could, but it will nevertheless come off as a convoluted mess to the uninitiated modern player. It’s heavily dependent on modes, a big no-no in GUI design since the days when the Apple Macintosh was a brand new product. If you’re anything like me, you’ll accidentally move a unit about ten times in any given evening of play because you thought you were in “view” mode when you were actually in “move” mode. And no, there is no undo function, a feature for which I’d happily trade the ability to design my own units.

The exit dialog is one of the few exceptions to Alpha Centauri as a humor-free zone. “Please don’t go,” says a passable imitation of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The drones need you.” Note that this is a game in which you click “OK” to cancel. Somewhere out there a human-factors interface consultant is shuddering in horror.

As so often happens in reviews like these, I find now that I’ve highlighted the negative here more than I really intended to. Alpha Centauri is by no means a bad game; on the contrary, for some players it is a genuinely great one. It is, however, a sharply bifurcated game, whose fiction and gameplay are rather at odds with one another. The former is thoughtful and bold, even disturbing in a way that Civilization never dared to be. The latter is pretty much what you would expect from a game that was promoted as “Civilization in space,” and, indeed, that was crafted by the same man who gave us Civilization II. A quick survey of YouTube reveals the two halves of the whole all too plainly. Alongside those earnest think-pieces about What It All Means, there are plenty of videos that offer tips on the minutiae of its systems and show off the host’s skill at beating it at superhuman difficulty levels, untroubled by any of its deeper themes or messages.

As you’ve probably gathered from the tone of this article, Alpha Centauri leaves me with mixed feelings. I’m already getting annoyed by the micro-management by the time I get into the mid-game, even as I miss a certain magic sauce that is part and parcel of Civilization. There’s something almost mythical or allegorical about going from inventing the wheel to sending a colony ship on its way out to the stars. Going from Biogenetics to the “Threshold of Transcendence” in Alpha Centauri is less relatable. And while the story and the additional philosophical textures that Alpha Centauri brings to the table are thought-provoking, they can only be fully appreciated once. After that, you’re mostly just clicking past the interludes and epigrams to get on to building the next thing you need for your extraterrestrial empire.

In fact, it seems to me that Alpha Centauri at the gameplay level favors the competitive player more than the experiential one; being firmly in the experiential camp myself, this may explain why it doesn’t completely agree with me. It’s a more fiercely zero-sum affair than Civilization. Those players most interested in the development side of things can’t ensure a long period of peaceful growth by choosing to play against only one or two rivals. All seven factions are always in this game, and they seem to me far more prone to conflict than those of Civilization, what with the collection of mutually antithetical ideologies that are such inseparable parts of their identities. Suffice to say that the other faction leaders are exactly the self-righteous jerks that rigid ideological extremists tend to be in real life. This does not lend itself to peace and harmony on Planet even before the mind worms start to rise up en masse. Even when playing as the Peacekeepers, I found myself spending a lot more time fighting wars in Alpha Centauri than I ever did in Civilization, where I was generally able to set up a peaceful, trustworthy democracy, forge strong diplomatic and trading links with my neighbors, and ride my strong economy and happy and prosperous citizenry to the stars. Playing Alpha Centauri, by contrast, is more like being one of seven piranhas in a fishbowl than a valued member of a community of nations. If you can find one reliable ally, you’re doing pretty darn well on the diplomatic front. Intervals of peace tend to be the disruption in the status quo of war rather than the other way around.

The other factions spend an inordinate amount of time trying to extort money out of you.

There was always an understanding at Firaxis that, for all that Alpha Centauri was the best card they had to play at that point in time from a commercial standpoint, its sales probably weren’t destined to rival those of Civilization II. For the Civilization franchise has always attracted a fair number of people from outside the core gaming demographics, even if it is doubtful how many of them really buckle down to play it.

Nonetheless, Alpha Centauri did about as well as one could possibly expect after its release in February of 1999. (Electronic Arts would surely have preferred to have the game a few months earlier, to hit the Christmas buying season, but one of the reasons Firaxis had been founded had been to avoid such compromises.) Sales of up to 1 million units have been claimed for it by some of the principals involved. Even if that figure is a little inflated, as I suspect it may be, the game likely sold well into the high hundreds of thousands.

