Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 16: 1994
Comments Edition

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This eBook was converted on
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Contents

1. Under a Killing Moon

1. Comments

2. Beneath a Steel Sky

1. Comments

3. Superhero League of Hoboken

1. Comments

4. Death Gate

1. Comments

5. Bullfrog after Populous

1. Comments

6. X-COM

1. Comments

7. Transport Tycoon

1. Comments

8. Master of Magic

1. Comments

9. Opening the Gold Box, Part 7: Back to the Roots

1. Comments

10. Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Panzer General

1. Comments

11. Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 2: Colonization

1. Comments

12. Lode Runner

1. Comments

13. The Dream of Flight

1. Comments

14. Microsoft Space Simulator (or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)

1. Comments

15. The Second Coming of Star Wars

1. Comments

16. Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step)

1. Comments

17. Wing Commander III

1. Comments

18. System Shock

1. Comments

19. The Ratings Game, Part 1: A Likely and an Unlikely Suspect

1. Comments

20. The Ratings Game, Part 2: The Hearing

1. Comments

21. The Ratings Game, Part 3: Dueling Standards

1. Comments

22. The Ratings Game, Part 4: E3 and Beyond

1. Comments

23. Bob Stein and Voyager

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24. The Best of Voyager, Part 1

1. Comments

Under a Killing Moon
July 3, 2020

We couldn’t believe one CD could be filled up so quickly.

— Aaron Conners

Bountiful, Utah, is the second city of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Legend has it that its patriarch, a herdsman named Perrigrine Sessions, exclaimed, “Here at last is paradise on earth!” on the day in 1847 when he first looked down upon the lush valley where the city stands today.

Like so many Mormon communities, Bountiful seems frozen in time, or rather out of time, a vision of a bucolic 1950s small-town America that barely ever existed in reality. The city’s newsletters have a weirdly anachronistic tone, regardless of their cover date. An issue from 1993 notes with alarm that a gang (!) has been formed, whilst going on to add a little reluctantly that it doesn’t appear to have committed any actual crimes yet. (“We hope that gang activity can be stopped before it takes a foothold.”) The same issue looks forward to “patriotic Americana” in the city park with “Utah Voices and the 23rd Army Band.” Somewhere in Bountiful, one senses, a middle-aged matron is still shaking her head disapprovingly over Elvis Presley and those gyrating hips of his — “and yet he seems such a nice, well-spoken young man otherwise…”

She was doubtless doing the same in the late 1960s, when a handful of Bountiful kids started to shoot their own movies on the new Kodak film format of Super 8. Chris Jones, Doug Vandegrift, and a collection of assorted siblings, cousins, and friends spoofed the things they were watching at the local cinema and on television: Batman, Tarzan, Mission: Impossible. Judging from the few fragments of their movies that have survived, they were hopelessly square — it’s hard to believe that they’re contemporaneous with the likes of Woodstock and Easy Rider — but also clever and endearingly cheeky. Typical Bountiful art, in other words.

Inspired by these experiments, Vandegrift went off to university to study acting, while Jones, being of a more practical bent, went out for finance. After university, Vandegrift switched from acting for a camera to drawing for one, landing a job with Hanna-Barbera illustrating Saturday-morning cartoons. He parlayed that gig into an impressive career; he won an Emmy Award in 1988 for his work on Muppet Babies. Meanwhile Jones wound up an accountant at an engineering firm in Salt Lake City.

Jones had a friend named Bruce Carver, who in 1982 bought one of the first Commodore 64s ever sold in Utah. He discovered a latent genius in himself as soon as he began to program it, and founded Access Software to publish his work. Jones initially joined the venture, whose offices would move back and forth between Salt Lake City and Bountiful as it grew, as its part-time sales representative and accountant, but he quickly grew fascinated with the creative potential of the new medium his friend was exploring. Thus he sketched out the scenario for a multi-part action game called Beach-Head, which Carver then proceeded to implement in code. Like virtually everything else Jones would ever do on a computer, this first game was inspired by his love of movies — in this case, by rah-rah World War II movies starring John Wayne and similarly lantern-jawed leading men. Thanks to Carver’s programming chops and Jones’s instinct for cinematic drama, Beach-Head became the breakout hit that put Access on the map upon its release in October of 1983. Raid Over Moscow and Beach-Head II, more games in the same style, did almost as well in 1984 and 1985.

After that, however, Bruce Carver stumbled upon the subject matter that would sustain Access for almost two decades. He and his brother Roger Carver made a golf game called Leader Board in 1986, which begot World Class Leader Board the following year, which in turn begot the long-running Links series in 1990. These games were very, very good for Access in general, but something of a mixed blessing for Chris Jones, who was now working full-time for the company, keeping track of all the money they were bringing in. The reality was that he just didn’t have much to contribute creatively to a golf simulation.

So, he decided to get the old gang back together and make another movie instead. Vandegrift had recently returned to Bountiful to take a job as Access’s art director, and was more than up for Jones’s plan. The two had dreams of showing at Sundance as they wrote a script that combined The Maltese Falcon with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jones took the starring role of a private detective born in the wrong time, who channeled not only Humphrey Bogart but also Roy Rogers, what with his penchant for yodeling cowboy tunes. The detective-cum-cowboy’s name was Tex Murphy.

Tex Murphy the yodeling cowboy, as seen in Plan Ten from Outer Space.

But the film went disastrously wrong. All Sundance ambitions went out the window when someone stole the gang’s brand-new 16-millimeter camera, forcing them to switch back to Super 8, then to videotape because, hey, film gets expensive. Most of the soundtrack got lost, forcing everyone to re-dub their lines. The project devolved into Plan Ten from Outer Space, a ludicrous farce whose only obvious advantage over the awful Ed Wood film it purports to spoof is the fact that it knows how terrible it is. And yet it’s also really, genuinely funny, even when it’s abundantly clear that its creators have no idea what they’re doing. It’s smart in its amateurishness, bursting with a joie de vivre that just can’t be faked. In this, it has much in common with what came later from many of the same creators.

Disappointed to have made a film that could only be shown to family and friends, however much fun he’d had with it, Jones proposed adapting it into a computer game built out of spare parts that happened to be lying around the Access offices. Bruce Carver had been blending real-world photography with computer graphics since making the first Leader Board a couple of years before; for that game and its sequel, he had captured Roger Carver swinging a golf club on videotape and imported selected frames using primitive digitization technology, all in order to give a smooth, realistic depiction of the subject. And Access also had a vaguely Starglider-like outer-space shoot-em-up called Echelon on the shelf, which Bruce Carver had worked very hard on but which had given a poor return on his investment; the game had never sold very well. Now, he agreed to let Jones make an adventure game relying heavily on digitized images, its puzzle-solving scenes glued together by a flight-simulator game that re-purposed some of the old Echelon code. It would move Tex Murphy into the dystopian world of the year 2033, largely dropping his Roy Rogers persona but doubling down on Humphrey Bogart. Cheerfully appropriating the name of a classic Martin Scorsese film without giving it a second thought, Jones dubbed the game Mean Streets.

Today Jones regards Mean Streets, like Plan Ten from Outer Space, as non-canonical, a piece of Tex Murphy juvenilia, and that’s probably a fair assessment. But, as with the movie, auguries of what came later are all over this work. Mean Streets mixes wildly disparate interfaces and modes of play with giddy abandon: the flight simulator you use to fly Tex’s speeder from place to place, the side-scrolling shoot-em-up you get dumped into when negotiations go south, the adventure game of searching locations for clues, the menu-driven conversations with some two dozen witnesses and suspects in the crime you’re trying to solve. It stitches this crazy quilt together using cutting-edge technical tricks from its time: all of the characters you meet are presented as 256-color digitized photographs — Jones once again plays Tex — and snippets of digitized speech pop up here and there, thanks to another of Bruce Carver’s brilliant innovations, a technology called Real Sound that let a game play back just what the name would imply on an MS-DOS computer without an add-on sound card.

Such an overweening focus on trendy gimmicks seldom yields a classic game; no surprise, then, that Mean Streets doesn’t quite earn that label. And yet Jones, working with Doug Vandegrift as art director, managed to bring it closer to that status than one might expect, thanks to yet another quality that would show up again in the future: a thoroughgoing willingness among the developers to put themselves in the player’s shoes, to try to play with her rather than against her. In Mean Streets, you can fly your speeder manually everywhere if that’s what you enjoy, or you can turn on the autopilot and zip to your destination; you can screw around in the desert outside of town shooting bounty hunters all day, or you can diligently pursue the resolution of the mystery with the help of the notepad thoughtfully included in the box. Even when it comes to the gimmicks, one never gets the impression the developers were thinking, “Including real pictures in our game will surely make us market leaders and sell a million copies!” No, it’s rather, “Gee, real pictures… in a game! How cool is that? Let’s do it!”

The “cast” of Mean Streets consisted of colleagues and friends, along with a smattering of fashion models recruited from a local agency. This character, whose name is Sylvia Linsky, would later show up in Under a Killing Moon as Tex Murphy’s ex-wife. (The course of love is never straight and true…) Even these few lines of text are enough to demonstrate the awkward writing that dogged these early games, which would be remedied only by the arrival of Aaron Conners on the scene. “If only I knew how she felt for me…” About me, maybe?

Released in late 1989, Mean Streets sold well enough to justify continuing with adventure games as a sideline to Access’s main business of golf simulations. In fact, Jones, Vandegrift and their colleagues made no fewer than three more games in the same general style as Mean Streets, minus only the flight simulator and shoot-em-up sequences, which most players of the first game had agreed were a bridge too far. The games in question were called Countdown, Martian Memorandum, and Amazon: Guardians of Eden, of which trio only the middle entry starred Tex Murphy. Then, the era of juvenilia ended as Jones and company took things to another level entirely.

Access was flying higher than ever at the time, but the reasons for their success still had much more to do with their golf games than their adventure games. In 1992, the year that Chris Jones made Amazon, Bruce Carver made Links 386 Pro, the first major game of any stripe to require a high-resolution “Super VGA” graphics card. It became a smashing hit, selling to many gamers who couldn’t care less about the sport of golf but just wanted to take in the mouth-watering details of the game’s meticulously recreated real-world courses. With Access thus flusher than ever with cash, Jones sought and won permission to, as he put it, “make the Links 386 of adventure games,” employing not only the new technology of SVGA but also CD-ROM. It was a tremendous gamble — the industry had been waiting in vain for CD-ROM to break through for literally years already — but the money flowing in from Links put Access in a position where they could afford to take such risks.

Although Doug Vandegrift had provided welcome assistance, all of Access’s adventure games to date had been Chris Jones’s babies at bottom, a fact that was perhaps not completely to their benefit. Jones was many things, but he wasn’t a terribly accomplished writer, and it often showed. Luckily, Access had recently hired as a technical writer a fellow named Aaron Conners, holder of a degree in English literature from the University of Utah. He’d become chummy with Jones when he was assigned to write hints for Amazon. Now, Jones asked him to write a full-length script for a third Tex Murphy game that would pull out all the stops.

It was the best move he ever made; Conners brought a whole new dimension to the character, adding not just more layers of humor but a degree of pathos as well. Conners:

He’s a man out of time, which works well because we can put him in an environment that none of us are familiar with, and he doesn’t seem to be familiar with it either. So, we can relate to him.

At the same time, he’s got the sensibilities of the 1940s, which is nostalgic to us. I think it ties in really well together, but it’s inherently humorous because he’s constantly out of place, no matter where he goes. He’s a [private detective], and he doesn’t really have any peers [in the future]. When he goes to the people who hire him, they’re generally higher class and think he’s scum. And yet he thinks that everyone at his level or lower is scum.

Tex’s basic attitude reminds me of the George Carlin line: “When you’re out driving, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” That’s kind of the way Tex is. He doesn’t seem to fit in with anyone. Tex has an inherent dislike of people who are born privileged. So he just has to poke them all the time. That’s how I see Tex’s character, fueled by this natural irreverence.

In November of 1992, three months after being given the assignment, Conners handed Jones the story for Under a Killing Moon, then stepped up to join him as co-designer. The two have been professionally inseparable ever since.

The story takes place in the San Francisco of 2042, ten years after Mean Streets. The people of the city, who live out their lives in a Blade Runner-esque nocturnal setting, have been segregated into “norms” who don’t evince radiation-induced mutations and “mutes” who do. Tex himself is a norm, but he feels more comfortable among the mutes who inhabit the ghettos of the city. In the course of the game, his investigation of a petty robbery at a local pawnshop puts him on the trail of a worldwide eugenicist conspiracy to cleanse the earth of mutants and re-constitute the human race from pure stock.

Doug Vandegrift crafted the look of the setting, blending film noir with science fiction in a way whose only obvious antecedents were his and Jones’s own earlier works and the aforementioned Blade Runner. Jones:

The model was old-style, rundown, down and out, seedy, making it feel like the [Great] Depression. In Tex’s neighborhood it could be 1938. Dirty, dark alleys and streets, wrecked buildings, that post-apocalypse feel. Then in the new city, Tex moves through beautiful condominiums and high-tech office complexes and facilities.

Like the Access adventure games that had come before it, Under a Killing Moon would knit together all of the trendiest new techniques in game development. But, in a telling sign of the changing times, the nature of those techniques was now such that this game would necessarily be ambitious — and expensive — on an almost unprecedented scale. At its core, it would be built around two seemingly wildly disparate approaches: a 3D-rendered virtual reality and full-motion video starring real actors.

At the time that Under a Killing Moon was first being conceived, the potential for 3D rendering outside the context of vehicular simulations was best demonstrated by two games with polar-opposite personalities: Blue Sky Productions’s CRPG Ultima Underworld and id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. The former was by far the more complete implementation of a 3D environment, but paid the price for it by running rather slowly even on machines that met its steep system requirements. Wolfenstein 3D, on the other hand, was much more limited — it was more of an illusion of a 3D environment than the real thing — but it ran like blazes on almost any computer made during the last five years. Ultima Underworld let you do all sorts of things in its world, from swimming to flying to casting spells; Wolfenstein 3D let you run through suspiciously uniform corridors and shoot Nazis. As the decade progressed, all games that employed 3D rendering would sort themselves on a continuum between these two archetypes.

Under a Killing Moon boasted some of the most impressive 3D environments yet seen on a computer. This part of the game was a technological marvel in its own right.

Jones and Conners, for their part, were interested in using 3D not as a test of reflexes but to bring their world to life in a way that third-person graphic adventures, including Access’s own earlier ones, did not. Although Tex Murphy must sometimes use stealth to hide from enemies in the 3D sequences, he never shoots anyone at all within them. Even all these years later, Under a Killing Moon and its eventual sequels still stand out as unusual, noble efforts to use the potential of 3D in the service of something other than what the politicians would soon be labeling “murder simulators.” Jones:

When we sat down to create this experience, we asked ourselves, “If I’m a private investigator, what do I want to do?” Hey, I want to look in drawers! I want to crawl around, look at footprints on the floor, pull things out and examine them! And I want to do that stuff myself. I want to control the action. I don’t want some mouse click to take me on a path over there. Give me all the freedom that you can, then let me interact with that environment.

In talking about “some mouse click to take me on a path over there,” Jones is implicitly comparing his game to The 7th Guest, the industry’s first big CD-ROM-exclusive hit, which appeared in March of 1993 and paved the way for Under a Killing Moon by unleashing at last the long-anticipated wave of CD-ROM uptake among consumers. And indeed, at a casual glance The 7th Guest seems like a very similar game to Access’s effort: it too blends 3D environments with full-motion-video clips of real actors, and it too is among the earliest games to require an SVGA graphics card.

Look closer, however, and the differences become stark. The 7th Guest uses a node-based movement system; thus Jones’s disparaging reference above. Your movements from node to node inside the haunted mansion where it takes place are presented via pre-rendered 3D animations. Under a Killing Moon, on the other hand, does its rendering on the fly, giving you a glorious free-scrolling environment to roam as you will — crouching, bending, looking on top of things and under things and inside things. It’s an extraordinary achievement, especially given that it’s almost entirely the work of a single programmer, a longtime Access stalwart named Bruce Johnson. In order to get the speed he needed from the hardware available at the time, he had to write it in pure assembly language — an approach which even as storied a programmer as id’s John Carmack had abandoned by that point as just too much trouble. Access Software is seldom mentioned as a 3D pioneer on the level of Looking Glass Technologies (née Blue Sky Productions) and id Software, but perhaps that’s unjust. Their reputation in this field may have been ironically undermined by their other ambitions — for, instead of being content merely to redefine the state of the art in 3D environments, Jones and Conners used 3D as just one component in their game.

The other side of the equation is, as mentioned, full-motion video, which is used for cut scenes that advance the story along and for your menu-driven conversations with others. Like virtually all such productions from the 1990s, Under a Killing Moon leaves much to be desired by the cineastes among us. Even the most experienced professional actors would surely have struggled to deliver good, natural-feeling performances when forced to ply their trade in front of a plain blue screen, waving around clumsy props that would later be painted over by Access’s artists, being directed by Jones and Conners themselves, who, clever and creative though they were, had never been to film school. But then, much of the cast of Under a Killing Moon are not professional actors, and, believe me, it shows.

A conversation with Beek Nariz, who was played by Doug Vandegrift. He “nose” a lot about goings-on in the criminal underworld, and what he doesn’t know he can sniff out.

Whether that quality of rank amateurishness is ultimately to the game’s detriment, however, is a different question. Under a Killing Moon’s secret sauce, which makes it work even where it really ought not to, is its sheer likability. Chris Jones deadpans his way through the role of Tex in a fashion that will never win him any acting awards, but it does win the viewer’s sympathy. The same applies to virtually every other amateur who appears onscreen, often in ludicrous homemade prosthesis and makeup appropriate for their mutant personae. Whether childhood friends of Jones and Vandegrift or people who just happened to work at Access, they’re clearly having a great deal of fun with their roles, and they clearly want us to have fun watching too.

Deep into production, Jones learned during a chance conversation with his brother that the latter knew a Hollywood talent agent who was in Salt Lake City casting for a movie. Doug Vandegrift:

She said, “If you guys want to hire Hollywood actors, I can arrange that.” But we really didn’t take it seriously until she called up one day and said, “I’ve got Margot Kidder. She’s got to go to the airport in three hours, but right now she’s sitting in Salt Lake City doing nothing. If you’d like for her to come, you can have her for three hours.” Aaron quickly wrote something, she showed up, and had great fun doing it.

We thought, well, if we can get her, maybe we can get somebody else. Before we knew it, Brian Keith came in for a day.

In an amusing reminder of Access’s essential Mormon-ness, Brian Keith, whose gruff persona in television shows like Hardcastle and McCormick apparently wasn’t affected, became in Aaron Conners’s recollection the first person ever to “drop an F-bomb” in the office. This must mark some sort of record; normally the F-bombs flow like soda inside a games studio…

Russell Means, a supporting player in the recent movie The Last of the Mohicans, also joined the cast. These “stars” who came on such short notice and left just as quickly stand out from the amateur thespians considerably less than one might expect. Like so many Hollywood actors who slummed it in CD-ROM during the heyday of the full-motion-video craze, they used Under a Killing Moon as an opportunity to chew up some scenery and have a little fun playing out-sized versions of the roles for which they were best known. “I don’t think she was really quite sure of what we were doing,” says Chris Jones about Margot Kidder. “Her reference point was Nintendo and Sega.”

Undoubtedly Access’s biggest coup was the casting of James Earl Jones, the iconic voice of Darth Vader himself, as narrator. It was really on a lark that they even rang up his agent — and sure enough, the initial response was, to say the least, not positive: “No way, no way will we do this, no way.” In the end, though, James Earl Jones did agree to do the job, and for a fraction of his normal rate at that, because his son had played and loved Access’s earlier adventure games and had been following the progress on this one closely: “Dad, you’ve got to do this!” Consider: LucasArts had just started making Star Wars games at the time, and yet with all their connections were forced to settle for a soundalike in the role of their Darth Vader. But here he was, performing for Access. Under a Killing Moon truly was a charmed project.

But if its makers were lucky, they earned their luck by doing everything they could to make sure that everyone who played it got more fun than frustration out of the experience. For example, it’s impossible to lock yourself out of victory without knowing it. Another telling sign that this game is on its player’s side is its interactive hint system, which you’re free to use as much or as little as you want. There’s even an “easy play” mode that lets you skip the puzzles completely and just explore the story. The designers plainly aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea — “you’ll enjoy a new level of entertainment” if you only use easy mode to “become familiar with the controls” and then move on to the real thing, says the manual — but, hey, if you really want to play that way, that too ought to be your right.

The travel interface, to which locations are added as time goes on and you learn about them. Under a Killing Moon uses plot time instead of clock time: time advances only in response to you making progress in your investigations. This technique, which had been pioneered by Infocom in Ballyhoo and used to good effect in the first Gabriel Knight adventure in the year before this game was released, was by this point becoming a staple of the adventure genre. And small wonder: it allows for a dynamic, unfolding plot without letting said plot run away without the player. What it sacrifices in realism, in other words, it recoups in practicality and mercy.

Yet another innovation for the player’s sake — perhaps the most enduring of all — is found in the conversation system. Menu-based conversations had been a staple of graphic adventures for quite some time, but Jones and Conners noted how awkward it felt to click on a line of dialog for Tex and then hear him parrot the very same line back. Aaron Conners:

Almost every game at the time would show the full line of dialog. We said, “This is so tedious.” A lot of the wordy games, including some of the best ones, like Monkey Island — fantastic, wonderful humor… but even with that I got tired of reading it and then hearing it. I had to come up with some other way to do it.

So, they implemented a mood-based conversation menu: instead of seeing exactly what Tex will say, you see options like (in the case of a potential love interest) “subtle innuendo,” “lovesick puppy,” and “charmingly curious.” This way, you still feel like you’re directing the course of the conversation, but some element of surprise is preserved. This system went on to influence no less a gaming blockbuster than the Mass Effect franchise, whose development teams included some avowed fans of the Tex Murphy games.

There’s an honesty about Under a Killing Moon, a commitment to its plot and premise that is lacking from most contemporary interactive movies. Again, a comparison to The 7th Guest is unavoidable. The earlier game is the poster child for puzzles that exist purely to give the player something to do, that have no connection whatsoever to a game’s fiction. But, in the words of Chris Jones, “there are no 7th Guest-type things” in Under a Killing Moon: “You know, ‘Here’s a puzzle to solve so you can move to the next room. Move these little marbles around here or whatever. None of that. In Under a Killing Moon, everything is interrelated.” The things you do in the game are mostly the things that a real private detective might be expected to do in order to solve a crime: interviewing people, searching premises for clues, piecing together the evidence to come another step toward the solution. Even those that are thoroughly goofy and would certainly never appear in a detective movie still bear directly on the case you’re trying to solve. And even those puzzles that might initially seem like roadblocks for the sake of roadblocks — like Tex’s urgent need for a new fax machine to replace his broken one — turn out to be useful as background, in this case by establishing just how down and out our hero actually is. At the time of its release, Under a Killing Moon was simply the best, most honest interactive implementation of a mystery — arguably the fictional genre most naturally amenable to becoming an adventure game — to appear since The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

By the time it was released just in time for the Christmas of 1994, Under a Killing Moon had taken two years and some $2 million to create, making it one of the two most expensive computer games ever made to that point. It was also one of the two biggest games yet made in terms of sheer number of bits: it grew from one CD to two to three to four over the course of its development. In both departments, it was equaled only by the near-simultaneously released Wing Commander III from Origin Systems, another, very different take on the full-motion-video interactive movie. How strange to think that just a year or two earlier developers had been fretting over how they would ever manage to fill up a single CD! Not content with blowing past the one-gigabyte barrier in 1994, these two games had already exceeded two gigabytes in size. It was as frenzied a period of technological change as gaming has ever known.

Under a Killing Moon was greeted with a brutal review in Computer Gaming World, courtesy of Charles Ardai, that magazine’s resident curmudgeon as well as my favorite gaming scribe of the 1990s. His take-down is odd not least because he had previously given Countdown and Martian Memorandum fairly glowing reviews. Nevertheless, his review of Under a Killing Moon makes some very valid points, so much so that I want to quote from it here as the flip-side to my positive take on the game.

With the plot about the cult and the crusade for genetic purity, [the developers] appear to be trying to tell a serious story, with serious threats and grim implications. Yet every time the story threatens to go in an interesting direction, they cut it off at the knees by throwing in lame, inappropriate jokes and cheap slapstick, such as scenes that involve Tex falling over in his chair or walking into walls or getting captured by villains who do Three Stooges-style eye-poking shtick.

This undisciplined willingness to sacrifice the story in order to stick gags in where they don’t belong is typical of amateur writers, and it is deeply unsatisfying. Jones and Conners seem to be hoping that they can make a single game be both a serious thriller and a goofy comedy, both Chinatown and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and it just doesn’t work.

Ardai isn’t precisely wrong about any of this; the game’s tone really is all over the map, in that way all too typical of adventure-game writers — and, yes, amateur writers of all stripes — who lack the courage of their convictions, and seek to head off criticism of their productions’ manifest weaknesses by suddenly playing them for laughs. Normally, this sort of thing irritates me as badly as it does Ardai.

In this case, however, it doesn’t; I recognize the game’s disjointedness, not only in terms of its fiction but in the disparate gallery of techniques and interfaces it uses to present its story, but I’m just not that bothered by it. For me, Under a Killing Moon is a shaggy beast for sure, but also a thoroughly lovable one. When I ask myself why this should be, I find myself tempted to fall back on those vague platitudes that are the hallmark of the amateur critic: that the game has “soul”; that it is, God help us, “greater than the sum of its parts.”

Since that will obviously never do, let me note that it has at least three saving graces. One is a certain cultural sophistication which peeks through the game’s pastiche, telling us that its creators were a bit older than the norm and had a taste for things beyond Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars: the street where Tex Murphy lives is called Chandler Avenue after the beloved crime novelist; the central Mcguffin of the game is a bird statuette, a nod to The Maltese Falcon. Another is its bold spirit of innovation, its willingness to try not just one new thing but a whole pile of them, despite working in the terminally conservative ludic genre of the adventure game, which usually departs from the tried and true only with the utmost reluctance. And a third — probably the most important of all — is one that I’ve already mentioned: its exuberant likability. Just being nice — being the kind of person that other people enjoy being around — will get you a surprisingly long way in life. If Under a Killing Moon is any evidence, the same is true in games.

Here, then, is the ultimate difference maker between Under a Killing Moon and a game like The 7th Guest: the former is generous to its player while the latter is stingy. Although Under a Killing Moon gleefully employs every piece of trendy technology its developers can get their hands on, it’s all done for the purpose of making a fun game of the sort that said developers themselves would like to play; it’s not done merely to make a statement about the alleged multimedia zeitgeist, much less to rake in beaucoups of cash. The money, one senses, was always secondary when it came to Tex Murphy. (Why else invest millions into risky interactive movies at all instead of wallowing contently in the ocean of guaranteed profit from the Links franchise?)

There’s an open-hearted joy about Under a Killing Moon that makes up for a multitude of acting and even writing sins. It’s still bursting with that excitement which Jones and Vandegrift felt as kids — “We’re making a movie!” It’s just that now it’s an interactive movie. Under a Killing Moon is a wonderful tonic in a cynical world. If that sounds odd, given that the game takes place in such a dystopian setting, it serves only to point out how special its personality really is. The game tells us that the best parts of us, the things we sometimes call our basic humanity, will always survive. Chris Jones:

Okay, this world’s worn-out and ugly and partially destroyed, but people are people. People still have their sense of humor. People still have an outlook they can hang onto. Even if the world’s going to hell, it’s the only world they’ve got. To be dragged down in the mud attitude-wise or [imagine] things never improving… well, maybe they will never improve, but there’s got to be some hope that they will.

It strikes me that the most under-discussed aspect of Under a Killing Moon, as well as quite possibly our key to understanding all this, is the Mormon community from which it sprang. There are all sorts of reasons for the silence on the subject, starting with many would-be game historians’ apparent belief that individual games can be understood without taking account of the real-world beliefs and biases that went into them, passing through the way that the people who made this particular game studiously avoid the subject, ending with how loaded any discussion at all of religion has become in our societies. Not everyone who worked on Under a Killing Moon was Mormon — even a community like Bountiful is “only” 75 percent Mormon, with a substantial Catholic minority among its other believers and non-believers — and the game never, ever proselytizes; it wants to entertain you, not convert you. Nevertheless, it has a distinct Mormon sensibility, and is all the better for it.

There is, I think, a tendency among many non-believers who lack experience with religious communities to imagine them as unduly grim milieus, where everyone marches in lockstep as Soldiers of God, where there is no room for warmth or humor or whimsy, no space for secular culture of any stripe. But, as Under a Killing Moon amply demonstrates, that’s not always or even usually the case at all.

Of course, like any dogmatic religion, Mormonism comes complete with a set of Lines That Shall Not Be Crossed, whose nature I won’t belabor here. Yet it’s more forward-looking than many religions, with surprisingly little aversion to modernity within its strict lines of demarcation. Based on my own limited experience, this orientation translates into a genuine desire to see the faithful live up to their individual talents here in the world. You can see this quality manifested in Under a Killing Moon, along with much else that will strike a chord of recognition with anyone who has ever lived among or around Mormons. I recently discussed the subject with Jeff Roberts of RAD Game Tools, a longtime friend of this site who did some contract work on the game’s video-compression system:

Yeah, I joke about how LDS the humor seems to me. It’s super chaste, awkward humor. Very dad-joke humor. I grew up in Utah as a non-Mormon, so I sense that feeling immediately (Book of Mormon nails that perfectly). But yeah, any clips of Access games immediately trigger a “whoa…” in me to this day. They did a “comical” golf game a few years later that really pegs the Mormon meter for me: “Extreme” something… yikes, so bad.

I remember a funny story about Bruce [Johnson] being a henchman that has to grab a girl that was being abducted, but Bruce was embarrassed and it kept filming badly, which led to the actor playing the girl finally just saying, “Look, can you just grab me, so I can go home?”

Tex looks very uncomfortable in this situation…

Under a Killing Moon is the videogame equivalent of Mitt Romney, the whitest man in the world, marching gawkily along with a Black Lives Matter protest, just because, gosh darn it — and Mitt Romney would actually say, “Gosh, darn it,” in 2020 — it’s the right thing to do. As far as the game is concerned, the Right Thing is to try its own earnest, gawky best to give its players the best time ever.

Fortunately for Access, most gamers hewed more to my verdict on Under a Killing Moon than to Charles Ardai’s. In spite of a coveted segment on the television show Entertainment Tonight, the game didn’t become a breakaway mainstream icon of the early CD-ROM era like The 7th Guest or Myst. But it did do well among the slowly expanding audience of core gamers, enough to earn back its development budget and justify another Tex Murphy game. So, one of the most likable series in the history of adventure gaming got to continue on its goofy way, and thus will be making another appearance as part of these histories before all is said and done. In the meantime, give the game a shot if you haven’t already. You might be surprised at how much wholesome fun a post-apocalyptic dystopia can be.

(Sources: the book Under a Killing Moon: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Computer Gaming World of January 1990, January 1991, January 1992, August 1994, and January 1995; Electronic Entertainment of November 1994 and January 1995; Commodore Magazine of July 1987 and August 1987; Provo Daily Herald of January 25 1989, August 1 1990, August 21 1990, June 23 1992, September 19 1993, and October 8 1994; various Bountiful city newsletters. Video sources include the original film of Plan Ten from Outer Space, with commentary from the makers; the documentary The Making of Tex Murphy; and Chris Jones, Aaron Conners, and Mat Van Rhoon on the Back Seat Designers podcast. And I owe a huge thank you to Jeff Roberts for sharing his impressions of working with Access Software.

Under a Killing Moon is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.)

Comments
29 Responses

- Phil Strahl

July 3, 2020 at 3:50 pm

What a lovely coincidence; I just finished the game the other day. Very much looking forward to the article ♥

- Andrew Pam

July 3, 2020 at 4:10 pm

Great installment! “the case you’re trying to solving” should be “the case you’re trying to solve”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 3, 2020 at 6:48 pm

Thanks!

- LeeH

July 3, 2020 at 4:22 pm

> And Access also had a vaguely Starglider-like outer-space shoot-em-up called Echelon on the shelf…

I remember that game—my dad picked it up from the local Babbage’s. The game was downright inscrutable. I was probably 10 or 11 and I just remember a lot of flying around blasting towers and beaming up artifacts, mixed in with a lot of crashing and dying.

- Aula

July 3, 2020 at 5:48 pm

“But, as with the movie, auguries of what came later all over this work.”

There seems to be something missing from this sentence.

- Jimmy Maher

July 3, 2020 at 6:50 pm

Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

July 3, 2020 at 8:41 pm

Martian Memorandum is truly a terrible game. I understand how you can write a negative review of Under a Killing Moon; I’m baffled how you could write a positive review of Martian Memorandum.

- Emily Bowman

July 4, 2020 at 9:21 am

Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum are very much historical artifacts: Things you might enjoy reading about, looking at, and touching, but would never keep in your kitchen to use regularly. I think I gave up on Mean Streets after two hours of not getting far, and MM even earlier. Probably watch a let’s play at some point just to see what I’m missing.

- dsparil

July 5, 2020 at 12:39 pm

Mean Streets is a legitimately fun and feels much more like an actual investigation than basically any other adventure game. It’s totally driven by following the leads you get rather than being directly plot driven. Even the mildly pointless flight and combat portions add a bit to the experience by adding some extra variety since flight has an autopilot, and combat is always short and easy. The adventure portions are almost always single screen, there’s only two situations where you need an item from elsewhere and both are obvious, and the interface eliminates pixel hunting. It isn’t perfect, but there’s a lot of ambition.

Martian Memorandum is just a standard point and click adventure and a terrible one at that. The puzzles in general are not good. For example, it has a precursor to Gabriel Knight 3’s awful mustache puzzle that is even worse. It’s divided between Earth and Mars which creates issues like keywords and locations that are useless on Mars never getting removed from the dialogue or travel menus! The split ends up creating what amounts to two smaller games mushed together with neither being particularly interesting or developed. It’s just a huge step down all around.

- Brian Bagnall

July 7, 2020 at 4:26 am

Thanks, I played Mean Streets back in the day and loved it. It was a surprise to find out that it had a honest to goodness adventure game in there, all on the good old c64. However I skipped Martian Memorandum and it sounds like it’s not worth revisiting.

- Marco

July 3, 2020 at 9:10 pm

Great article, thanks. Finally we’re getting into the prime era of graphical adventure games!

I’m a big fan of Tex Murphy though was unaware of the Mormon dimension, which was really interesting to read about. I totally agree though that the series exhibits a kind of chaste joy: they are obviously games produced by people who love elaborate make-believe for its own sake.

One aspect of UAKM (and its successors) I particularly like is that it has a proper first act. You spend quite a long time exploring Tex’s home and Chandler Avenue, learning a lot about the character, before he crosses the threshold into adventure.

Regarding the acting, my favourite of the series is actually the often underrated Overseer: in part because they managed to land a seriously good actor in Michael York, and he put the effort in to give them a serious performance.

Just to be super-pedantic, my understanding is that Tex’s San Francisco is nocturnal – because radiation levels are too high during the day – rather than perpetual night. (I’ve never seen Blade Runner, which meant I didn’t get far with the Blade Runner game, but understand that isn’t perpetual night either, just a lot of the scenes were set then for aesthetic reasons.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 3, 2020 at 9:26 pm

Slight edit made. Thanks!

- Mikko

July 4, 2020 at 3:11 am

One perhaps interesting thing about Raid over Moscow: a generally positive review of the game in a Finnish magazine caused a public complaint from the Soviet Union about American “space war propaganda”, and a member of the Finnish parliament even raised the question whether or not the game should be banned.

Naturally, after that kind of publicity, the game hit the top of the sales charts in Finland for several months in 1985.

Meanwhile, I never realized that the golf games were made by the same people – Leaderboard was one of those games that I used to play regularly with my dad as a kid, along with the Epyx “Games” games.

- Jimmy Maher

July 4, 2020 at 6:08 am

Yes, I discussed that episode briefly in my first article on Access, which I published quite some years ago now. I don’t think there were really any bad intentions behind Raid Over Moscow, just a degree of the cultural insensitivity and insular tunnel vision that Americans have unfortunately become a bit famous for.

I had great fun as well with the original minimalist Commodore 64 Leader Board, as I mentioned in another of those old articles. But I never was able to have the same sort of fun with the likes of Links. The more photorealistic and simulation-oriented Access’s golf games got, the less fun they seemed somehow… for me, anyway.

- dsparil

July 4, 2020 at 8:56 am

The forward to the novelization of Under a Killing Moon (which comes with the GOG release) mentions that the original script was way too long and had to be cut down significantly. The portion that gives the game its title was even removed!