By 1999, an expansion pack for a successful game like Alpha Centauri was almost obligatory. And indeed, it’s hard to get around the feeling that Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire, which shipped in October of that year, was created more out of obligation than passion. Neither the navel-gazers nor the zero-summers among the original game’s fan base seem all that hugely fond of it. Patched together by a committee of no fewer than eight designers, with the name of Brian Reynolds the very last one listed, it adds no fewer than seven new factions, which only serve to muddy the narrative and gameplay waters without adding much of positive interest to the equation; the two alien factions that appear out of nowhere seem particularly out of place. If you ask me, Alpha Centauri is best played in its original form — certainly when you first start out with it, and possibly forever.

Be that as it may, the end of the second millennium saw Firaxis now firmly established as a studio and a brand, both of which would prove very enduring. The company remains with us to this day, still one of the leading lights in the field of 4X strategy, the custodian of the beloved Civilization…

Yes, Civilization. For their next big trick, Firaxis was about to get the chance to make a game under the name that they thought they’d left behind forever when they said farewell to MicroProse.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, January 1998, September 1998, April 1999, and January 2000; Next Generation of July 1997; Retro Gamer 241. Also the Alpha Centauri manual, one of the last examples of such a luxuriously rambling 250-page tome that the games industry would produce.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview of Brian Reynolds for his Designer’s Notes podcast and Reynolds’s appearance on the Three Moves Ahead podcast (also with Soren Johnson in attendance). The YouTube think-pieces I mentioned include ones by GaminGHD, Waypoint, Yaz Minsky, CairnBuilder, and Lorerunner.

Where to Get It: Alpha Centauri and its expansion Alien Crossfire are available as a single digital purchase at GOG.com.

 
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Posted by on June 20, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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It’s 1999 and I Feel Fine

19 Jun

Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.

Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.

  • Alpha Centauri.
  • Everquest.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
  • Rollercoaster Tycoon.
  • Discworld Noir.
  • Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
  • Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
  • Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
  • Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
  • The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
  • For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
  • Homeworld.
  • Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
  • Ultima IX: Ascension.
  • Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
  • The Longest Journey.
  • Planescape: Torment.

As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)

There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.

  • Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
  • Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
  • Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
  • A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
  • The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
  • On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.

A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:

It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.

I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.

Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.

Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.

I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

 
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Posted by on June 19, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction, Modern Times

 

The Last Adventures of Legend

06 Jun

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.

— Bob Bates

This article tells part of the story of Legend Entertainment.

The history of Legend Entertainment can be divided into three periods. When Bob Bates and Mike Verdu first founded the company in 1989, close on the heels of Infocom’s shuttering, they explicitly envisioned it as the heir to the latter’s rich heritage. And indeed, Legend’s early games were at bottom parser-based text adventures, the last of their kind to be sold through conventional retail outlets. That said, they were a dramatic departure from the austerity of Zork: this textual lily was gilded with elaborate menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions that made actual typing optional, along with an ever increasing quantity of illustrations, sound effects, music, eventually even cutscenes and graphical mini-games. At last, in 1993, the inevitable endpoint of all this creeping multimedia was reached. Between Gateway II: Homeworld and Companions of Xanth, the parser that had still been lurking behind it all disappeared. Thus ended the text-adventure phase of Legend’s existence and began the point-and-click-adventure phase.

Legend continued happily down that second road for a few years. Its games in this vein weren’t as flashy or as high-profile as those of Sierra or LucasArts, but a coterie of loyal fans appreciated them for their more understated aesthetic qualities and for their commitment to good, non-frustrating design — a commitment that even LucasArts proved unable or unwilling to match as the decade wore on. Legend’s games during this period were almost universally based on licensed literary properties, which, combined with in-gaming writing that remained a cut above the norm, still allowed the company to retain some vestige of being the heir to Infocom.