UaKM can be literally too cartoonish at time—someone runs through a wall and leaves a silhouette behind near the beginning—but I do agree that it’s very amiable in general. Beek Nariz having a comment on almost everyone’s nose is just too funny. It’s certainly heaps better than Martian Memorandum which I think is generally awful for a variety of reasons. Pandora Directive finds a better balance with the tone but has some issues. Mean Streets is a little underrated, but UaKM is certainly the best out of the DOS games.

- Carl Grace

July 4, 2020 at 4:04 pm

We are well beyond the point I stopped playing computer games but I still love the blog.

My comment is that you don’t use the preposition “of” with “beaucoups” in English.

- Jimmy Maher

July 4, 2020 at 7:46 pm

I don’t know… it’s a highly idiomatic expression, but I’ve always heard it with the “of.” I’m thinking, for example, of the old Ringo Starr album Beaucoups of Blues. (As my wife always says, most things ultimately come down to either the Beatles or Shakespeare for me…)

- Lisa H.

July 4, 2020 at 8:16 pm

I’ve never heard it with “of”. Maybe it’s an American vs British usage thing?

- J.

July 6, 2020 at 11:54 am

Just riffing out loud about words as we are, I’ve heard “Beaucoup de ” (well of course I have, that’s just that actual French language), and “Beaucoup “. So “Beaucoup of” certainly fits, simply translating “de”, although if you’re going to throw in some French, “Beaucoup de” sures feels like the more classy and elegant option.

- Laertes

July 4, 2020 at 7:22 pm

Nariz is spanish for nose, so nice name there.

- Wolfeye M.

July 5, 2020 at 3:07 am

Huh. I don’t play Adventure games, because I don’t like puzzles. I play games to have fun and relax, not get frustrated and rack my brain. My brain just doesn’t work that way. But, “easy play” mode which would allow me to play for the story, and skip the puzzles, makes this game interesting.

I like the future noir aesthetic and playing as a private investigator.

I might just check this one out.

Also, I want to say thanks for continuing your blog after the Doom article. I’ve really enjoyed reading about the history of games, even ones I never heard of before your blog.

- Brian Bagnall

July 7, 2020 at 4:43 am

Thanks for another great article. You really understood what made this game such a standout at the time. When I was looking at the box cover back then I assumed the screen shots were pre-rendered. What a surprise when I got it home and was allowed to fully explore those beautiful 3D environments! It seemed like the fulfillment of years of steady improvements stretching back to the early eighties. I was absolutely glued to my PC exploring every inch of every environment. It was a shame it wasn’t as big a hit as other games of the time but I guess most people were looking for action. In fact it seemed like most people were more impressed with the full motion video than the actual game engine. You really did a worthy analysis of this game. Terrific as usual, thanks again!

BTW Tex Murphy: Poisoned Pawn is set to be released one of these days. Hopefully we get a return to being able to pilot a speeder through the city, just like in Mean Streets but without 5 FPS wire-frame graphics.

- Ricky Derocher

July 7, 2020 at 9:03 pm

The plot for Under a Killing Moon is largely ripping off the James Bond film Moonraker – ie there’s a group that wants genetic purity so it’s going to infuse the atmosphere with deadly agents in order to kill off the impure on the planet, In the meantime, the pure will hang around in their space station waiting for the earth to become re-habitable and restart humanity. The game’s still great however, but no one seems to ever mention this.

- TomR

July 19, 2020 at 10:29 pm

There’s a sequel out now. Adventure Gamers just reviewed it:

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/beyond-a-steel-sky

- Dave Thompsen

August 8, 2020 at 2:03 am

I think you’re confusing Under a Killing Moon with Beneath a Steel Sky. Two wildly different games.

- Ted

July 30, 2020 at 2:12 am

I think you captured the idiosyncratic Mormon tone well, Romney is an apt comparison. There’s an optimistic squareness combined with awkwardness when topics are discussed. Salt Lake City is the least affected by this with a fairly even split of Mormons and nons.

- Jon Clark

August 8, 2020 at 4:48 am

I did all the lighting and sound for these games. The day Brian Keith was shooting, we had to wait for someone from the press to arrive. Mr Keith sat in my office with Doug and me and told great stories from his life… did you know he was in the Marines in the So Pacific during WWII?
The actors would come in not too sure about what they’d gotten into, then not want to leave when we were done shooting.
Great memories.

Beneath a Steel Sky
July 17, 2020

I would rather see a personal vision onscreen than filmed live-action. I have an idea that with CD technology there are going to be a lot of little-known actors photographed and appearing on our screens. I think if you have a graphic artist involved, you get something even better than reality.

— Dave Gibbons

There’s no reason why hundreds of people in California should know the future any better than ten people based in Yorkshire.

— Charles Cecil

Charles Cecil

Charles Cecil was a part of the British adventure-games scene from the beginning. Born in 1962, he began studying engineering at Manchester University in 1980. There he became friends with a fellow student named Richard Turner, who had just co-founded Artic Computing, one of the very first suppliers of software for the Sinclair ZX80, Britain’s very first mass-market personal computer. Although he was not and never would become a programmer, Cecil got pulled into other aspects of the venture, such as drawing what he describes today as “the shittiest logo.”

Chris Thornton, Richard Turner’s partner in Artic, owned an imported Radio Shack TRS-80; this allowed the group of friends to keep tabs on the American microcomputing scene, which had a few years’ head start on the British. Taking note of the success that Scott Adams was having with his text adventures in the United States, Artic developed an engine for similar games on Sinclair machines. In June of 1981, Turner and Thornton’s Adventure A: Planet of Death became the first home-grown adventure game ever to be sold in Britain.

As the name of that first game would imply, Artic intended from the beginning to make a whole line of text adventures, just as Scott Adams had done. “You like telling stories,” Turner said to Cecil. “Why don’t you write one?” Thus Cecil designed Adventure B: Inca Curse, followed by several more text adventures, all primitive enough — or, if you like, minimalist enough — to fit into a computer with just 16 K of memory. A game designer had been born, alongside a cottage industry of similarly ramshackle semi-professional text adventures that would persist for the better part of two decades. (Artic’s games were particularly noted for their atrocious spelling…)

Cecil continued to design games and do various other odd jobs for Artic for several years, but by the middle of the decade the company’s homespun products were finding the going tough in what had now become a crowded and hyper-competitive British software market. In 1985, Cecil jumped from the sinking ship to found his own Paragon Programming, which specialized in porting American games to European platforms. Two years later, he parlayed that into a short-lived gig as development manager for US Gold, then a longer-lived one in the same role for Activision’s European subsidiary.

But a series of unfortunate events and poor management decisions at the American parent company — a trend which began about the time of Cecil’s arrival, with management’s decision to change the company’s name to the hopeless corporatese “Mediagenic” — ultimately spelled disaster for that international software empire. In 1990, the 27-year-old Charles Cecil, who had recently been enjoying such luxuries as a posh company car and a mobile phone, was left high and dry by Mediagenic’s collapse. What to do now?

All his time spent porting and selling American games had given him a familiarity with goings-on across the Atlantic that was unusual among his countrymen. The one area of gaming where the Americans most obviously outdid the Brits, he realized, was the genre he still loved best: the adventure game. British and, indeed, most European developers had little that could compete with the latest graphic adventures from American publishers like Sierra and Lucasfilm Games. There was a reason for this: thanks to their need for large amounts of single-use visual and audio assets, those games were among the most expensive of all to produce; European studios for the most part simply lacked the resources to make them. The one partial exception to this rule came in the form of a few French studios like Delphine, who made games that were beautiful to look at if often atrociously designed. But Britain had absolutely nothing on offer.

So, Cecil decided for the second time in his young life to found his own company, with the intention of changing that — this despite the fact that he had very little money at all to work with even by the modest standards of British game development. He started Revolution Software in March of 1990 on the back of a £10,000 loan from his mother, and took up residence in an unheated cubbyhole above a fruit market in the struggling city of Hull — “We choose Hull because it was cheap,” admits Cecil — with a few of the folks he’d met during his previous travels through the British games industry. The setting verged on the Dickensian; during the winter months, they would huddle against their computers to try to stay warm.

Still, Cecil did soon convince the British publisher Mirrorsoft to provide some minimal funding for Revolution’s first game in return for the publication rights to the eventual finished product. When Mirrorsoft collapsed in the wake of the suspicious death of its kingpin Robert Maxwell and the postmortem revelation of financial improprieties throughout his organizations, they moved on in fairly short order to Virgin Games — a better partner on the whole, as Virgin came complete with a North American branch.

The core team at Revolution in the early days: Tony Warriner, Adam Tween, David Sykes, Stephen Oades, Dave Cummins, and Charles Cecil.

Tacitly admitting that it would be difficult indeed for a shoestring operation like theirs to compete with a company like Sierra in terms of production values, Revolution settled on a concept and engine to power it which they called “Virtual Theatre.” They envisioned it as nothing less than the next great leap in adventure design. Cecil described it thusly at the time:

Within each game, time advances and people walk around with their own routes: the blacksmith will go into his forge and hammer away, then he’ll go into the pub to have a drink and he’ll talk to other people around the village. You could have fifteen people all walking around, all interacting with each other. So instead of being a game where you’re the key and everything reacts to you, we have a game where you’re just another person.

It was a noble vision in its way, one which aimed to push the frontiers of an oft-hidebound genre. And yet, for all that it reads well on paper, it would prove more than problematic in practice. The disadvantage of making a world which runs along of its own accord is that it can run merrily away without the player, leaving her stranded in some plotting cul de sac. And then, far from being a drawback, most players enjoy adventure games precisely because they let them be the star of the show. After all, If one wants a world where one is “just another person,” one generally need only look up from the computer.

When Cecil expanded yet further on his vision, he wound up in a place to which many designers have dreamed of venturing since the heyday of commercial text adventures, but which has yet to yield a single comprehensively satisfying game: “What we’re planning to do in the future is put in artificial intelligence whereby we set the basic parameters and then we let the characters decide what they’re going to do themselves. Fundamentally, anything could happen.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the first Revolution game — the one which most wholeheartedly embraced the Virtual Theatre concept — also proved to be the worst one they would ever make. Lure of the Temptress combined a clichéd fairy-tale setting with an awkward interface, sub-Sierra graphics, and well-nigh infuriating gameplay, which mostly entailed chasing all of those vaunted self-directed characters hither and yon through a plot line littered with potential dead ends. Published internationally by Virgin Games for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS in the spring of 1992, it sold in reasonable quantities, doing best with Amiga owners in Europe. Charles Cecil didn’t hesitate to wave the flag on behalf of the continent. “I believe that European graphic artists are the best,” he said — an assertion which the graphics in Lure of the Temptress utterly failed to prove. Thankfully, better things were still to come from Revolution.

Lure of the Temptress did earn enough money to fund a move to better offices in York, with a corresponding uptick in the budget for their next game. Even so, much of the dramatic improvement evinced by said game was the result of a series of chance events that won Revolution the services of arguably the most respected comic-book illustrator of the era. And yes, he was a European. In fact, he hailed from Britain.

In May of 1989, a popular British gaming magazine known as The One published a feature about Watchmen, a two-year-old book which had done much to inculcate the idea of the graphic novel as a respectable literary form. Amidst much speculation about a potential Watchmen film and game — neither of which would appear until decades later — the article somehow managed to avoid mentioning the name of Dave Gibbons, the man who had drawn writer Alan Moore’s story. Understandably annoyed, Gibbons wrote to the magazine to point out the fact of his existence.

Dave Gibbons

By way of apology, The One sent Gibbons a Commodore Amiga and a copy of Deluxe Paint, then devoted five pages to an interview featuring his impressions of those things and many others. As the fact that he had seen the first Watchmen article in the magazine in the first place would indicate, Gibbons was already following the latest developments in computer gaming fairly closely. (In this respect and in many others, the down-to-earth Gibbons was unlike his sometime partner Alan Moore, an unrepentant eccentric and dyed-in-the wool Luddite.)

It seems that computer games are finding their own level in the same way as comics. I think that a lot of games, like a lot of comics it must be said, are pretty banal, and pretty repetitive — sort of like chewing gum. They won’t do you any harm, but on the other hand they aren’t likely to do much good.

I find puzzle games the most interesting. And the flight simulations… Falcon’s brilliant. You get to the point where you think you are there and you find yourself leaning in the chair. Rocket Ranger is very interesting stuff, that to me is like those role-playing gamebooks. It’s a different game every time you play it.

The magazine’s earlier slight was forgiven; Gibbons went on to draw the cover art for at least one issue of The One. More importantly, he met Charles Cecil through the magazine; Cecil was still with Mediagenic at the time and was also chummy with the staff at The One. The two started tentatively to feel one another out, until finally, after making some suggestions here and there for Lure of the Temptress, Gibbons agreed to become the principal illustrator and art director of Beneath a Steel Sky, Revolution’s second game. Not only did he bring his unique talents to the game itself, but the presence on the team of such a high-profile individual did much to drum up interest in the press. Cecil tells of the many journalists who came to the trade shows to meet Gibbons and see the game, in that order. They “began pulling out copies of the old Watchmen comics and Dave spent a while signing the lot. It was very positive, and they were dying to see what he had created in the game.”

Charles Cecil’s games have never been notable for the originality of their subject matter, and Beneath a Steel Sky is no exception to that rule of derivation. It trades in the King’s Quest-like fantasy of Lure of the Temptress for a dystopic science-fiction setting with strong cyberpunk overtones — a mixture of Blade Runner and Neuromancer, not exactly a rare blending among games of the early 1990s. Union City, where this game takes place, is the familiar authoritarian technocracy, a place where class strata have taken on a literal dimension. One has to take originality in such a setting where one can find it: upending a science-fictional trope stretching back at least to Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis, in Union City the poor and powerless live out their squabbling lives in tenements that scrape the sky, while the rich and powerful live in luxury near ground level. Union City’s most unusual wrinkle of all is the fact that it exists in the far-flung locale of Australia instead of some faded North American or European hegemony. Yet even this fact is disarmingly easy to miss entirely, especially if you happen to be playing the voice-acted CD-ROM version with its distinctly British and American accents — not an Aussie voice to be found.

You play a young man named Robert Foster, who as the introduction begins lives with one of the nomadic tribes that inhabit a place known as The Gap, the vast wasteland separating the cities of Australia. (Said wasteland is known as the Outback today…) But then a military raid kills everyone in the tribe except Foster himself; he is spared, to be spirited away by helicopter to Union City for reasons unknown. He escapes when the helicopter crashes over the city before it can reach its final destination, whereupon the game proper begins. As Foster, you must elude your pursuers as you explore Union City’s nooks and crannies, must learn the secret that makes you of such special interest to the powers who control the city — and must bring about their downfall.

Undoubtedly the strongest aspect of the game — the one thing you’re guaranteed to still remember even years after playing it — is Dave Gibbons’s art. Despite his earlier well-publicized experiments with Deluxe Paint, he elected to draw all of the approximately 90 background scenes for which he was responsible using the same old analog techniques that he had used to bring Watchmen and countless other comics to light. He provided pencil sketches of each scene to Revolution, where an artist named Les Pace, a veteran of such Hollywood productions as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, proceeded to color them in by hand. Only then were the illustrations scanned in on an Apple Macintosh, that being the most affordable platform at the time with good support for 24-bit color. Finally, these “master plates” could be down-sampled to come within the capabilities of Revolution’s two primary target platforms for the finished game: MS-DOS machines with VGA graphics cards (which allowed a maximum of 256 onscreen colors) and the Commodore Amiga (which allowed just 32).

Even in these degraded forms, the game’s imagery is striking. Inspired to some extent by the collapsing factories of hardscrabble Hull, Revolution Software’s original home, Union City manages to be varied but also of a piece, dingy but also coldly clinical, a warren of boldly vertiginous drops and furtively claustrophobic corners. Unlike many games during this era of exploding technological innovation, when the desire for spectacle could often overwhelm consistency and coherence, there’s a thoroughgoing visual aesthetic to Beneath a Steel Sky that stems from something more than a desire to show off the technology that powers it. Charles Cecil’s comment on the subject stood out in an era obsessed with photo-realism in games: “We’re not trying to create reality. We’re trying to create a style.”

The Process

Dave Gibbons sketched each background on paper, just as he would have a comics illustration…

…to produce something like this.

Still working on paper, Les Pace painted the sketch.

Finally, it was scanned in in 24-bit color. This master copy was then down-sampled to 256 colors (MS-DOS) or 32 colors (Amiga) for inclusion in the game. (The image above is from the Amiga version; those below are from the higher-fidelity MS-DOS version.)

The End Results

The writing in the game is a touch weaker than its visuals; scriptwriter Dave Cummins isn’t incompetent by any means, but nor is he another Alan Moore. As tends to happen constantly in the adventure genre, the overarching “dark, serious” plot gets immediately overrun in the details by a collapse into comedy, a genre which seems far better suited to the outlandish puzzles that are the driving force of most adventure games, this one included.

Still, the blow of this failure of the game to stick to its dramatic guns is eased immensely simply because a lot of the humor is really, truly funny; it never feels forced, something which is by no means the case in all or even most of this game’s competitors. This is wry British humor at its best: it’s sneakily smart, and also a bit more deviously risque than what you might find in a contemporary American game of this ilk. (One running gag, for example, has to do with a skeezy character’s collection of “pussy pictures” — which, yes, turns out just to be pictures of cats.) You begin the game with a sidekick already in your inventory: your childhood friend Joey, a synthetic personality on a circuit board who can be transplanted into various robots as you go along. His sarcastic banter is a great source of fun and oblique hints, such that when he’s not with you in some sort of embodied form you genuinely miss him. In fact, I’d like the game even more if it had more of him in it. He’s prevented from joining the absolute highest ranks of classic adventure-game sidekicks only by the fact that he’s onscreen less than half the time.

If you hate convoluted adventure-game puzzles on principle, the ones here will do nothing to convince you otherwise. If you enjoy them, on the other hand, Beneath a Steel Sky is a solid implementation of their ilk. It’s not a particularly easy game, but nor is it an unusually hard one for its time, and it is consistently logical in its silly adventure-game way. (In this sense as in several others, it stood head and shoulders above its few competitors among homegrown British graphic adventures, whose grasp on the fundamentals of good game design tended to be shaky at best.) It eschews the contemporaneous interactive-movie trend, with its chapter breaks and extended cut scenes, for a more old-school non-linear approach; for the bulk of the game, you have a fairly large area to roam and multiple problems to work on. There’s never a sense that the puzzles were hasty additions inserted just to give the player something to do; they’re part and parcel of a holistic experience.

Vestiges of Revolution’s earlier rhetoric about creating more dynamic worlds do remain here. Characters are still a bit more active than you might find in a Sierra or LucasArts game, and an unusual number of the puzzles rely on analyzing their movements and timing your own actions just right. That said, the most frustrating aspects of Lure of the Temptress have been excised. For the most part, the designers opted to return to the things that were known to work in this genre rather than continuing to blaze problematic new trails — and it must be said that the game is all the better for it for their conservatism. Likewise, its straightforward one-click interface wasn’t hugely innovative in itself even at the time — this doing-away-with the old menu of verbs was becoming the norm in graphic adventures by this point — but it is a well-executed example of such an interface. All in all, if you like traditional graphic adventures, you’ll find this game to be a sturdy, perhaps occasionally inspired example of the genre.

Beneath a Steel Sky was a European game made at a time when the Commodore Amiga, although slowly sliding past its peak, was still the most popular gaming platform across much of that continent, and thus one that could not be safely ignored by any European studio. Make no mistake: the challenges of making a game that could run on an Amiga at the same time that it could stand on a reasonable par with the latest adventure games on American shelves were immense. The Amiga was slower than the latest MS-DOS machines and was lacking graphically by comparison, and most European Amiga owners didn’t even have a hard drive, much less a CD-ROM drive. And yet, remarkably, Revolution largely pulled it off. Beneath a Steel Sky shipped in March of 1994 on no fewer than fifteen Amiga floppy disks. You had to swap them constantly in order to play it on a machine without a hard drive, but it wasn’t quite aggravating enough to completely destroy the fun of the game itself for an Amiga-owning adventure fan.

Charles Cecil, whose nebbishy appearance concealed a surprisingly down-and-dirty sort of marketing savvy, cast the game not only as Britain’s answer to the adventures of Sierra and LucasArts but as the savior of adventure gaming writ large on the Amiga, coming as it did just as the aforementioned companies were abandoning the platform. He wasn’t above the occasional gratuitous slam against the Americans in interviews which he knew would remain safely ensconced on his side of the ocean: “Most American graphic adventures are a little shallow because the American public doesn’t see plot as important. However, European game players seem to want to think a lot more about what they’re doing, and we’ve tried to reflect that.” Some of his statements in this mode were just bizarre: “The engine Sierra [is] using is outdated. They introduced it five years ago and really haven’t developed it.” For the record, it should be noted that the five years in question encompass Sierra’s move from parser-driven games to point-and-click ones, along with the jump from 16-color EGA graphics to 256-color VGA and the addition of voice acting, just to list a few highlights. To further confuse the situation, Cecil was seeking and winning a contract from Sierra to port King’s Quest VI to the Amiga — something the American company otherwise had no plans to do — at the very same time he was making such comments. Naturally, the European magazines ate it up, awarding his game gold stars pretty much across the board.

Just a month later, Commodore declared bankruptcy. Beneath a Steel Sky was one of the last of its breed on the Amiga.

By way of completing the picture of a work at the crossroads between the old order and the new, Revolution released a voice-acted CD-ROM version for MS-DOS computers shortly after the floppy-based releases. The actors went for the most part uncredited, but it appears that Revolution didn’t look far from home for most of them. The eccentric citizens of Union City deliver their lines with gusto in broad Northern English, a nice contrast to the prim London accents of so many games. Their accents make the humor go down even better, and give the game that much more of a distinctive personality. Meanwhile an American refugee named Adam Henderson voices straight man Robert Foster in the neutral Midwestern tones of a prime-time news anchor, while most of the villains speak Brooklynese straight out of an episode of Law & Order. Go figure…

Helped along by positive reviews and the measure of hype which accompanied the involvement of Dave Gibbons, Beneath a Steel Sky rode Amiga loyalists in Europe and MS-DOS-computer-owning adventure fans in North America to solid sales numbers. Thus Revolution got to live on and make still more games, following a template which was the ironic opposite of their name: solidly constructed adventure games cut from a sturdy traditionalist cloth.

(Sources: Amiga Format of March 1993, December 1993, March 1994; AmigaWorld of December 1993 and August 1994; Amiga Computing of Christmas 1993 and June 1994; Computer Gaming World of July 1992; Computer and Video Games of July 1987 and January 1989; CU Amiga of March 1993 and January 1994; Edge of September 1993; Games TM 9; New Computer Express of August 4 1990; PC Review of May 1992; Questbusters 114; Retro Gamer 56 and 63; The One of May 1989, August 1989, March 1990, November 1991, February 1992, March 1993, and November 1993. Online sources include interviews with Charles Cecil on Gamasutra, Dining with Strangers, and MCV/Develop.

Charles Cecil and Revolution have released Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky as free downloads.)

Comments
43 Responses

- Chris D

July 17, 2020 at 3:54 pm

Really great article – 1994 is pretty much my sweet spot for gaming, and I have fond memories of BASS, even if it crashed so often on my Amiga 1200 that I had to take it back to the shop. Two meg of memory was not quite enough to run the game from a hard drive, and there was no way I was going to run it from floppy disks.

There are a couple of points I would argue with:

1. I’m not sure “Mancunian” is the right word in respect of the accents in the game. There are a LOT of different UK accents in the game, but Lamb is probably the most prominent and he has a thick Yorkshire accent. There’s a surprising degree of variation in Northern accents in a relatively compact geographical area, and a Manchester accent is quite distinctive.

2. Was BASS the last of its breed of the Amiga? Flight of the Amazon Queen was a LucasArts-style graphic adventure, and it came out in 1995 – the Amiga version wasn’t some creaky, slow port, it was developed primarily on the Amiga, and then ported to the PC.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 4:08 pm

Thanks! I debated with myself about the accents, knowing there’s a staggering number of variations compressed into what seems a ridiculously small area to an American. In the end, I decided to go with it on the assumption that someone would correct me if I got it wrong. And lo and behold! :)

- Chris D

July 17, 2020 at 4:23 pm

No problem! Sorry to act as the Dialect Enforcement Officer. I would probably just stick with Northern as an overall descriptor for the accents you’re talking about – I’m not sure “Yorkie” is used very often to refer to a Yorkshire accent. It’s (apparently) used to describe someone from York, but I think it’s much more widely understood as a breed of dog or a brand of chocolate bar.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:04 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

July 17, 2020 at 4:45 pm

I think Amazon Queen may have been the last Amiga-first adventure game. There’s were a few official Amiga ports later (Feeble Files originally from ’97, and the really obscure Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy from ’98) but they definitely qualify as “creaky”.

- Ken Brubaker

July 17, 2020 at 4:14 pm

In the second paragraph, ‘Richard Tuner’s’ is missing an ‘r’ in his last name.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:03 pm

Thanks!

- David Yates

July 17, 2020 at 4:30 pm

>decision to change the company’s name to the hopeless corporatese “Mediageic”

Missing an n in Mediagenic.

>Thus Revolution got to live on and make still more games, following a template which was the ironic opposite of their name: solidly constructed adventure games cut from a sturdy traditionalist cloth.

In an amusing coincidence, Revolution released a sequel to this game, Beyond a Steel Sky, just two days ago.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:05 pm

Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

July 17, 2020 at 4:36 pm

Was this intentionally timed for the release of the sequel Beyond a Steel Sky yesterday, or was it a wild coincidence?

- Phil B.

July 17, 2020 at 6:03 pm

Yeah, this has to win the award for “most opportunistic timing ever” for a DA post.

Awesome as ever, Jimmy.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:06 pm

The latter actually. I knew vaguely that a sequel was being worked on, but had no idea it was so close to release.

- Josh T

July 17, 2020 at 5:47 pm

“Mediageic” -> “Mediagenic”
“quanities” -> “quantities”
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” should not have a question mark in the title.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:08 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

July 17, 2020 at 6:30 pm

The “people walk around with their own routes”-manifesto might have been the next great leap in adventure design, but it’s also sounds very much like a game from 1983 I don’t know if you’ve covered: Valhalla. A British game for the ZX Spectrum, Cecil was certainly aware of it.

- stepped pyramids

July 27, 2020 at 11:37 pm

It also reminds me of the Melbourne House games The Hobbit and Sherlock, both of which were covered here:

https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
https://www.filfre.net/2013/12/sherlock/

There seems to have been a bit of a mini-genre of these simulationist adventure games in the British computer scene.

- Sniffnoy

July 17, 2020 at 7:05 pm

Union City, where this game takes place…

…in New Jersey?

…exists in the far-flung locale of Australia instead of some faded North American or European hegemony.

Oh, huh, no.

And looking it up, turns out that’s not the only Union City in the US, and not even the largest one; there’s a Union City, CA that’s larger…

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 7:13 pm

No worries, we have a game coming soon that’s set in Hoboken. ;)

- Sniffnoy

July 17, 2020 at 7:54 pm

Oh wow, next town over!

- Klaus

July 17, 2020 at 7:42 pm

died-in-the wool Luddite > should be dyed

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2020 at 8:40 pm

Thanks!

- Lasse

July 18, 2020 at 2:42 am

Great article as always. I always had a soft spot for BaSS and its my favourite Revolution game even over the more popular first Broken Sword.

Charles Cecil’s comments regarding Sierra’s SCI engine are just baffling. There’s plenty of reasons to criticize Sierra but that’s not one.
They were probably the one graphic adventure company most aggressively pushing new technologies throughout the 80’s AND the 90’s.

Have to say Revolution did a very good job on the Amiga conversion of KQ6. Definitely a huge step up from Sierra’s lazy ports on the platform. Its obvious Sierra never particularly cared about the Amiga as a platform..
I know Amiga was never a big deal in the USA as a gaming platform or otherwise, but that didn’t stop other U.S based companies like Lucasarts and Microprose releasing very competent ports for it.

- Mike Russo

July 18, 2020 at 2:53 am

Great as usual. Thanks for that link to blue renga all the adventures blog. Looks like an awesome project I’m going to enjoy catching up on!

- Bill Maya

July 18, 2020 at 11:27 am

Notice you linked to Crawford’s Erasmatazz site. Any plans to do a profile on his past games and interactive storytelling attempts in the future?

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2020 at 11:55 am

I wrote a bit on Balance of Power, and his ideas do come up from time to time in articles like this one, but my general opinion about Crawford is that he’s spent the last 25 years pursuing a rigid ideological vision that no one is actually asking for while others have gotten on with the slow but steady business of advancing the state of the art in interactive storytelling in practical terms. If we’re honest — and as he’d probably be the first to admit — his ideas have had pretty much no impact on the actual state of games today; I suspect his biggest claim to historical importance will wind up being his founding of the Game Developers Conference. I must confess that I find Crawford himself more fascinating as a noteworthy mind who got completely derailed by a single quixotic obsession than I find his ideas all that compelling; there’s something almost Shakespearean about the tragedy of that. But writing an article with that theme wouldn’t be a very kind thing to do, on the whole, so I think I’ll probably just continue to leave it alone, at least as long as Crawford himself is still with us. (Hopefully that’s many years…)

Of course, if a great game should someday emerge from all this Storytron business, I am, as ever, fully prepared to eat crow.

- xxx

July 18, 2020 at 6:08 pm

Actually, it sounds like he gave up on Storytron, and interactive storytelling in general, a couple of years ago. https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-ending-further.html

Poor guy. His rationale for why it didn’t work (people aren’t willing to learn the skills necessary to tell interactive stories) misses the mark by quite a bit, I think, but I can’t imagine how disheartening it must be to see the world react with a disinterested shrug to your closely-held ideals and ambitions.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2020 at 7:45 pm

It seems that his retirement didn’t last too long: https://medium.com/storytron/trust-betrayal-the-legacy-of-crawford-c8fef94d635c.

- Bill Maya

July 18, 2020 at 9:04 pm

I forgot about your mention of Balance of Power in the Macware post. I have to agree with your take on things Crawford. Also, finally signed up to your Patreon (long overdue since I’ve been enjoying your writing for years).

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2020 at 9:20 pm

Thanks so much for the support!

- Eric Nyman

July 20, 2020 at 5:54 am

The fact that Crawford called text adventures “about as interesting as a refrigerator light” goes a long way towards explaining why he hasn’t found the type of dynamic interactive storytelling he is seeking….If he could get past that hang up, he’d find a gold mine of such fantastic efforts over the last 4 decades (especially the last 2 and a half). In his description of the games he seeks, literally all of them as best I can tell have been done with interactive fiction, and by people working for no financial compensation, thus also meeting his goal of them being sufficiently noble in their incentives, too:

“I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression — an art form. I dreamed of computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience and emotion: computer games about tragedies, or self-sacrifice; games about duty and honor, patriotism; a satirical game about politics, or games about human folly; games about men’s relationship to God or to Nature; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, or the serene and mature love between husband and wife of decades; games about family relationships or death, mortality, games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young; games about a man facing truth at high noon on a dusty main street, or a boy and his dog, and a prostitute with a heart of gold.”

But alas, as you say, he’s tragically stuck on his own idea of what a good game is. And I say this as someone who considers “Balance of Power” one of the greatest games of all time. I wish someone could interview him and ask him about what the interactive fiction community has done, and find out what his thoughts on it are. Or if he’s unaware, to inform him and check back in 6 months.

And quixotic is clearly the perfect adjective for him as he has compared himself to Quixote directly.

- Jimmy Maher

July 20, 2020 at 8:11 am

This is where the rigid ideology comes in, and along with it the fundamental contradiction in Crawford’s vision. Having embraced the religion of process intensity, he insists on creating all of these rich, humanistic scenarios using only algorithms, with no space whatsoever for a human author contributing bespoke content. He wants to let the player *create* her own story, believing at the same time that the story she winds up with can be as richly evocative as a good literary novel. I simply don’t believe this is possible. Personally, I’m just fine with letting the player *experience* such a story. Lord knows we have enough algorithms in this world. I’m happy to leave some space for the human author.

- Bill Maya

July 20, 2020 at 6:22 pm

Crawford’s is aware of the work the interactive fiction community has done over the years but rather than learn what they’ve done and build on what they’ve accomplished, he dismisses it out of hand – https://medium.com/storytron/inform-7-storytron-b84dae55d40d

IMHO – Inform 7 would be a good tool to attempt to implement a Crawford storyworld.

- Wolfeye M.

July 19, 2020 at 4:17 am

Didn’t know Dave Gibbons worked on games after he did Watchmen. Kinda a shame that everyone focuces on Alan Moore’s contribution to the book. In a graphic novel, the art is just as important as the writing, if not more so.

I tried to play Beneath a Steel Sky. But, I didn’t get very far, thanks to the puzzles. It was that game, more than any other I tried, which made me realize that I hate adventure games. I mean, yes, I could have used a walkthrough, but then I really wouldn’t have been playing the game, would I? I was just glad I got it for free.

The game is pretty, though. I mean, pretty for a game set in a Cyberpunk Dystopia. Gibbons, Pace, and whoever put the art into the computer, did a great job on the backgrounds. And, the NPCs having there own schedules is a neat idea. I wish more games did something like that, it makes them feel more “lived in”.

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- Matthew Parsons

July 21, 2020 at 6:31 am

Autofill fail, please remove my email address.

I meant to make sure you and your readers are aware that BASS has been available for free, legally and with extras, and configured for a minimum of fuss on modern systems:

https://www.gog.com/game/beneath_a_steel_sky

- Ricky Derocher

July 25, 2020 at 4:27 am

The CD-ROM voiced version did make it to the Amiga as well – at least as a CD32 release.

- Jeremy Cotton

July 29, 2020 at 10:48 am

“Watchmen, a two-year-old book which had all but single-handedly invented the idea of the graphic novel as a respectable literary form.” is either terminal Anglocentrism or terminal fachidiotism. Or is it both?

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2020 at 5:52 pm

I assume that’s a rhetorical question. But I see the first book of Maus was published the year before Watchmen, so thanks.

- Zed Banville

August 1, 2020 at 8:18 pm

Watchmen was published as a 12-issue limited series in 1986-1987; although it was later released as a single collection, this doesn’t make it a “graphic novel”. Will Eisner’s “Contract with God” in 1978 is generally credited with popularizing the term “graphic novel” and making it a respectable format, leading, for example, Marvel Comics to initiate its own series of graphic novels in 1982 (the fifth of which, “God Loves, Man Kills”, would later be used as the basis for the second X-Men film).

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- Lee C.

August 8, 2020 at 6:35 pm

I seem to remember reading about a game with “a world which runs along of its own accord”, the computer-controlled characters living their own lives elsewhere even while the player is absent from their location, in the first run of Electronic Games magazine, which ended 1985, long before Revolution’s “Virtual Theatre”. It wasn’t The Hobbit, but a game in which the player visits multiple worlds, whether planets, time periods, alternate histories or minds, I don’t remember. Is my memory playing tricks on me, or does anyone else remember something like that?

- Ord Mandell

August 24, 2020 at 2:58 am

>Yet even this fact is disarmingly easy to miss entirely, especially if you happen to be playing the voice-acted CD-ROM version with its distinctly British and American accents — not an Aussie voice to be found.

Doesn’t Eduardo the Gardener have an Australian accent? (Granted, he’s the only one.)

His design even looks a bit like Paul Hogan’s “Crocodile Dundee” character…

- Leo Vellés

October 4, 2020 at 9:56 pm

I played Lure of the Temptress quite a bit on my Amiga 500 when it was released and at that time i thought that the graphics where pretty good…about one year ago i played it again on scumvm and, after all this years, i don’t think the graphics are that awful. It’s a game that at the first impression is very promissing, but once you met all the people of the town and after visiting every location, it start to show its flaws.

Superhero League of Hoboken
August 7, 2020

Please bear with me as I begin today with an anecdote from Beatles rather than gaming fandom.

Paul McCartney was having a rough time of it in 1973, three years after the Beatles’ breakup. He’d been thrown off balance by that event more than any of his band mates, and had spent the intervening time releasing albums full of far too many flaccid, underwritten songs, which the critics savaged with glee. They treated Wings, the new band he had formed, with the same derision, mocking especially the inclusion of Paul’s wife Linda as keyboard player. (“What do you call a dog with wings?” ran one of the uglier misogynist jokes of the time. “Linda!”) Then, just as it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, two of the three members of Wings who weren’t part of the McCartney family quit just as they were all supposed to fly to Lagos, Nigeria, to record their latest album.