By 1996, however, another endpoint seemed to be looming. One of Legend’s two games of the year before had been the biggest, most expensive production they had yet dared to undertake, as well as a rare foray into non-licensed territory. Mission Critical had been made possible by a $2.5 million investment from the book-publishing giant Random House. The game was the brainchild and the special baby of founder Mike Verdu, a space opera into which he poured his heart and soul. It filled three CDs, the first of which was mostly devoted to a bravura live-action opening movie that starred Michael Dorn, well known to legions of science-fiction fans as the Klingon Lieutenant Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, here taking the helm of another starship that might just as well have been the USS Enterprise. But there was more to Mission Critical than surface flash and stunt casting. It was an astonishingly ambitious production in other ways as well: from the writing and world-building (Verdu created a detailed future history for humanity to serve as the game’s backstory) to the multi-variant gameplay itself (a remarkably sophisticated real-time-strategy game is embedded into the adventure). I for one feel no hesitation in calling Mission Critical one of the best things Legend ever did.

But when it was released into a marketplace that was already glutted with superficially similar if generally inferior “Siliwood” productions, Mission Critical got lost in the shuffle. The big hit in this space in 1995 — in fact, the very last hit “interactive movie” ever — was Sierra’s Phantasmagoria, which evinced nothing like the same care for its fiction but nevertheless sold 1 million copies on the back of its seven CDs worth of canned video footage. Mission Critical, on the other hand, struggled to sell 50,000 copies, numbers which were actually slightly worse than those of Shannara, Legend’s other game of 1995, a worthy but far more modest and traditionalist adventure. The consequences to the bottom line were devastating. After hovering around the break-even point for most of its existence, Legend posted a loss for 1995 of more than $2 million, on total revenues of less than $3 million. Random House, which despite its literary veneer was perfectly capable of being as ruthless as any other titan of Corporate America, decided that it wanted out of Legend — in fact, it wanted Legend to pay it back $1 million of its investment, a demand which the fine print in the contract allowed. (Random House was certainly not making any friends in the world of nerdy media at this time; it was holding TSR, the maker of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, over another barrel.)

Beset by existential threats, Legend managed in 1996 to put out only one game, an even more radical departure from the norm than Mission Critical had been. Star Control 3 had the fortune or perhaps misfortune of being the sequel to 1992’s Star Control II, an unusual and much-loved amalgamation of outer-space adventure, action, and CRPG that was created by the studio Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. As it happened, Accolade also served as Legend’s distributor from 1992 to 1994. (RandomSoft, the software arm of Random House, took up that role afterward.) It was through this relationship that the Star Control 3 deal — a licensing deal of a different stripe than that to which the company had grown accustomed — came to Legend, after Toys for Bob said that they weren’t interested in making another game in the series right away. Michael Lindner, a long-serving music composer, programmer, and designer at Legend who loved Star Control II, lobbied hard with his bosses to take on Star Control 3, and was duly appointed Lead Designer once the contract was signed. Being so different from anything Legend had attempted before, the game took a good two years to complete.

Again I have to save the galaxy? Even the box copy seemed determined to undermine Star Control 3.

Star Control 3 received good reviews from the professionals immediately after its release in September of 1996. Computer Gaming World magazine, for example, called it a “truly stellar experience” and “the ultimate space adventure,” while the website GameSpot deemed it “one of the best titles to come out this year.” It initially sold quite well on the strength of these reviews as well as its name; in fact, it became Legend’s best-selling game to date, their first to shift more than 100,000 units.

Yet once people had had some time to settle in and really play it, an ugly backlash that has never reversed itself set in. To this day, Star Control 3 remains about as popular as tuberculosis among the amazingly durable Star Control II fan base. In the eyes of many of them, it not only pales in comparison to its predecessor, but the non-involvement of the Toys for Bob crew makes it fundamentally illegitimate.