It ought to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But instead, Paul, Linda, and their faithful rhythm guitarist Denny Laine went to Nigeria and delivered what many still regard as the finest album of McCartney’s post-Beatles career. “Paul thought, I’ve got to do it. Either I give up and cut my throat or get my magic back,” said Linda later. He did the latter: Band on the Run marked the return of the Paul McCartney who had crafted the astonishing medley that closed out Abbey Road, that parting shot of the greatest rock band ever. As Nicholas Schaffner wrote in The Beatles Forever, “Band on the Run more than sufficed to dispel the stigma of all that intervening wimpery. And the aging hippies all said: McCartney Is Back.”

I tell this story now because I had much the same feeling when I recently played Superhero League of Hoboken, Steve Meretzky’s game from 1994: “Meretzky Is Back.” And a welcome return it was.

Meretzky, you see, spent the period immediately following the breakup of Infocom in 1989 pursuing his own sort of peculiarly underwhelming course. The man who had strained so hard to bring real literary credibility to the medium of the adventure game in 1985 via A Mind Forever Voyaging spent the early years of the 1990s making lowbrow sex comedies seemingly aimed primarily at thirteen-year-old boys. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, the first of the bunch, was defensible on its own merits, and certainly a solid commercial choice with which to kick-start Legend Entertainment, the company co-founded by former Infocom author Bob Bates with the explicit goal of becoming the heir to Infocom’s legacy. By the time of Spellcasting 201 and Spellcasting 301, however, the jokes were wearing decidedly thin. And the less said the better about Activision’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, the comprehensively botched graphical sequel to arguably Meretzky’s best single Infocom text adventure of all. By 1992, it was time for a change. Oh, boy, was it time for a change.

Thus it was a blessing for everyone when Meretzky decided not to make the fourth game in what had been planned as a Spellcasting tetralogy, decided to do something completely different for Legend instead. The change in plans was readily accepted by the latter, for whom Meretzky worked from home on a contract basis. For, in a surprising indication that even the timeless marketing mantra that Sex Sells isn’t complete proof against a stale concept, sales of Spellcasting 301 hadn’t been all that strong.

The concept for Meretzky’s next game was fresh in comparison to what had come immediately before it, but it wasn’t actually all that new. In 1987, after finishing Stationfall for Infocom, he’d prepared a list of eight possibilities for his next project and circulated it among his colleagues. On the list was something called Super-Hero League of America:

When Marvel Comics asked if we’d be interested in a collaboration, I thought, Steve, old buddy, old pal, you could think up a lot more interesting and weird and fun superheroes than those worn-out boring Marvel Comics superheroes. Such as Farm Stand Man, who can turn himself into any vegetable beginning with a vowel. Dr. Madmoiselle [sic] Mozzarella, who can tell the toppings on any pizza before the box is even opened! I see this as a Hitchhiker’s/Rashomon type game in which you can play your choice of any of half a dozen superheroes. The story would be slightly different depending on which one you chose. If you elected to portray Annelid Man (able to communicate with any member of the worm family), you wouldn’t command as much respect as Dr. Asphalt (able to devour entire eight-lane highways), and the other superheroes wouldn’t obey you as readily. Potential for lots of interesting puzzles. Possible RPG elements.

“I like this!” scribbled one of his colleagues on the memo. “The superheroes shouldn’t be so silly, though… maybe?” But in the end, Meretzky wound up doing the safest project on the list, yet another Zork sequel. After releasing a whole pile of unique and innovative games over the course of 1987, to uniformly dismal commercial results, Infocom just didn’t feel that they had room to take any more chances.

Still, the idea continued to resonate with its originator, even through all of the changes which the ensuing five years brought with them. In late 1992, having decided not to do another Spellcasting game, he dusted it off and developed it further. He had the brilliant brainstorm of setting it in Hoboken, New Jersey, a real town of 35,000 souls not without a record of achievement — it’s the birthplace of baseball, Frank Sinatra, and Yo La Tengo — but one whose very name seems somehow to hilariously evoke its state’s longstanding inferiority complex in relation to its more cosmopolitan neighbor New York. Hoboken was the perfect home for Meretzky’s collection of low-rent superheroes with massive inferiority complexes of their own. Even more notably, the “possible RPG elements” of the first proposal turned into a full-fledged adventure/CRPG hybrid, a dramatic leap into unexplored territory for both Mereztky and Legend.

It was new territory for Meretzky the game designer, that is, but not for Meretzky the game player: he had long been a fan of CRPGs. Among the documents from the Infocom era which he has donated to the Internet Archive are notes about the games from other companies which Meretzky was playing during the 1980s. One finds there pages and pages of lovingly annotated maps of the likes of Might and Magic. Meretzky:

I’d been wanting to make an RPG for many years. But I thought that the usual Tolkienesque fantasy setting and trappings of RPGs had been done to death, and it occurred to me that superheroes was an excellent alternate genre that worked well with RPG gameplay, with superpowers substituting for magic spells. I originally planned to make it a full RPG, but Legend had never done anything that wasn’t a straight adventure game and were therefore nervous, so the only way I could convince them was to make it an RPG/adventure hybrid.

Meretzky’s characterization of Legend here is perhaps a touch ungenerous. They were a small company with limited resources, and were already in the process of moving from a parser-based adventure engine to a point-and-click one. Adapting it to work as a CRPG was a tall order.

Indeed, Superhero League of Hoboken remained in active development for more than eighteen months, longer than any Legend game to date. In the end, though, they succeeded in melding their standard graphic-adventure interface to a clever new combat engine. By the time the game was released in the summer of 1994, Meretzky had already moved on from Legend, and was working with fellow Infocom alum Mike Dornbrook to set up their own studio, under the name of Boffo Games. As a parting gift to Legend, however, Hoboken could hardly be beat. It had turned into a genuinely great game, Meretzky’s best since Stationfall or even Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

It takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, a choice that was much in vogue in the mid-1990s; I’m now reviewing my third post-apocalyptic adventure game in a row. But, whereas Under a Killing Moon and Beneath a Steel Sky teeter a little uncertainly between seriousness and the centrifugal pull that comedy always exerts on the adventure genre, Hoboken wants only to be the latter. It’s extravagantly silly, so stupid that it’s smart — Meretzky at his best, in other words.

The premise is that a considerable percentage of the population have become “superheroes” in the wake of a nuclear war, thanks to all of the radiation in the air. But most of the actual superpowers thus acquired are, shall we say, rather esoteric. For example, you play the Crimson Tape, whose superpower is the ability to create organizational charts. That makes you ideal for the role of leader of the Hoboken chapter of the Superhero League. Your gang there includes folks like the Iron Tummy, who can eat spicy food without distress; the ironically named Captain Excitement, who puts others to sleep; Robo Mop, who can clean up almost any mess; Tropical Oil Man, who raises the cholesterol levels in his enemies; the holdover from the Infocom proposal Madam Pepperoni, who can see inside pizza boxes; and my personal favorite, King Midas, who can turn anything into a muffler. (For my non-American readers: “Midas” is the name of a chain of American auto-repair shops specializing in, yes, mufflers.) Some of these superpowers are more obviously useful than others: Captain Excitement’s power, for example, is the equivalent of the Sleep spell, that staple of low-level Dungeons & Dragons. Some of them are sneakily useful: the game’s equivalent of treasure chests are pizza boxes, which makes Madam Pepperoni its equivalent of your handy trap-detecting thief from a more ordinary CRPG setting. And some of the superpowers, including your own and that of many others, are utterly useless for fighting crime — until you stumble upon that one puzzle for which they’re perfect.

The game has a smart and very satisfying structure, playing out in half a dozen chapters. At the beginning of each of them you’re given a to-do list of five tasks in your superhero headquarters. To accomplish these things, you’ll naturally have to venture out into the streets. Each chapter takes you farther from home and requires you to explore more dangerous areas than the last; by its end, the game has come to encompass much of the Northeastern Seaboard, from Philadelphia to Boston, all of it now plagued by radiation and crime.

Your handy to-do list for Chapter 1.

In the Spellcasting games, Meretzky had a tendency to ask the player to do boring and/or irritating things over and over again, apparently in the mistaken impression that there’s something intrinsically funny about such blatant player abuse. It’s therefore notable that Hoboken evinces exactly the opposite tendency — i.e., it seeks to minimize the things that usually get boring in other CRPGs. Each section of the map spawns random encounters up to a certain point, and then stops, out of the logic that you’ve now cleaned that neighborhood of miscreants. I can’t praise this mechanic enough. There’s nothing more annoying than trying to move quickly through explored areas in a typical CRPG, only to be forced to contend with fight after mindlessly trivial fight. Likewise, the sense of achievement you get from actually succeeding in your ostensible goal of defeating the forces of evil and making a place safe again shouldn’t be underestimated. Among CRPGs that predate this one, Pool of Radiance is the only title I know of which does something similar, and with a similar premise behind it at that; there you’re reclaiming the fantasy village of Phlan from its enemies, just as here you’re reclaiming the urban northeast of the United States. Hoboken is clearly the work of a designer who has played a lot of games of its ilk — a rarer qualification in game design than you might expect — and knows which parts tend to be consistently fun and which parts can quickly become a drag.

You explore the city streets — this CRPG’s equivalent of a dungeon — from a top-down perspective. This interface yields to a separate interface for fighting the baddies you encounter, or to the first-person adventure-game interface when you wander onto certain “special” squares.

The combat system makes for an interesting study in itself, resembling as it does those found in many Japanese console CRPGs more than American incarnations of the genre. It’s simple and thoroughly unserious, like most things in this game, but it’s not without a modicum of tactical depth. Each round, each character in your party can choose to mount a melee attack if she’s close enough (using one of an assortment of appropriately silly weapons), mount a ranged attack if not (using one of an equally silly assortment of weapons), utilize her superpower (which is invariably silly), or assume a defensive stance. Certain weapons and powers are more effective against certain enemies; learning which approaches work best against whom and then optimizing accordingly is a key to your success. Ditto setting up the right party for taking on the inhabitants of the area you happen to be exploring; although you can’t create superheroes of your own, you have a larger and larger pool of them to choose from as the game continues and the fame of your Hoboken branch of the Superhero League increases. But be careful not to mix and match too much: heroes go up in level with success in combat, so you don’t want to spread the opportunities around too evenly, lest you end up with a team full of mediocrities in lieu of at least a few high-level superstars.

Combat on the mean streets of Hoboken. Here we’re up against some Screaming Meemies (“members of a strange cult that worships the decade of the 1970s, identified by their loud cry of ‘Me! Me!'”) and Supermoms (“Bred for child-bearing and child-rearing characteristics by 21st-century anti-feminist fundamentalists”).

As you explore the streets of the city, you stumble upon special locations that cause the adventure side of the game’s personality to kick in. Here the viewpoint shifts from overhead third-person to a first-person display, with an interface that will look very familiar to anyone who has played Companions of Xanth, Legend’s first point-and-click graphic adventure. In addition to conversing with others and solving puzzles in these sections, you can visit shops selling weapons and armor and can frequent healers, all essential for the CRPG side of things. That said, the bifurcation between the game’s two halves remains pronounced enough that you can never forget that this is a CRPG grafted onto an adventure-game engine. Your characters even have two completely separate inventories, one for stuff used to fight baddies and one for stuff used to solve puzzles. Thankfully, each half works well enough on its own that you don’t really care; the adventure half as well marked a welcome departure from Meretzky’s recent tendency to mistake annoyance for humor, whilst offering up some of his wittiest puzzles in years.

Curing a disease contracted in the CRPG section by visiting a healer found, complete with gratuitous Infocom references, in the adventure section.

But by my lights the funniest part of the game remains the rogue’s gallery of superheroes and villains — especially the latter. These provided Meretzky with an opportunity to vent his frustration on a wide array of deserving targets. Some are specific, like Transistor Jowl, a clone of Richard Nixon, right down to his parting line of “You won’t have Transistor Jowl to kick around anymore” (delivered perfectly in the CD-ROM version by voice actor Gary Telles). And some are more generalized, like the marketing executives who chirp, “Let’s do lunch!” in their unflappable cluelessness as you dispatch them. Either way, the social satire here has the sharp edge that was missing from the Spellcasting games:

Junk Bond Amoeba: Environmental toxins have produced these one-celled creatures, twelve feet across, bent on engulfing food morsels and defenseless companies. Beware, for during combat they can divide by mitosis, doubling their number!

Espevangelist: Similar to televangelists of the 20th and 21st centuries, except that espevangelists require no broadcasting equipment to transmit their programming, since they can project their thoughts and words directly into the minds of those around them. In addition to the damage they can thus inflict, espevangelists have been known to separate weak-willed parties from their funds. They are even more dangerous if they FUNDRAISE.

By way of attacking this last-mentioned reprobate, you “reveal details about his affair with an altar boy,” and “all the tears in the world fail to save him.” And all the aging gamers said: Meretzky Is Back.

Transistor Jowl leaves the scene of the crime.

Unfortunately, Superhero League of Hoboken’s course after its release was markedly different from that of Band on the Run. The game got a lot of support from the all-important Computer Gaming World magazine, including an extended preview and a very positive review just a couple of issues later that proclaimed it “the first true comedy CRPG ever”; this wasn’t strictly correct, but was truthy enough for the American market at least. And yet it sold miserably from the get-go, for reasons which Legend couldn’t quite divine. Legend was no Sierra or Electronic Arts; they averaged just two game releases per year, and the failure of one of them could be an existential threat to the whole company.

But they got lucky. Just after Hoboken’s release, the book-publishing titan Random House made a major investment in Legend; they were eager to make a play in the new world of CD-ROM, and, having been impressed by Legend’s earlier book adaptations, saw a trans-media marketing opportunity for their existing print authors and franchises. This event took some of the sting from Hoboken’s failure. Random House’s marketing consultants soon joined in to try to solve the puzzle of the game’s poor performance, informing Legend that the central issue in their opinion was that the cover art was just too “busy” to stand out on store shelves. This verdict was received with some discomfort at Legend; the cover in question had been the work of Peggy Oriani, Bob Bates’s wife. Nevertheless, they dutifully went with a new, Random House-approved illustration for the CD-ROM release, splashed with excerpts from the many glowing reviews the game had received. It didn’t help; sales remained terrible.

The revised CD-ROM box art. (The original can be seen at the beginning of this article.)

Steve Meretzky would later blame the game’s failure on its long production time, which, so he claimed, made it look like a musty oldie upon its release. And indeed, it was the last Legend game to use only VGA rather than higher resolution SVGA graphics. Still, and while the difference in sharpness between this game’s graphics and Legend’s next game Death Gate is pronounced, Hoboken really doesn’t look unusually bad among a random selection of other games from its year; there were still plenty of vanilla VGA games being released in 1994 and even well into 1995 as software gradually evolved to match the latest hardware. The real problem was likely that of an industry that was swiftly hardening into ever more rigid genres, each of which came complete with its own set of fixed expectations. An adventure game with hit points and fighting? A CRPG with no dungeons or dragons, hurling social satire in lieu of magic spells? Superhero League of Hoboken just didn’t fit anywhere. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, unlicensed superhero games of any stripe have historically struggled for market share; it seems that when gamers strap on their (virtual) spandex suits, they want them to be those of the heroes they already know and love, not a bunch of unknown weirdos like the ones found here.

A few months after the release of the CD-ROM version, Legend received a cease-and-desist letter out of the blue from Marvel Comics. It seemed that Marvel and DC Comics were the proud owners of a joint trademark on the name of “superhero” when used as part of the title of a publication. (This sounds to my uneducated mind like a classic example of an illegal corporate trust, but I’m no lawyer…) While there was cause to question whether “publications” in this sense even encompassed computer games at all, it hardly seemed a battle worth fighting given the game’s sales figures. Already exhausted from flogging this dead horse, Legend worked out a settlement with Marvel whereby they were allowed to continue to sell those copies still in inventory but promised not to manufacture any more. In the end, Superhero League of Hoboken became the least successful Legend game ever, with total sales well short of 10,000 copies — a dispiriting fate for a game that deserved much, much better.

That fate makes Hoboken a specimen of a gaming species that’s rarer than you might expect: the genuine unheralded classic. The fact is that most great games in the annals of the field have gotten their due, if not always in their own time then in ours, when digital distribution has allowed so many of us to revisit and reevaluate the works of gaming’s past. Yet Superhero League of Hoboken has continued to fly under the radar, despite its wealth of good qualities. Its sharp-edged humor never becomes an excuse for neglecting the fundamentals of good design, as sometimes tends to happen with forthrightly comedic games. It’s well-nigh perfectly balanced and perfectly paced. Throughout its considerable but not overwhelming length, its fights and puzzles alike remain challenging enough to be interesting but never so hard that they become frustrating and take away from its sense of fast-paced fun. And then it ends, pretty much exactly when you feel like you’re ready for it to do so. A lot of designers of more hardcore CRPGs in particular could learn from this silly game’s example of never exhausting its player and refusing to outstay its welcome. The last great narrative-oriented game of Steve Meretzky’s career, Superhero League of Hoboken is also the one most ripe for rediscovery.

Some pop-culture references are truly timeless…

(Sources: the books The Beatles Forever by Nicolas Schaffner and Game Design Theory & Practice (Second Edition) by Richard Rouse III; Computer Gaming World of August 1994 and October 1994; Questbusters 113. Online sources include “The Superhero Trademark FAQ” at CBR.com and “Super Fight Over ‘Superhero’ Trademark” at Klemchuk LLC. I’m also greatly indebted to the indefatigable Jason Scott’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents from Steve Meretzky’s exhaustive collection. And my huge thanks to Bob Bates and Mike Verdu for their insights about Superhero League of Hoboken and all other things Legend during personal interviews.

Superhero League of Hoboken is available for digital purchase on GOG.com. This is wonderful on one level, but also strange, as it should still be subject to the cease-and-desist agreement which Legend signed with Marvel Comics all those years ago. There is reason to question whether Ziggurat Interactive, the digital publisher currently marketing this game, actually has the right to do so. I leave it for you to decide the ethics of purchasing a convenient installable version of the game versus downloading a CD-ROM image elsewhere and struggling to set it up yourself. Believe me, I wish the situation was more clear-cut.)

Comments
43 Responses

- AndyHat

August 7, 2020 at 5:06 pm

I loved this game. It remains the only CRPG I’ve ever played through all the way twice.

- O Andarilho

August 7, 2020 at 5:30 pm

“Already exhausted from flogging this dead horse, Legend worked out a settlement with Marvel whereby they were allowed to continue to sell those copies still in inventory but promised not to manufacture any more.”