Whatever else it may be, Star Control 3 is not the purely cynical cash-grab it’s so often described as; on the contrary, it’s an earnest effort that if anything wants a little bit too badly to live up to the name on its box. And yet it’s hard to avoid the feeling when playing it that Legend has departed too much from their core competencies. The most significant addition to the Star Control II template is a new layer of colony management: you have to maintain a literal space empire in order to produce the fuel you need to send your starship out in search of the proverbial new life and new civilizations. Unfortunately, the colony game is more tedious than fun, a constant nagging distraction from what you really want to be doing. The other layers of the genre lasagna are better, but none of them is good enough to withstand a concerted comparison to Star Control II. The feel of the action-based starship combat — Legend’s first real attempt to implement a full-on action game — is subtly off, as is the interface in general. For example, a hopelessly convoluted 3D star map makes navigation ten times the chore it ought to be.

In the end, then, Star Control 3 is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Where it’s bold, it comes off as ill-considered: it represents the aliens you meet as digitized hand puppets, drawing mocking references to Sesame Street online. Where it plays it safe, it comes off as tepid: the writing — usually Legend’s greatest strength — reads like Star Control fan fiction. Still, Star Control 3 isn’t actively terrible by any means. It’s better than its rather horrendous modern reputation — but, then again, that’s not saying much, is it? There are better games out there that you could be playing, whether the date on your calendar is 1996 or 2025.

In its day, however, its strong early sales allowed Bob Bates and Mike Verdu to keep the lights on at Legend for a little while longer. A shovelware compilation of the early games called The Lost Adventures of Legend, whose name consciously echoed Activision’s surprisingly successful Lost Treasures of Infocom collections, brought in a bit more much-needed revenue for virtually no outlay.

Nevertheless, Bob Bates and Mike Verdu were by now coming to understand that securing Legend’s future in the longer term would likely require nothing less than a full-fledged reinvention of the company and its games — a far more radical overhaul than the move from a parser-based to a point-and-click interface. Everything about the games industry in the second half of the 1990s seemed to militate against a boutique studio and publisher like Legend. As the number of new games that appeared each year continued to increase, shelf space at retail was becoming ever harder to secure, even as digital distribution was at this point still a non-starter for games like those of Legend that filled hundreds of megabytes on CD. Meanwhile it was slowly becoming clear that the adventure genre had peaked in 1995 and was now sliding into a marked decline; there were no new million-selling adventure games like Phantasmagoria to be found in 1996. The games that sold best now were first-person shooters and real-time strategies, two genres that hadn’t existed back when Legend had been founded.

Mike Verdu, whose gaming palette was more diverse than that of the hardcore adventurer Bob Bates, hatched a plan to enter the 3D-shooter space. Three years on from the debut of DOOM, he sensed that John Carmack’s old formulation about the role of story in this sort of game — “Story in a game is like the story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” — no longer held completely true in the minds of at least some developers and players; he sensed that the world was ready for richer narratives and more coherent settings in its action games. His thinking was very much on trend: LucasArts was in the latter stages of making Jedi Knight at the time, and Valve had already embarked on Half-Life. Verdu believed that Legend might be able to apply their traditional strengths — writing, storytelling, aesthetic texture, perhaps even a smattering of adventure-style puzzle-solving — to the shooter genre with good results.

To do that, however, he and Bob Bates would need to drum up a new investor or investors, to stabilize the company’s rocky finances, pay Random House its $1 million ransom, and, last but by no means least, fund this leap into the three-dimensional unknown. As they wrote in their investor’s prospectus at this time, “Legend’s strengths in storytelling and world creation will be used to craft a unique game experience that combines combat, character interaction, exploration, and puzzle solving.” They had already secured what they thought was the perfect literary license for the experiment: the Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan, which were currently the best-selling epic-fantasy books in the world from an author not named J.R.R. Tolkien.

After months of beating the bushes, they found the partner they were seeking in GT Interactive, an outgrowth of a peddler of home-workout videos that had exploded onto the games industry in 1994 by publishing DOOM II exclusively to retail stores. (The original DOOM had been sold via the shareware model, with boxed distribution coming only later.) Now, GT was to be the publisher of Epic MegaGame’s Unreal, a shooter whose core technology was, so it was said, even better than id Software’s latest Quake engine. GT was able to secure the Unreal engine for Legend’s use long before the game that bore its name shipped. Even with that enormous leg-up, Legend would need every bit of their new publisher’s largess and patience; The Wheel of Time would prove a much bigger mouthful to swallow than Bob and Mike had ever anticipated, such that it wouldn’t be done until the end of 1999, more than two and a half years after the project was initiated.

As you’ve probably gathered, these events herald the beginning of the transition from the second to the third phase of Legend’s history, from Legend as a purveyor primarily of adventure games to a maker of 3D shooters that retain only scattered vestiges of the company’s past. Yet this transition wasn’t as clean or as abrupt as that from parser-driven to point-and-click adventures. While most of Legend was chasing reinvention in the last years of the 1990s, another, smaller part was sticking to what they had always done. There would come two more traditionalist adventure games before The Wheel of Time made it out the door to signal to the world that Legend Entertainment had become a very different sort of games studio.

So, we’ll save The Wheel of Time and what came after for a later article. I’d like to use the rest of this one to look at that those last two purist adventures from Legend.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is one of those games that I would love to love much more than I actually do. It’s warm-hearted and well-meaning and wants nothing more than to show me a good time. Unfortunately, it mostly just bores me. In all of these respects, it has much in common with its literary source material.

Said source is the Callahan’s series by the science-fiction journeyman Spider Robinson, the first volume of which shares its name with the game. Born in the 1970s as loosely linked short stories in the pages of Analog magazine, it’s written science fiction’s nearest equivalent to the television sitcom Cheers; the stories all revolve around a convivial bar where everybody knows your name, owned and operated by a fellow named Mike Callahan in lieu of Sam Malone. The tone is what we like to call hyggelig here in Denmark: cozy and welcoming, both for the patrons of the bar and for the reader. A sign that Mike Callahan keeps hanging on the wall behind his post says it all: “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.” The stories manage to qualify as science fiction — or maybe a better description is urban fantasy? — by including elements of the inexplicable and paranormal: aliens drop in for a drink, as do time travelers, a talking dog, and plenty of other freaks and oddities. If you read long enough, you will begin to realize that Mike Callahan himself is not quite what he appears to be. But never fear, he’s still a good guy for all that.

It’s very hard even for a curmudgeon like me to work up any active dislike for a series that so plainly just wants to make us feel good. And yet I must admit that I’ve never been able to work up the will to read beyond the first book either. Even when I first encountered Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon in the stacks of my local library at the ripe old age of twelve or so, it felt so slight and contrived that I couldn’t be bothered to finish it. When I picked the first book up again as part of my due diligence for writing this article, I wound up feeling precisely the same way, thus illustrating that I either had exceptionally good taste as a twelve-year-old or that I am a sad case of arrested development.  (The child is the father to the man, as they say.)

Still, none of this need be the kiss of death for the game. I’ve played a fair number of games, from Legend and others, that are based on books that I would never choose to read on my own, and enjoyed a surprising number of them. But, as I noted at the outset, the game of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon isn’t in this group.

Callahan’s was the second Legend adventure game to be masterminded by a former Sierra designer, after Shannara, by Corey and Lori Ann Cole of Quest for Glory fame. This time up, we have Josh Mandel, a former standup comedian who had once been a regular on the same circuit as such future stars as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld. His own life took a very different course when a close encounter with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards caused him to seek a job with the company that had made it. His design credits at Sierra included Pepper’s Adventures in Time, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. Having left Sierra in the middle of the Space Quest 6 project because he was unhappy with the company’s direction, he was available for Legend to sign to a design contract circa late 1995.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is a very well-made game by any objective standard. The graphics and sound, created by a stable of out-of-house free agents to whom Legend returned again and again, are attractive and polished and perfectly in tune with the personality of the books. If the overriding standard by which you judge this game is how well it evokes its source material, it can only be counted a rousing success. Hewing to the series’ roots as a collection of short stories rather than anything so ambitious as a novel, the game uses Callahan’s Bar as a jumping-off point for half a dozen largely self-contained vignettes, which take you everywhere from Manhattan to Brazil, from outer space to Transylvania. (Yes, there is a vampire.)