Technically, no one is manufacturing the game anymore, only selling digital copies… (:

- dsparil

August 7, 2020 at 6:16 pm

Superhero League of Hoboken is a game I always really wanted to like, but I don’t think it really quite gels. My main issue is that the whole game is structured around your heroes weird powers rather than needing to find unconventional solutions to more standard problems. This ends up robbing the adventure sections of some possible inventiveness while also just being window dressing for the very basic combat and combat abilities. There’s also no central plot so it ends somewhat anticlimactically.

The difficulty also has a weird curve where it’s hard at the beginning because everyone is so weak, and you haven’t unlocked all your party slots. It’s then very easy for most of the game until you get to the end and it’s just a huge spike in difficulty. Combat is very annoying at the end and pointless since every hero used is likely at max level by then making encounters a chore. I finally finished it for the first time last year after noodling around for decades, and I ended up saving all the time and reloading to avoid random encounters.

—

On the Ziggurat issue, I think Legend was still listed as the publisher for their games on GOG until at least the end of last year. Maybe the rights just got sold recently? The company itself seems to have formed in September ’19 based on business records.

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2020 at 6:34 pm

Your opinion is of course every bit as valid as mine.

That said, I find this just a little confusing. There is a central plot, if not a terribly serious one, involving the dastardly villain named Doctor Entropy. You foil his latest master plan at the end of each chapter, and then things come to a grand climax at the end of Chapter 6. I’m also a little confused how you could avoid so many encounters and still wind up with a maxed-out squad. I cleared every area in the game — there are, as noted in the article, a limited number of random encounters to be found in each region — and always felt like my heroes were right at the level they should be for each new chapter. I found the game to be quite cannily balanced in that respect.

- dsparil

August 8, 2020 at 10:28 am

You do have Dr. Entropy as a recurring villain, but there’s no actual plot. You get your assignments, complete the first fours tasks and stop Entropy in the fifth. Then you get a new set and repeat until the end. The last “set” is just a stop Entropy mission and is a little bit more dramatic than the earlier ones as it should be as the end, but there isn’t anything tying the whole game together.

I think there are minor changes that could at least give the smallest semblance of a plot. For example, Dr. Entropy could also be collecting parts needed for his final plan. That’d only be an extra line or two per mission set and would give the slightly sense that something bigger is coming. There aren’t even little episodic mini-plots within each set of missions. As it is, the game a series of comedic situations, and then there’s no more of them so the game ends.

Sorry my comment about skipping battles was unclear. I only skipped the ones at the end because my heroes were maxed out by then. I cleared out every area before that, but the end is such a tedious slog.

- O Andarilho

August 8, 2020 at 12:21 am

dsparil, Superhero League of Hoboken and other Legend games were published by Piko Interactive some time ago. And then yes, they were sold recently to Ziggurat.

- Bob Bates

August 10, 2020 at 12:46 am

I can state with great and certain authority that the rights to Superhero League of Hoboken were never sold by Legend to anyone, and that neither Piko nor Ziggurat has purchased them. –Bob Bates.

- Petri N

August 7, 2020 at 7:03 pm

Long time reader, first time poster (yes, one of those again).

This is one of my favourite games of that era, and while it’s tone and setting were certainly unique in it’s time, I wish modern designers took some notes from it. Where are my silly, modern-day apocalypse CRPG’s? And no, Fallout New Vegas isn’t quite Meretzky enough..

Thanks for the article. And nice that you found reasons to include Yo La Tengo and Band On The Run in it, as well!

- Elzair

August 7, 2020 at 7:07 pm

Jimmy, have you ever looked at Dark Heart of Uukrul? It is another unheralded classic of the CRPG genre.

- Jimmy Maher

August 7, 2020 at 7:13 pm

I did, but I’m afraid I ultimately decided to pass on it. Fantasy CRPGs are horrifically time-consuming, and often in ways I don’t find that terribly rewarding; playing too many games in that style wears me out quickly. I have to pick my battles there pretty carefully, and only go for the really influential or groundbreaking stuff.

- Brian

August 8, 2020 at 1:49 am

Hey Elzair,

Chet over at the CRPG addict has reviewed Dark Heart of Uukrul. I think he and Jimmy cross pollinate a good bit, so I don’t think he’ll mind me pointing that out!

- Jed

August 7, 2020 at 9:22 pm

I found two points of dissonance when I read this article. So far your judgment seems pretty good to me. Most of my favorite games from this period have made your list. The ones I’ve since played on your recommendation have been pretty good or better — sometimes much better. So one thing that worried me was the possibility that I’d get to the end and find no GoG link because the game was a flop the first time out.

The other point still rankles, though. You don’t really touch on why Hoboken flopped, but I think the reason is perfectly clear. You had to get the joke to buy the
game. If you didn’t, the title made it sound about as promising as Minor League
Baseball Simulator. Superhero stories are mostly power fantasies, which are about being Somebody. Somebody important. Superhero League of Hoboken, with its unimportant setting and dorky superpowers, communicates (incorrectly as it turns out) that the people you’ll be shepherding around are Nobodies.

A lot of the damage is done by the title, but I wonder if the whole premise isn’t too clever by half.

- Andrew Plotkin

August 8, 2020 at 3:17 pm

I dunno. Dorky second-rate superheroes have been a genre staple for a long time — in 1994 you could point at Doom Patrol and the Great Lakes Avengers, just for a start. And let us not forget Matter-Eater Lad and Arm-Fall-Off Boy.

Besides, that whole post-Infocom adventure game era feels like dorky comedy knockoffs of genre power fantasies. Spellcasting 101 was comedy wizards, Sam and Max was comedy cop show, Monkey Island was comedy pirates. I’d say the joke was thoroughly well-understood.

- Bruce Brenneise

August 8, 2020 at 5:48 pm

A parody super hero story without any attachment to a well known comic brand is something that seems like it would have only appealed to a niche within an already niche demographic at the time. One of those genuinely clever or fresh ideas that appeals a lot to creatives, but ends up being a bad ROI from a business perspective, if only because it came at the wrong time. Compound that by having it in a hybrid adventure/RPG computer game in the early 90s? I can’t help thinking how much better this idea could have paid off now. Super heroes are as mainstream as can be, the genre has been done to death enough that there’s a healthy appetite for parody, and you could probably do a version of this game for tablets/mobile. Then again, probably still helps if you’re attached to a recognized brand, like Kickass or Deadpool.

- Joshua Main

August 7, 2020 at 11:16 pm

I know you are about PC games,but the game’s city streets for a map really remind me of Shin Megami Tensei,especially the fourth installment..

- Lisa H.

August 8, 2020 at 5:59 am

I’d never heard of this game before.

And the less said the better about Activision’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, the comprehensively botched graphical sequel to arguably Meretzky’s best single Infocom text adventure of all.

Did you mean to end this sentence with “the better”? (I thoroughly agree, by the way. Oy.)

Hichhiker’s/Rashomon

“Hichhiker’s” sic?

King Midas, who can turn anything into a muffler.

Okay, I actually laughed at this. Puntastic, of course, but clever.

Among CRPGs that predate this one, Pool of Radiance is the only title I know of which does something similar

The Summoning (1992) does something similar, in that each map you enter only has a fixed number of monsters to kill, so once you’ve cleaned it you’ve cleaned it.

available for digital purpose on GOG.com.

Digital purpose?

- Lisa H.

August 8, 2020 at 5:59 am

Sorry, n/m about the first, I see you put “the better” in an earlier spot in the sentence.

- Jimmy Maher

August 8, 2020 at 7:40 am

Thanks! The actual use of King Midas’s power in the game adds another layer of punnery. It doesn’t turn out to involve a car muffler at all…

- Glaurung

August 11, 2020 at 5:30 pm

The original Diablo was another game that didn’t refill areas with enemies – once you’d killed everything on a dungeon level, it stayed empty.

- Sniffnoy

August 8, 2020 at 7:52 am

It seems pretty doubtful to me that that trademark claim would hold up in court, less for antitrust reasons and more for basic, like, that’s-too-common-to-trademark reasons; I have to wonder how they were able to register the trademark in the first place. Looking it up, though, it seems nobody’s challenged it in the US. There was one challenge to it in the UK around 1979, which Marvel and DC somehow won, but I’d have a hard time imagining they’d win such a case today. It’s a little incredible to me that they won it then, but I’m not really familiar with the media landscape of 1979; I guess their case really was more plausible back then?

- Jimmy Maher

August 8, 2020 at 8:13 am

It seems that Marvel and DC have never taken this all the way to a final court verdict in the United States, presumably out of fear of exactly what you describe: that the court would elect to invalidate the trademark, under the long-established precedent that you can’t trademark everyday nouns. They’ve only used it to put pressure on smaller players like Legend without the resources for a long legal battle.

The cultural landscape of the 1970s and earlier was much different. There weren’t so many superhero movies, and the word probably really was more immediately associative of Marvel and DC Comics. Thus an argument for the word as truly unique to them might have been more reasonable at that time. That becomes an interesting legal question in itself: how to handle a trademark which becomes *so* ubiquitous that it becomes an everyday commonplace noun? (It has happened before, of course: witness Kleenex.)

- Sniffnoy

August 9, 2020 at 8:31 pm

This is pretty well-trod legal ground; I don’t understand what the question is here?. Just requires, y’know, an actual case to come up.

- Cliffy

August 28, 2020 at 8:59 pm

The super-hero TM seems valid to me. It’s a common word, but everybody who uses it in a commercial context does so by paying Marvel and DC a license fee. If I were litigating it, I’d have argued that video games and comics are different enough markets that Legend wouldn’t be reaping a benefit of confusion. (I would expect this argument to lose.)

There is certainly no antitrust concern.

- Dom

November 21, 2020 at 4:18 pm

That’s interesting. I just did a quick TM search and there are quite a few active TM’s that are registered to just the word “Superhero” (for all sorts of different things).

If that were the case, why were those allowed to be registered? And if they were issued a TM, then I would assume they wouldn’t need to pay that royalty (although perhaps I’m mistaken). Perhaps Marvel is no longer trying to defend just the name “Superhero”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2020 at 6:35 am

The Marvel and DC trademark, which I believe still technically exists but is seldom if ever enforced by them, applies only to “publications” using the word “superhero.” The linchpin of any court case over a superhero game would be whether it counts as a publication. Since the trademark was granted before videogames existed, it would be a question of limiting oneself strictly to the original intent or taking a more expansive view.

- Greg

August 8, 2020 at 2:01 pm

As the owner of one of those 10k copies sold, I’m happy to see this game getting some love after all these years. :)

- Cliffy

August 28, 2020 at 9:00 pm

Same.

- Corey Cole

August 8, 2020 at 8:46 pm

Lori and I loved Superhero League of Hoboken; it’s one of the few 1990’s games that we still keep proudly on our game shelf.

Then again, maybe we have a soft spot for comedy adventure / RPG hybrids. ;-)

P.S.: Steve Meretzky is a swell guy who deserves many accolades both as a game designer and a person.

- Gnoman

August 9, 2020 at 3:30 am

Having never heard of this game, my impression might be off base, but the parallels to the SNES title Earthbound are striking. The two titles seem to have a similar irreverant tone, both have a “you cleared this” mechanic (in EB, enemies will flee from you if you’ve taken out the area boss, so there’s no need to actually engage them), and both have very unconventional takes on the RPG genre. They even had the initial release in the same year.

The parallel even appears to carry on to the reception. Due to a dated look and the most disastrously stupid marketing campaign in gaming history, Earthbound had very disappointing sales on release, but now holds an extremely high reputation (to the point that there’s a backlash against it) as being one of the finest games of the era.

- CdrJameson

August 9, 2020 at 7:50 pm

For non-American readers: “Mufflers” are the part of a car’s exhaust system that reduce the noise produced, aka the “silencer” in UK English.

- Adam Thornton

August 12, 2020 at 6:24 am

This game was much in mind when I was writing “Bring Me The Head Of Frank Sinatra!” but it was clearly also a huge influence on the much-better known Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. One of these decades you will get to that 2008 masterpiece.

- Torbjörn Andersson

August 14, 2020 at 1:37 pm

“The last great narrative-oriented game of Steve Meretzky’s career”

I guess that means that either The Space Bar wasn’t narrative-oriented, or it wasn’t great. I heard it got some decent reviews at the time, but I never had the chance to play it even though I own a second-hand copy of it.

- Jimmy Maher

August 14, 2020 at 4:19 pm

Yeah, it’s not a good design. All of Meretzky’s bad habits come back with a vengeance for that one. An unfortunate way to bow out.

- TommyR

August 16, 2020 at 2:58 am

I have the box sitting besides me on my game shelf; many fond memories of playing this gem. The music (for your base, especially) is a real ear-worm, and I loved the zany narrative and art style – the enemies remain some of the most unique I’ve ever encountered.

- Steve Meretzky

August 16, 2020 at 7:49 pm

Minor historical note: Doctor Entropy was actually a nickname that I had given my son, who was 4 or so when I started working on SHL. The nickname came from his ability to enter a room and instantly maximize its level of disorder and chaos, whether emptying a toy chest, or the pan cabinet in the kitchen, or pulling every CD off a bookshelf. So when it came time to name the arch-villain in SLH, I just employed that existing name.

- Jimmy Maher

August 17, 2020 at 10:08 am

Sounds like the kitten we just adopted…

- Fuck David Cage

August 17, 2020 at 11:17 pm

I always wondered something: Was this game supposed to have a sequel, or was that just a joke at the end?

- Fuck David Cage

August 17, 2020 at 11:25 pm

I really love this game: This is my favorite C.R.P.G. and it hs a massive amount of creativity and humor, which tend to be lacking in this genre.

I love the detailed character development: The difficulty of the game really depends on how much thought you put into your leveling and skills. I remember that the first time I played it, I was reckless, my characters were underleveled and I was unable to finish it. Next time I played it, I was more careful and built my party well, and though the endgame was very challenging I beat it. I played it recently for a third time, and this time I micromanaged everything, making sure that my most powerful characters had the highest levels and strongest skills, avoiding as much combat as possible until I got my best party members, and the endgame was easy. I like games that encourage thought and care.

Legend was a great game company, made a lot of hilarious adventure games with great deaths. I miss classic adventure games.

- Fuck David Cage

August 18, 2020 at 4:40 pm

An article I would like to see is an investigation of the unfinished superhero R.P.G. Champions. What little was shown of it looked very similar to the classic Freedom Force games, and I would like to know why it was cancelled and if you can find a prototype and see if it deserved to die. You could collaborate with the “RPGenius” from Thinking inside the Box, a great commentator on the genre who played the Freedom Force Force though he did not like them.

- Leo Vellés

October 8, 2020 at 1:08 am

So, if Meretzky was the McCartney of Infocom, who was Lennon?

- minusf

October 10, 2020 at 11:02 am

> they want them to be those of the heroes they already know and love, not a bunch of unknown weirdos like the ones found here.

I think Watchmen disagrees :}

- Ian Crossfield

May 22, 2021 at 2:36 am

Another enjoyable article, about an intriguing game I hadn’t heard about.

Two possible typos (or just curious choice of words):

“console CRPGs” — it feels like there might be a redundancy here.

“if not always in their own time than in ours” –> perhaps this was meant to end with “*then* in ours” ?

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2021 at 8:16 am

Thanks! A CRPG is an RPG played on a computer rather than by friends around a table. It is a bit redundant or just plain weird in a sense to stick the word “console” in front of it — “console computer role-playing games” — but acronyms do sometimes take on an identity of their own, and I think is one of those cases.

Death Gate
August 21, 2020

Licensed games are often dismissed as supremely cynical cash grabs. And for the most part, this judgment is correct: the majority of them are indeed dispiriting affairs.

But no thing in life is all one thing. Take, for instance, the story of Legend Entertainment, which upends all of our prejudices about the licensing racket. Rather than being some evil marketing genius’s idea for maximizing revenue, Legend’s reputation as a peddler primarily of licensed product arose all but accidentally, and at least in the beginning involved very little cynicism at all. It all stems from 1991, when Legend co-founder Mike Verdu decided that he’d really, really like to write a game set in the universe of Gateway, a series of science-fiction novels by Frederick Pohl which he happened to love for reasons pure as the driven snow. When that game was well-received, Legend designer Michael Lindner piped up to say that he would like to make an adaptation of his favorite fantasy series, the Xanth novels of Piers Anthony. And when that too went well, Glen Dahlgren asked for a license to adapt Death Gate, another series of fantasy novels, these ones by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It was all quite shockingly organic — just like one of the press releases put out by one of the other makers of licensed games, the kind that claim that they were actually passionate about Brand X since long before they were given a chance to make a game out of it. In this case, though, it’s the truth.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman were among a new group of authors who began reaching bookstores shelves in the 1980s with novels that had begun as games; thus there was a certain poetic symmetry in Legend eventually completing the circle. Indeed, Weis and Hickman had at least as much impact on gaming writ large over the course of their careers as they did on the state of the art of the fantasy novel.

It all began for Tracy Hickman, as it did for so many others, with tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. He was introduced to the game by his fiancée Laura Curtis in the late 1970s, when the two were starving university students in their home town of Salt Lake City, Utah. After getting married and starting a family, the couple looked for a way to justify their hobby when they couldn’t even afford “church shoes” for their two young children. (Like a surprising number of significant figures in gaming history, they were and remain devout Mormons.) So, they founded DayStar West Media to publish two pre-written Dungeons & Dragons “adventure modules.” These sold in fairly minuscule numbers, but provided an entrée to TSR, the maker of the game. In 1982, TSR offered Tracy Hickman a job as an in-house designer. And so the couple piled their children and all the luggage that would fit into the back of their battered old Volkswagen Rabbit and set off for Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the tabletop RPG scene’s Mecca.

Tracy has since said many times that the idea for Dragonlance, the Hickmans’ master stroke in the fields of both games and books, was born on that long drive. They’d been sent a copy of a marketing study TSR had commissioned, which said that, as Tracy remembers: “1) Dungeons & Dragons is your core product. 2) You have lots of dungeons. 3) You need more dragons.” Ergo, Dragonlance would be a series of adventure modules, each revolving around a different type of dragon.

But its short-term goal of injecting more dragons into the mix has little to do with Dragonlance’s ultimate importance. The Hickmans conceived it as a series of adventures which would be, as tabletop-gaming historian Shannon Applecline puts it, “plot-oriented” rather than “location-based.” Instead of engaging in the mere tactical challenge of clearing a dungeon of monsters and traps and looting its contents, players would get to live out a complicated epic story worthy of Tolkien himself, set in a brand new, richly detailed fantasy world.