The worst objective complaint to be made about it is that, if you were to hazard a guess, you might assume it to be two or three years older than it actually is. Barring the addition of a 360-degree panning system, the interface and presentation of the game aren’t very far removed at all from what we were seeing at the beginning of the point-and-click phase of Legend’s existence in 1993. For example, there’s still no audible narrator guiding the show, just lots and lots of textual descriptions of the things you click on. (The characters you speak to in the game, on the other hand, are fully voice-acted.) Its dated presentation may have represented a marketing problem when Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon made its debut in the spring of 1997, but there’s no reason for it to bother tolerant retro-gamers like us unduly today.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was the last hurrah for Legend’s original adventure engine, which had been steadily improved since their very first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101.

So much for objectivity. Subjectively, this is my least favorite point-and-click Legend adventure game, with the possible exception only of Companions of Xanth, for which my distaste is driven more by the pedophiliac overtones of the books on which it is based than by anything intrinsic to the game itself. I can’t accuse Spider Robinson of so serious an offense as that, only of a style of humor to which I just don’t respond. Alas for me, Josh Mandel chooses to ape that style of humor slavishly. This game is a hall of mirrors where every pane of glass hides a wretched pun or a groan-inducing dad joke or a pseudo-heart-warming “I feel you, man!” moment. It sets my teeth on edge.

And the thing is, you just can’t get away from it. Josh Mandel has chosen to implement every single thing you see in the scenery as a hot spot. And because this is a traditional adventure game, any one of those hot spots could hide the thing or the clue or the action you need to advance. So, you have to click them all. One by one. And it’s absolutely excruciating. The words just run on and on and on… so many words, vanishingly few of them funny or interesting, a pale imitation of a writer I don’t like very much in the first place. I get tired and fidgety just thinking about it. For me at least, Callahan’s is proof that it’s possible to over-implement an adventure game, with disastrous effects on its pacing — a problem that tended not to come up in the earlier years of the genre, when space constraints served as a natural editor.

Sigh…

But of course, it’s well known that comedy is notoriously subjective. You might respond very differently to this game, especially if Spider Robinson happens to be a writer you enjoy, or perhaps if the humor in Sierra’s comedy adventures is more to your taste than it is to mine. I’d be lying if I said I finished it — dear reader, there came a point when I just couldn’t take it anymore — but what I did see of it gave me no reason to doubt that it’s up to Legend’s usual standards of meticulous, scrupulous fairness.

Okay… every once in a while, a joke does kind of land.

Sadly for Legend, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon sold like a Popsicle in the Arctic. And small wonder: whatever its intrinsic merits or demerits, it’s hard to imagine a game more out of touch with the way the industry was trending in 1997. In light of this, that could very well have been that for Legend Entertainment as a maker of adventure games. Instead, the company ponied up for one last adventure while the drawn-out Wheel of Time project was still ongoing. It was permitted only a limited budget, but it seems like a minor miracle for ever having gotten made at all. Best of all, John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is really, really good.

This project was an unusual one for Legend, in that for once the author behind the literary work that was being borrowed from showed an active, ongoing interest in the game. John Saul was riding high at this point in his career, being arguably the most popular American horror writer not named Stephen King. He was also, as he said at the time, “an old computer gamer, going back to the days of Zork when the adventure was all in text.” He first began to speak with Bob Bates about some sort of collaboration as early as 1995. The two initially discussed a book and game that would be released at the same time, to serve as companion pieces to one another. When that became too logistically challenging — a book tends to be a lot faster to create than a game — they decided that the game could come out later, to serve as a sequel to the book. Even so, Bates was already sketching out a design at the same time that Saul was writing his manuscript.

In the midst of all this, the aforementioned Stephen King tried out a unique publication strategy for his story The Green Mile: in an echo of the way the Victorians used to do these things, it appeared as six thin, cheap paperbacks, one per month over the course of half a year. The experiment was a roaring commercial success, convincing John Saul that it would serve his own burgeoning Blackstone Chronicles equally well. Thus the latter too was published in six parts over the first half of 1997 (after which the inevitable omnibus volume which you can still buy today appeared).

The Blackstone Chronicles revolves around an old, now abandoned asylum that looms physically and psychically over the New Hampshire town of Blackstone. In each of the first five installments, a resident of the town receives a mysterious gift of some sort, an object that once belonged to one of the inmates of the asylum. Strange events ensue on each occasion, until it all culminates in a showdown between a dark past and a hopefully brighter future in the sixth installment. The Blackstone Chronicles isn’t revelatory — creepy asylums in bleak New England towns aren’t exactly the height of innovation in horror fiction — but I found it to be a very effective genre piece nonetheless, one that’s wise enough to understand that shadows in the mind are always scarier than blood on the page. It was also a commercial success in its day to rival its inspiration The Green Mile, with each of the installments reportedly selling in the neighborhood of 1 million copies.

Sales figures like that do much to explain why Legend decided to continue with their game of The Blackstone Chronicles despite the headwinds blowing against the adventure genre. The project marked the first time that Bob Bates had taken on the role of Lead Designer since Eric the Unready back in 1993. Designing games was what he had started Legend in order to do, but navigating the shifting winds of the industry had come to demand all of the time he could give it and then some. Now, though, the situation was a bit more settled, thanks to GT Interactive stepping in with a long-term commitment to The Wheel of Time. Not being an FPS gamer, Bates wasn’t sure how much he could contribute there. Meanwhile his loyal friend and partner Mike Verdu felt strongly that, if Bates wanted to take a modest budget and make an adventure game with John Saul’s help, he had earned that right. The way things were going for Legend and the industry as a whole, it might very well be the last such chance he would ever get.

Bob Bates looks back on the time he spent making this game about madness, sadism, and tragedy as a thoroughly happy period in his own life. The constant stress over how Legend was to make payroll from month to month had, at least for the time being, abated, allowing him to do what he had really wanted to be doing all along: designing an adventure game that he could be proud of. It was gratifying as well to be working with such a literary partner as John Saul, who was, if far from a constant presence around the office, genuinely interested in what he was doing and always available to answer questions or serve as a sounding board. The contrast with most of the authors Legend had worked with in the past was stark.

The game takes place several years after the last of John Saul’s novellas, casting you in the role of Oliver Metcalf, the son of Malcolm Metcalf, the Blackstone Asylum’s last and most infamous superintendent. With a plan to demolish the old building and erect a shopping center in its place having backfired in the books, the town council now wants to make a museum of psychiatric history out of it. Before the museum can open, however, Malcolm’s malevolent spirit kidnaps your — Oliver’s, that is to say — flesh-and-blood son and hides him somewhere in the building. You go there to rescue him, which is exactly what your father wants you to do, having hatched a special plan for your soul. It’s a classic haunted-house setup, no more original in the broad strokes than the premise of the books, but executed equally well. The museum conceit is indicative of the design’s subtle cleverness: the exhibits you find in each room fill in the backstory of what you’re seeing, making the game completely accessible and comprehensible whether you’ve read the books or not.

Instead of pulling out Legend’s standard third-person adventure engine for one more go-round, Bob Bates opted for a first-person perspective with node-based movement through a contiguous pre-rendered-3D space — i.e., the sturdy Myst model, which Legend had previously used only for Mission Critical. With most of the small company busy with The Wheel of Time, the majority of the graphics and much of the programming were outsourced to Presto Studios, who were just wrapping up their third and final Journeyman Project game and were all too eager for more projects to take on in these declining times for the adventure genre. The end result betrays that the budget was far from expansive, but the sense of constrained austerity winds up serving the fiction rather than detracting from it.

Indeed, the finished game is something of a masterclass in doing more with less. The digitized photographs that drift across the screen from time to time serve just as well or better than full-fledged expository movies might have. Then, too, The Blackstone Chronicles uses its sound stage as effectively as any adventure game I’ve ever played; when I think back on the experience, I remember what I heard better than what I saw. Artfully placed creaks and groans and grinds and drips keep you from ever feeling too comfortable as you roam, as does the soundtrack, all brooding minor chords that swell up from time to time into startling crescendos.