Dragonlance evolved into one of the most ambitious projects TSR ever undertook, one that remains to this day an enduring icon of its hobby. A groundbreaking trans-media experience at a time when such things were much rarer than they’ve become today, its story filled twelve adventure modules, supported by numerous source books — and, most importantly for our purposes, by a trilogy of thick novels which walked its readers through the modules. TSR’s management was first inclined to hire a “real” author to write them, but when the initial pool of applicants proved underwhelming they agreed to let Tracy Hickman and another staffer named Margaret Weis have the assignment. (The important contributions of Laura Hickman — née Laura Curtis — not only in the beginning stages of the project but throughout its duration, went sadly uncredited.)

Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first volume of the Dragonlance Chronicles, appeared in late 1984. It wasn’t quite at the level of Tolkien; you could almost hear the dice rolling behind the scenes during its lovingly detailed round-by-round descriptions of Dungeons & Dragons combat. Still, it offered up a fast-paced story with appealing characters, and for many or most of its readers the Dungeons & Dragons-ness of the whole affair was actually a feature rather than a bug. It launched TSR into a whole new field of publishing, one that would eventually become more profitable than the games which continued to inform the novels so intimately.

Weis and Hickman, meanwhile, saw their names suddenly at the top of genre-fiction bestseller lists. Almost overnight, the two heretofore obscure game designers became household names among fans of fantasy fiction, bankable enough to be sought after by the old guard of American publishing. They stuck with TSR long enough to write a second, standalone trilogy of Dragonlance novels, but then departed the games industry entirely for more lucrative climes, leaving others there — perhaps most notably the company White Wolf, with their World of Darkness series of Gothic-horror RPGs — to build upon the storytelling revolution they had fostered.

After signing with the Random House imprint of Bantam Books, Weis and Hickman churned out the paperbacks at the steady pace of a novel every six to nine months: first came a Darksword trilogy, then a Rose of the Prophet trilogy. And then, beginning in 1990, came the seven-book Death Gate Cycle.

Dragon Wing, the first of the Death Gate novels. (You can’t ever go wrong with dragons, right?)

Like so many fantasy novels, the Death Gate books are most of all an exercise in world-building, and so your level of enjoyment of them must ultimately be determined by your level of interest in their elaborate castles in the air. As my regular readers know all too well by now, I haven’t been part of that target market for a long time. Nevertheless, here’s the capsule version:

The books involve two races of ultra-advanced beings, known as the Patryns and Sartans, who inhabit the far future of what would appear to be our own planet Earth. Long before the main story of the novels begins, these two races went to war with one another. The Sartans won the war, whereupon they placed the remaining Patryns in an inter-dimensional prison known as the Labyrinth. For rather convoluted reasons, they then sundered the Earth into four separate worlds, each based upon one of the Aristotelian elements — air, water, earth, and fire — and each inhabited mostly by less godly races, whom the Patryns and Sartans traditionally call the Mensch. So much for the backstory. The books proper describe how the Patryns and Sartans finally reconcile and heal their shattered realm. Weis and Hickman were just publishing the fifth of the seven books when Glen Dahlgren over at Legend decided that he’d like to make a game out of them.

Dahlgren had originally been hired to work at Legend as an assistant programmer. But, as was typical of most employees of the tiny company, his responsibilities bloomed in all sorts of unexpected directions after he arrived there. A talent for music led him to become Legend’s in-house sound man, responsible for soundtracks and sound effects alike. A talent for organization led him to become Legend’s quality-control man, overseeing a far-flung network of outside testers. And then he was selected to become one of the three men who put together Gateway, a project consciously engineered by Bob Bates, who had co-founded Legend alongside Mike Verdu, as a boot camp for training up new designers. After that, Dahlgren did half of the design work on Gateway 2, before being given permission to make his own game from start to finish; that game became Death Gate. Bates and Verdu put an enormous amount of faith in him — the sort of faith which one usually only sees manifested at small, young companies like this one, where bureaucracy is minimal and second-guessing rare. Whether or not Dalhgren realized it at the time, his bosses gave him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Of course, Legend had to secure the license before anything else could happen. Fortunately for everyone, this proved not to be terribly difficult. The negotiations were aided by the fact that Weis and Hickman remained enthusiastic gamers themselves; they made sure that their agent and publisher got the deal done with very little hassle, and even agreed to provide an original novella to include in the box. Like Bates and Verdu, they were almost bizarrely trusting of Dahlgren. They didn’t even blink when he proposed packing the entire story arc of the Death Gate series — some 3000 pages in text form — into a single game. Although only five of the planned seven novels had yet appeared when the project began, Weis and Hickman freely shared their plans for the remainder of the series — most importantly, for the big finale where the worlds would be unified once again.

In  what he called his “high concept” proposal for the game, Dahlgren laid out the plot in the broadest possible strokes:

This game is about a warrior whose race was imprisoned thousands of years ago in a place called the Labyrinth. His people were defeated by another race who broke up the world into four realms connected only by the Death Gate. In the game, the hero seeks to re-form the world by finding and assembling the scattered pieces of the World Seal.

None of it should work; it should feel like the Cliff’s Notes abridgement of the novels that it is. And yet Dalhgren made it work against all odds, largely by emphasizing the worlds of the books over the details of their plots. His most dazzling stroke was the insertion of the aforementioned World Seal as his McGuffin — one piece of it on each of the four worlds, in classic adventure-game fashion. With this scavenger hunt to serve as a straightforward motivation, you can get a taste of each world and interact with some of its characters without getting too bogged down in the more elaborate plot machinations of the books. Then fast-forward to the reunification, and you’re done.

This isn’t to say that well-nigh encyclopedic amounts of material from the books aren’t missing from the game. These leavings encompass not just countless details of the environments and cultures that Weis and Hickman created, but also nuances of theme and character. The central protagonist of both the novels and the game is a Patryn named Haplo, but he cuts a very different figure in the two mediums. In the books, he’s a morally ambiguous character at best, a cold fish full of prejudice and at times outright malevolence; in the game, he’s a naïve innocent whose mistakes all arise from the deceptions perpetrated upon him by his master Xar, a fellow the player can see is up to no good about five minutes after meeting him for the first time. It’s telling that Dahlgren refers to Haplo as his game’s “hero” in the extract above; few readers of the books would choose that word. To wit: in the first of the novels, Haplo deliberately engineers a war on the world known as Arianus; in the game, he prevents one instead with a dose of good old-fashioned peace, love, and understanding. Johnny L. Wilson, the editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World magazine as well as precisely the fan of the books that I am not, wrote in his otherwise positive preview of the game that “I just wish Haplo had a little more anger in him.”

Sometimes Death Gate can feel a bit like a vintage Star Trek episode, with Haplo in Captain Kirk’s role of the man who swoops in to solve centuries of conflict between two commercial breaks.

Nevertheless, even Wilson admitted that Death Gate passed the acid test of any adaptation: if you didn’t know that the game was based on a series of books before playing it, you wouldn’t feel like you were missing anything. It truly works as a self-contained experience, while still capturing the feel of its source material. It manages to present the complex cosmology of the novels in an intuitive, natural way, without ever burying you under info-dumps.

Death Gate has much else going for it as well. By the time of its release in late 1994, Legend had quietly turned into the most consistent adventure studio in the industry, with a design aesthetic defined by an absolute commitment to fairness which even LucasArts couldn’t match. If at times this commitment could lead Legend to play it a bit too safe — Legend’s puzzles seldom evince the inspired lunacy of LucasArts at their best — it’s vastly preferable to the other extreme, as exemplified by the sloppy designs of Sierra, their other major competitor. Glen Dahlgren recently wrote on the subject, using terms that seem suspiciously similar to the design philosophy which Bob Bates has repeatedly explicated in his own writings and lectures:

Every puzzle should provide an “Aha!” moment, where either you feel smart for having figured it out, or you discover the answer elsewhere and smack your head for NOT figuring it out. If you don’t have enough information in the game to figure out the solution logically, you never get that moment. In an adventure game, that moment is the fun!

The design isn’t intended to torment you or to “beat” you (the designer isn’t even there to enjoy besting the player, so it isn’t a satisfying goal to begin with). My philosophy has always been that a player puts his trust in the designer to take care of him. Once the player has lost that trust, he’ll give up.

So, while there are no puzzles in Death Gate that you’ll remember for years — or even days — afterward, there are likewise none that unduly block your progress through the story. Thanks to its conversations that can go on for minutes at a time, it plays almost as much like an interactive storybook as a puzzle-solving adventure game.

Is this a puzzle I see before me?

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its share of more conventionally gamey pleasures as well. A highlight is its rune-based magic system, which smacks of the classic CRPGs Dungeon Master and Ultima Underworld more than that of any other adventure game with which I’m familiar. Combining the runes into magical recipes, then trying said recipes out on anything and everything, is a consistent source of fun. A surprising number of the silly things you can try are implemented, usually to very amusing effect. You can’t lock yourself out of victory without knowing it when doing stuff like this, and, while you can die, resurrection is always just a click of the “undo” button away. Thus you can experiment to your heart’s content.

Mucking about with magic runes…

The interface is the one which Legend introduced in Companions of Xanth: fully point and click now rather than parser-based, but still retaining a pronounced literary feel that betrays Bates and Verdu’s original conception of Legend as the heirs to Infocom’s legacy. Although the characters you meet are voice-acted, descriptions and narrations are still presented only in text.

It’s easy to see which screens (like this one) are rendered in SVGA and which screens (like the previous one) are not.

Death Gate was, however, the first Legend game to make partial use of SVGA graphics, at a resolution of 640 X 480 rather than the 320 X 200 of VGA. The difference is marked. In fact, I’d go so far as to call the transition to SVGA the most significant transformation in computer-game audiovisuals since the Commodore Amiga appeared on the scene in 1985. SVGA games of the 1990s — the non-3D ones, at least — no longer have to be graded on a curve when it comes to their visual aesthetics. Much of the art in Death Gate would fit perfectly well into the latest indie sensation on Steam.

In another first for Legend, the opening movie and some of the later cut scenes are pre-rendered 3D, built using 3D Studio, a tool which was making a steady march across the games industry at the time.

All of these good qualities serve to make the rather negative review of Death Gate which Computer Gaming World published after Johnny Wilson’s positive preview seem all the more jarring. Peter Olafson dinged the game for its supposed inconsistencies of tone, for thoughtlessly mixing the serious with the comedic. This really is a problem with many adventure games then and now, which tend to collapse into comedy as a crutch for their ridiculously convoluted puzzles. And yet I don’t see Death Gate as one of those games at all. On the contrary: it strikes me as doing an admirable job of sticking to its guns and avoiding this tendency. The humor here is actually of a piece with the humor of the source material, as even Olafson admits in a tossed-off sentence that desperately needs further elaboration: “Even though this comic relief is present in the books, it seemed distracting and inappropriate in the game.” (Why exactly is that, Mr. Olafson?) Whether or not one finds the befuddled old wizard Zifnab, who wandered into the Death Gate universe from a dimensional warp in the Dragonlance world of Krynn, as hilarious as he’s obviously meant to be, his portrayal in the game isn’t notably different from his portrayal in the novels.

But another of Olafson’s criticisms is more telling, so much so that I’d like to quote it in full here:

I occasionally was haunted by a feeling that Death Gate’s technology has outstripped its genre. All the amenities lavished on the game — the enormous reservoir of digitized speech, the SVGA graphics, the animated cut scenes — build expectations for a game mechanism to complement them. And as agreeable as the engine may be, the game proper is essentially the same old object-oriented adventuring: take everything that’s not nailed down and use it in a conspiracy to take everything that is. There is something inherently trivial about inhabiting a lavish world and being stranded simply by want of a certain item. [It] is rather like having an orchestra play “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

If there is an overarching criticism to be raised against Death Gate, it’s this lack of will to innovate beyond the traditional confines of its genre. Indeed, the same criticism can be leveled against Legend’s catalog as a whole. While their adventures were the most consistently fair and literate in the industry during the 1990s, they were far from groundbreaking in formal terms. But then again, this eschewing of dizzying leaps in favor of keeping their feet planted firmly on solid ground does much to explain just why their games remain so playable to this day. In an industry that often fetishizes vision at the expense of craft, Legend’s games show how satisfying the tried and true can be when executed with thoroughgoing care.

Death Gate is a typical Legend game in another respect: it sold in reasonable but not overwhelming numbers; its sales figures remained in the five digits rather than the six or even seven to which the flashiest releases could aspire by 1994. Despite that, it wound up playing a role in Legend’s long-term evolution which was belied by its middling commercial performance.

Like many other small publishers, Legend found themselves increasingly threatened by the winds of change which blew through their industry as the 1990s wore on. The arrival of CD-ROM increased budgets enormously, thanks to the voice acting and richer and more elaborate graphic presentations that became not just possible but expected in this new era of 650 MB of storage. Meanwhile there arose a CD-ROM-fueled bubble in the marketplace, an ironic parallel to the bookware flash in the pan of exactly a decade earlier: titans of old media, from Disney to Random House, once again turned their attention to computer games as the potential Next Big Thing in publishing. How could little Legend hope to compete with the likes of them?

Well, as a wise person once said, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. By this point, Legend had established a solid relationship with Random House, first through their adaptations of Frederick Pohl’s Gateway novels and now with their work on Death Gate. With Random House eager to jump into computer games in a more concerted way, it made sense to both parties to cement the relationship — to, as they put it in their corporate-speak press release, “intensify the synergy established between them.” Mike Verdu spoke to me about it recently using more recognizably human language:

What drew Random House’s attention was the identity we had developed as a company that could take literary licenses and create properties out of them with the respect their authors thought they deserved. We had credibility as people who could take other authors’ worlds and build essentially new fictions in them, and take care of them and be a trusted partner in doing that. That had become sort of our trademark. As Random House was surveying what was then called “the new-media landscape,” they saw this as a very natural extension of their strength; it seemed like a very happy partnership.

Random House injected $2.5 million into Legend in the fall of 1994, at virtually the same instant that Death Gate was hitting store shelves. The first fruits of the investment would appear the next year, when Legend released a three-CD full-motion-video extravaganza starring Michael Dorn, the actor best known as Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation. That game cost almost an order of magnitude more to make than the ones Legend had been making before it, but its budget didn’t stem from arrogance or decadence. Legend was just trying to survive. And, accordingly to the conventional wisdom anyway, this was the only way to do it in the midst of the CD-ROM bubble.

In the end, the Random House deal would prove a mixed blessing at best. It gave the larger company a great deal of control over the smaller one — more control in reality than the latter had realized it would. It was structured to indemnify Random House against loss, such that Legend was on the hook to pay much of the investment back if they didn’t meet certain financial targets. For this reason not least, Random House would play an outsize role in the future in deciding which games Legend got to make. Not coincidentally, licensed games would come to dominate Legend’s output more than ever. In fact, during the entirety of their existence after the Random House deal Legend would release just one more game that wasn’t based on someone else’s preexisting intellectual property.

It was good, then, that they had a special talent for building upon the creativity of others. For they’d be doing a lot more of that sort of thing, sometimes for reasons that perhaps weren’t quite as pure as the honest love for the books in question that had spawned Gateway, Companions of Xanth, and Death Gate. Such was life if you wanted to run with the big boys.

(Sources: the book Designers and Dragons, ’70 to ’79 by Shannon Appelcline; Computer Gaming World of June 1993, November 1994, and February 1995; Questbusters 115; Retro Gamer 180. Online sources include Glen Dahlgren’s memoir of the making of Death Gate and Tracy Hickman’s interview at Mormon Artist. And my huge thanks to Bob Bates and Mike Verdu for their insights about Death Gate and all other things Legend during personal interviews.

Death Gate was briefly available for digital purchase at GOG.com, but has since disappeared again, presumably due to the difficulties associated with clearing the rights for licensed titles. It’s too large for me to host here even if I wasn’t nervous about the legal implications of doing so, but I have prepared a stub of the game that’s ready to go if you just add to the appropriate version of DOSBox for your platform of choice and an ISO image of the CD-ROM. A final hint: as of this writing, you can find the latter on archive.org if you look hard enough.)

Comments
26 Responses

- Jake Wildstrom

August 21, 2020 at 8:31 pm

You definitely touched on it in your write-up, but Haplo struck a pretty unimpressive character in the game. As you mentioned he comes off as a lot more well-intentioned and innocent, but even beyond that his dialogue options and actions in the game paint him as oddly dimwitted and powerless. This last is a particular departure from the novels which shows the danger of adapting a work whose central character is extremely powerful: having a sense of Haplo from the book, it’s oddly dissonant to have him sneaking in unlocked windows and going on quests to fetch bits of pipe for dwarves where the book character would accomplish pretty much all these petty tasks with clandestine rune-complexes and/or violence.

- Fuck David Cage

August 22, 2020 at 2:15 am

My opinion on this game is the opposite of the last Legend, Superhero League of Hoboken: It ruins the story, most of the good parts are taken verbatim from the books and the ending makes no sense because so much was cut. I have not read the books or played the game in a long time so my memory is pretty hazy, but later in the books you find out that the Sartans and the Patryns are not black and white and that both have done great and terrible things, information which puts certain discoveries into perspective, like the Patryn graves in the world of the dwarfs. This game skips from the third book to the middle of the last book, leaving out all the ambiguity and making the discoveries into plot holes.

- Emily Bowman

August 22, 2020 at 5:26 am

I can’t entirely blame them, Serpent Mage and The Hand of Chaos ground the entire series to a halt. It was as if they started entirely over with the worldbuilding (just like Elven Star) without a direction. It was only in the last couple novels that they locked into how to write a taut novel.

- Torbjörn Andersson

August 26, 2020 at 6:59 am

I think I’ve played all of the Legend Entertainment adventure games except Blackstone Chronicles at some point (my memory is very fuzzy about some of them), and of the non-parser ones Death Gate is my favorite. But maybe it helps that I never read the books?

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2020 at 7:25 am

I think there’s something to that. I too don’t have any particular investment in the books, and thoroughly enjoyed Death Gate the game.

- Jay Brasch

August 22, 2020 at 3:49 am

I don’t think your statement is technically wrong, since video standards support multiple resolutions. But I think VGA usually implies 640×480 resolution. And SVGA means 800×600.