And then there are the disembodied voices you converse with as you explore the asylum, who are sometimes deeply unsettling, sometimes downright heart-wrenching. In the category of the former is an all-American boy who talks like a cast member of Leave It To Beaver, but who has found his true calling as the operator of the asylum’s basement torture chamber, where iron maidens are only the tip of a sadistic iceberg. (“When I was a teenager, I killed a few animals and skinned them. People got upset. They said something was wrong with me. I guess what tipped the balance was when I cut up my best friend and put him in my closet…”) In the category of the latter is a little boy who prefers to wear dresses. Following the theories of the real psychiatrist Henry Cotton that such “disorders” of the mind reside in an organ of the body, Malcolm Metcalf proceeded to dismantle the boy piece by piece, beginning by pulling out his teeth and proceeding on to liver, spleen, kidneys, eyes, ears, and finally limbs. Standing there in a bare little room, surrounded by the remnants of the boy in Mason jars, listening to him tell his story… well, I found it fairly shattering. I’m not scared of werewolves or vampires, but I can be scared by monsters who appear in the guise of ordinary humans.

The fact is that many of the horrors The Blackstone Chronicles unveils really did happen inside mental institutions, and not all that long ago. During Medieval and Renaissance times, convents were the places one used to hide away embarrassing or inconvenient family members — usually women. (When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery,” it isn’t meant as a tribute to her religious devotion.) So-called “lunatic” asylums took over this role during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When in The Blackstone Chronicles you meet the spirit of an unmarried young woman who tells you she is pregnant, you don’t know whether to believe her own words or to believe her official admission record, which says that she is suffering from an “hysterical pregnancy.” You just know that your heart goes out to her.

The puzzles you encounter as you explore the asylum and engage with its inmates and their persecutors aren’t exceptionally memorable in and of themselves, but they do their job of guiding your progress through the drama; in an echo of the books, they’re mostly object-oriented affairs, with most of the objects being intimately connected to the people who once lived here. Every once in a while, Oliver gets tossed into a situation that led to the death of an inmate: he might get locked inside the “heat chamber,” get hooked up to an ECT (“electroconsulsive therapy”) machine, or find himself strapped down underneath a swinging pendulum straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. If you don’t escape in time, you die — but never fear, the game gives you a chance to try again, as many times as you need. These sequences are as minimalist as the rest of the game, doing much with a few still frames and the usual brilliant sound design. And once again, the end result is more unnerving than a hundred blood-drenched videogame zombies.

The Blackstone Chronicles definitely isn’t for everyone; some might find it traumatizing, while others might simply prefer to play something that’s a little bit more cheerful, and that’s perfectly okay. But if it does strike a chord with you, you’ll never forget it. It’s one of only a few games I’ve played in my life that I’m prepared to call haunting — not haunting in a jump-scare sort of way, but in the way that can keep you up at night, wondering what on earth is wrong with us that we can do the things we do to one another.


If anyone had thought that being tied to such a successful series of books would make the game of The Blackstone Chronicles a hit in its own right, they were destined to be disappointed. GT Interactive saw so little commercial potential in Legend’s side project that they didn’t even want to distribute the game. Released in November of 1998 under the auspices of Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Mindscape, it performed only slightly better than Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, offering up no justification whatsoever for Legend to continue to make adventure games even as a sideline to their new direction. The future of the studio founded as the heir to Infocom lay with first-person shooters.

What was there to be said about that? Only that it had been one hell of a transformative decade for Bob and Mike’s most-excellent adventure-game company, as it had been for gaming in general.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, and The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, December 1996, February 1997, September 1997, January 1999, and February 1999; Retro Gamer 180; PC Gamer of December 1995. and May 1996

Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of Star Control 3 and an old GA Source interview with Michel Kripalani of Presto Studios.

I also made extensive use of the materials held in the Legend archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

In addition to the above, much of this article is based on a series of conversations I’ve had with Bob Bates and Mike Verdu over the last ten years or so. My thanks go to both gentlemen for taking the time out of their still busy careers to talk to me.

Where to Get Them: Star Control 3 is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and The Blackstone Chronicles can be downloaded as ready-to-run packages from The Collection Chamber; doing so is not, strictly speaking, legal, but needs must.

 
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Posted by on June 6, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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