- Emily Bowman

August 22, 2020 at 5:06 am

VGA was 640×400 if you stuck with 16-color, but only 320×200 if you wanted 256-color, which most game designers wanted to target by 1990. Similar for SVGA. The enormous immersion difference of richer color vs higher resolution was worth it for games, whereas desktop only needed 16 colors.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2020 at 10:57 am

Yes, exactly. The early SVGA standard for games was 640 X 480 with 256 colors; VGA was 320 X 200 with 256 colors.

- Martin

August 22, 2020 at 4:47 pm

Must have been kind of “click-ey” experience in the switching of screen modes with the multi-sync monitors of the day.

- arthurdawg

August 22, 2020 at 3:53 pm

The Dragonlance Chronicles and the Legends trilogies are guilty pleasures… not great literature… but as an early 80s AD&D player… awesome!

The ensuing 400+ Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels not so much. Probably… haven’t read the last 380 of them!

- GeoX

August 23, 2020 at 3:10 am

Yeah! I read WAY too many awful Dragonlance books back in the day, but I too remember the original Chronicles and Legends with great fondness. There’s a part of me that wants to revisit them, but I don’t know that that’s a good idea: was I just a very dumb kid?

- Kevin Stevens

August 26, 2020 at 3:40 pm

I actually did this about a year ago. They held up ok- some bits did not age well- I remember being almost endlessly amused by Tas and Kender as a preteen/teen, but was not impressed in the second go-round. Raistlin/Camaron and their dynamic was still pretty good, and Raistlin’s just pure coldness to his well-meaning brother was just as frustrating (in a good way). Bupu and the gully dwarves storyline held up well as well. Overall the pace is very fast- almost too fast- between book one and two (or was it two and three?) they just completely skipped over an adventure where they retrieve a significant artifact, but considering that I wasn’t too impressed with the writing overall, I was happy that things kept moving.

Overall, I remembered them more fondly, and in some ways wish I kept it that way.

- Remi

August 22, 2020 at 9:22 pm

Nerd mode engaged: Keeping in mind the highest resolution achievable with a plain VGA in 256 color mode was 360×480. I think Quake and Duke Nukem did support these oddball resolutions, if I recall properly.

- GeoX

August 23, 2020 at 3:08 am

It’s not the sort of thing I generally read nowadays, but man, when I was in eighth grade, the Death Gate Cycle was the coolest, most evocative thing EVER (okay, the last few books were a bit lame, but STILL). Never got to play the game at the time, alas, and I kind of think I’ve missed my interval; I probably would’ve loved it at the time, but I doubt it would do a lot for me nowadays.

- Mikko

August 23, 2020 at 4:37 pm

My 15 year old self would have agreed with your opinion!

If you keep doing something, you may eventually get better at it – I believe Weis and Hickman(s) are proof of that, as the Death Gate Cycle was overall much better written than the first Dragonlance novels. Compared to all the bulk fantasy I consumed in my adolescence – Robert Jordan, Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, any number of Dragonlance/Forgotten Realms stuff – the Death Gate novels seemed to belong to the top category (“pretty good, quite memorable, maybe even some original ideas”).

Looking back at my teenage tastes, a lot of that might have had to do with the antihero Haplo, who was indeed a cold fish and quite bastardly, but still somewhat “sympathetic”, unlike, say, the protagonist of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant… I never got past the first few of chapters of that one. The worry of the (unsophisticated, 15-year old) reader that Haplo might end up murdering all the other characters in the book created a lot of useful tension :)

Somehow I missed that the game was available on GOG for a time. It would have been interesting to try, at least. Darn it!

- Not Fenimore

August 23, 2020 at 6:56 pm

Ugh, Thomas Covenant. Like, the idea there (“since the Chosen One is always so arbitrary anyways, what if he were an actual, complete, unredeemed asshole?”) is a clever one, but it’s the kind of idea that could support a short story. Like, we have to spend all our time riding with this asshole.

Death Gate… man, I too enjoyed the heck out of this in high school and I too think the first four, where the worldbuilding is at its most untrammeled, are the best. Not that it ends weakly, per se, just that “flying rocks! Which means water is desperately scarce since there’s no water table”, etc, are what really drew me into the series.

(Also, was anyone else thrown by the image of the Labrynth above? I always had the impression it physically looked more like a savannah and the route through it was more metaphysical than anything so literal as a maze. Which may have just been my teenage misreading, but I feel like it fits with the Sartans’ condescending paternalism.)

- Martin

August 24, 2020 at 12:09 am

I assume nobody ever did a Thomas Covenant game or for that matter ever used Covenant assets for anything else such as a film.

- Rowan Lipkovits

August 24, 2020 at 9:19 pm

There is a 1985 pseudo-Roguelike called “The Land”, which the CRPG Addict reviewed at http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/06/game-101-land-1985-2009.html

- Steph C

August 24, 2020 at 5:30 pm

As someone who loved the books (I particularly liked ‘Elven Star’, with the Dyson sphere and the vast jungles and the Tytans and Zifnab), I had no idea there had ever been a game version, so this was fun to read.

- Ross

August 24, 2020 at 9:34 pm

deceptions perpetrated upon him by his master Xar, a fellow the player can see is up to no good about five minutes after meeting him for the first time

I remember being struck by just how much less evil Xar ended up being than it seemed he obviously telegraphed as being.

- Joaquim Nogueira

August 28, 2020 at 11:02 am

This was the game that reconciled me with adventure games. Most of them had puzzles that seemed illogical to me, with a lot of pixel hunting or collecting objects with the hope that they would be useful further on; but not with this one and that’s why it was one of the few that I managed to finish without resorting to walkthroughs.

Having never read the books on which the game was based, the fact that the main character has a personality different from his homonym from the books didn’t bother me at all. The puzzles were very intelligent and when I could solve them I got a pleasant feeling of satisfaction. Especially the puzzle where the main character had to kill himself (sorry for the spoiler). Yes, this was one of the most clever puzzles of the whole game!

But not everything was good. The game did not start with my usual configuration. I had to start the computer with my own floppy disk (don’t recall how I got it), which was only good for that game, and then if I wanted to do some real work on the computer I had to start it again.
The second aspect that displeased me was the final section of the labyrinth. Very, very, very small! I was expecting it to be at least two or three times bigger. I got the impression that the budget for the game was ending and they had to finish it in a hurry.

A year later (I think) Legend Entertainment released “Shannara” which looked to me like a bigger version of “Death Gate” (they were both fantasy games), with better designs and a touch of RPG. Also very accessible. And I must not have been the only one to be sad about what happened to the main female character. But when “Mission Critical” came up it was the big disappointment: wonderful drawings (in SVGA), but an extremely difficult adventure that I could only complete following the walkthrough.It was a good story, but very hard, with some of the flaws of the old “Sierra online” games. And I regretted that the author of “Death Gate” had not also been in charge of “Mission Critical”: I believe the game would have been much better.

- Wolfeye M.

August 31, 2020 at 3:31 am

I’m a big fan the Death Gate books. I first read them when I was a young lad, and after I reread them as an adult, I found that they still held up and we’re an enjoyable read.

I never knew they made a game. Figures it’d be an adventure game, a genre I don’t enjoy, instead of an RPG. Oy vey.

Haplo is definitely kinda an arsehole at first, I think that’s why they gave him the dog, to show he’s not completely an arsehole. His whole arch is becoming even less of an arsehole as the series progresses. It’s kinda a shame that the game didn’t have that, because they might as well not have even called the protagonist Haplo without how he changes in the books.

Do they even have the Dog in the game?

- Jimmy Maher

September 1, 2020 at 3:10 pm

The dog does make an appearance, and sacrifices himself for Haplo. Glen Dahlgren says in his memoir of the making of the game that the moment made some players cry. That strikes me as perhaps laying it on a bit thick, but who knows?

- Ross

September 1, 2020 at 5:16 pm

Also, the dog is involved in a puzzle that I think is pretty darn good.

- Beau

September 8, 2020 at 4:48 pm

**So, while there are no puzzles in Death Gate that you’ll remember for years…***

I haven’t played this game in twenty years and I vividly remember the vortex puzzle, one of my favorites of all time.

- Ross

September 9, 2020 at 3:13 am

Heck, the mirror Haplo puzzle sticks with me unto this day.

Bullfrog after Populous
September 4, 2020

I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture. And then there’s me. I had the blank canvas, accidentally knocked a can of paint over, and it went splat. And an art dealer has seen it and said, “That’s brilliant.” Well, I know all I’ve done is kick a can of paint. And that’s what I believe really happened with Populous.

— Peter Molyneux

When we last met Peter Molyneux and his little database-developer-turned-games-studio Bullfrog Software, they had just made Populous and watched in disbelief as it blew up huge. The radically innovative game joined Will Wright’s SimCity as one of the progenitors of a hazily delineated new genre which the media labelled the “god game” for the way it gave you direct control over an environment but only indirect control over the people therein. As Populous became a hit on three continents and sold in the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of copies, Bullfrog struggled to reckon with the cognitive dissonances of their changed circumstances. In a matter of months, they went from a handful of poverty-stricken dreamers pissing in the sink of their miserable, toilet-less hovel of an office to Britain’s single most successful and respected games studio of all.

The trappings of their success tended to trail behind their sales figures: when a group of Japanese executives stopped by the Bullfrog hole-in-the-wall to discuss plans for publishing Populous in their country, the senile pensioner who lived below met them at the bottom of the stairs with a mop and proceeded to beat them off the premises. “We had to get out of there as soon as possible,” says Molyneux. They wound up in a more conventional business park, whose more conventional tenants complained endlessly about their penchant for racing skateboards through the hallways and shooting BB guns out the windows. (“We were brats,” admits Molyneux today. “Horrible, horrible brats.”)

While certainly preferable to failure, success could be its own kind of mixed blessing. Expectations of Bullfrog, which had previously been nonexistent, were suddenly sky high. After a quickie add-on disk that brought additional levels and environments to Populous, they made a rather shockingly unambitious little platformer called Flood, a project of Bullfrog programmer Sean Cooper. Released only in Europe for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST by Bullfrog’s publisher Electronic Arts, it garnered a collective shrug from the magazines; the market was already flooded with platformers much like this one, often with more compelling level designs. This sort of derivative work wasn’t at all what people had come to expect from Bullfrog after Populous.

Luckily, they had something else in the works. Released in late 1990, some eighteen months after Populous, the real-time war game Powermonger evinced a lot of innovation on its own terms even as it clearly drew from the same set of techniques and approaches that had yielded Bullfrog’s first hit. Instead of casting you as a god able to alter the very landscape of the world on behalf of your mortal followers, Powermonger cast you as an ordinary human on a mission to conquer the world — all 195 regional cross-sections of it, one region at a time. The ethos of indirect control that had made Populous so unique remained: you had to convince the people to rally to your cause, and had to work constantly to keep them loyal to you. Ditto a focus on large-scale environmental effects: you had to worry about the ecology of the land in order to feed, water, house, and equip your people. (After all, it’s hard to build much of anything if you’ve already clear-cut all of the forests…) While Computer Gaming World’s Johnny L. Wilson, who was always eager to read meaning into games, may have been overstating the case when he called Powermonger “a dynamic treatise on the human capacity for aggrandizement and the potential consequences therein,” the same magazine’s description of it as the “thinking person’s Populous” was a good deal more tenable.

Unfortunately, it suffered from many of the same flaws as its predecessor — flaws which would become consistent hallmarks of Molyneux’s work in general. He obviously wanted to give players a lot of game by providing 195 levels, but, being all procedurally generated, they didn’t really build upon one another or force the player to reevaluate the tools at her disposal in interesting new ways. Powermonger was great fun at first — thus all the glowing reviews in the magazines — but it started to feel a little bit rote a little bit too quickly.

The graphics in Powermonger got a dramatic upgrade over those in Populous, yielding not only aesthetic but also practical benefits: it was now possible to rotate your view of the landscape and zoom it in and out as needed, while the variety of landscape features was dramatically greater. “In Populous,” noted Molyneux, “we had hills, houses, and rivers. Thanks to this new system, we’re able to generate waterfalls, cliffs, valleys, mountains, proper towns, road networks, forests… it’s a real world!”

Molyneux originally conceived of Powermonger not so much as a standalone game as an engine for running a variety of them. After the first game with its vaguely Medieval theme, he talked of making a World War I version, a high-fantasy version, an Asian version for the Japanese market, and a version focusing on the American Civil War for the punters in the United States. But Powermonger, while moderately successful, never became the sensation that Populous was, and most of those plans were abandoned; only the World War I data disk ever appeared. Powermonger “appeals to a lot of people who like very, very high strategic games, but it needed that extra element that would appeal to everybody and it didn’t have that,” said Molyneux after the dust had settled. He blamed the lack largely on the pressure Bullfrog was under from Electronic Arts to complete and release the game in time for Christmas, which meant that it didn’t get played prior to release to anywhere near the extent of Populous.

Still searching for that elusive second million-selling hit, Bullfrog opted to drink even deeper from the old Populous well next time around. Their game for the Christmas of 1991 was Populous II, which mated the improved interface and graphics of Powermonger to the literal god-game theme of Populous I. There was slightly more semblance of a plot this time out: you played a minor deity who must fight her way through a pantheon of some 35 Greek gods, culminating in Zeus himself. Your powers too were more varied than last time out; no longer could people scoff that the game was nothing more than an elaborate topography simulator, not with your ability to spawn tidal waves, whirlwinds, and lightning strikes. Yet one only had to glance at the screen, or read about its more than 1000 (!) anonymous, procedurally-generated levels to know that this was still very much Populous, for both good and bad. It sold well to the committed faithful and spawned the by-now standard expansion pack; in a sop to the Japanese market, where the first Populous had become so popular as to spawn graphic novels and symphony concerts recreating the game’s soundtrack, the expansion was set in ancient Japan rather than Greece. But even so, Populous II made relatively few new converts to the cause at home or abroad.

Populous II. Molyneux admits to feeling “ashamed” at the time to be doing a sequel at all, but he felt obligated to deliver a direct follow-up to such a massive hit. He considers Populous II a reasonable but somewhat unimaginative sequel, which in rather typical industry fashion added a lot more stuff to the template of its predecessor in the form of new godly powers, but failed to drill down on what actually made the original fun. A fair assessment, I think.

Although their latest games hadn’t sold quite as well as the original world-beating Populous, Bullfrog remained the preeminent British games studio in the minds of many. Their status was rivaled only by that of DMA Design, whose Lemmings had become upon its release in early 1991 the most successful single British game since Populous. But DMA was located way off in Dundee, Scotland, a country away from the press on Fleet Street, and when an intrepid journalist did make the trek out to those hinterlands its founder David Jones didn’t provide as many choice quotes as the gregarious Peter Molyneux, then as now one of his industry’s greatest raconteurs. The press loved him not least because he was so willing to go against the official industry position on many subjects, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Asked about the effects of piracy — a subject guaranteed to produce predictions of an imminent gaming apocalypse from any other prominent industry figure — Molyneux shocked his interviewer by replying mildly that “to be honest, I don’t think that piracy hurts.” Likewise, he never hesitated to air his real feelings about competing products: “If you’ve got a crappy shoot’em-up style game, then that’s going to be pirated to hell — and it should be because it’s not even worth using this planet’s resources to produce the game.”

The chain-smoking, perpetually hyperactive Molyneux got on particularly splendidly with the laddish British Amiga magazines of the time. He was up for pretty much anything when they came calling — as when he agreed to be interviewed about a recent trip to Japan while sitting on the toilet. From here he regaled his interlocutors with anecdotes about geisha girls, and told them that “Peter Molyneux” meant “wooden tit” in Japanese: “If I wanted to break the ice anywhere I just said ‘Molyneux’ and the whole room would break up.” He cultivated the persona in such interviews of a slightly befuddled ordinary bloke who liked to spend his time down at the pub when he wasn’t making games, who had no idea how he had stumbled into this charmed career of his. Substitute playing games for making them, and remove the charmed career, and he seemed of a piece with most of the people reading the interviews. He never missed an opportunity to run down his programming skills. “When we wrote Populous,” he said, “we barely knew how to put a sprite onto the screen.” In the end, he claimed, “programming isn’t really that skillful. Anybody can learn to program, anybody, within a week.” Asked to describe Bullfrog in a single sentence, he did so in three words: “Disorganized but keen.” Or, as he put it on another occasion: “We write computer games. We’re not businessmen.”

The Peter Molyneux toilet interview for Zero magazine in December of 1991. Molyneux had by then perfected the art of press relations, which in the case of the gaming magazines often came down to the simple expedient of taking the youthful journalists down to the pub and getting them blind drunk.

In keeping with this everyman persona, Molyneux evinced no interest whatsoever in professional credentials. Recruitment at Bullfrog operated on the principle of “show us what you got,” via little classified advertisements placed in the nether reaches of the same magazines that were featuring Molyneux and his games on their covers. Bullfrog endeared themselves even more by running tutorials in said magazines, teaching graphics and programming tricks; at least one series of tutorials concluded with a contest for those who had been following along diligently, the prize a potential job with Bullfrog. “You too can make games!” was the message. And people loved Molyneux for it.

But there was also another side to Molyneux: the side that was a real businessman, whatever his claims to the contrary — a businessman who was watching his industry with eagle eyes. When someone deigned to ask him a serious question, he could deliver a cogent, sometimes even prescient response. For example, when asked whether personal computers would ultimately win out over consoles as game-playing devices, he had this to say:

Definitely not. PCs are too much bother, even with CDs. You’ve got to configure one of the 30 trillion sound cards’ 30 trillion settings. I don’t understand all these DMAs and IRQs and all that crap. I just fiddle around until I get it right. Until they sort that out, the machine is just going to terrify people.

About the general state of games in the early 1990s, he had this to say:

The current trend in games like simulations, adventures, and some sports sims is that they are getting progressively harder, cleverer, and more challenging. But that doesn’t necessarily make them better games. The trouble is that a lot of games are getting so hard that only the very best gamers can play them. The first rule of game design is that you mustn’t produce games that are too complex for people to play. Being overly complex for the sake of being complex is not a good idea. Complexity is good as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the game.

And this:

We’re into a new thing called interactive drama. Everybody’s doing interactive drama with interactive plots and interactive characters. But I think it’s going to be a tough, tough thing to do. Hollywood spends millions of pounds on scripts. They have hundreds and hundreds of scriptwriters and they get it right once or twice a year. And little game designers like us are coming along and we’re going to write this script which is going to have infinite variations, is going to be as entertaining as any Hollywood film, is going to have cinematic sequences in it, and we’re going to sell it for four times more than you can buy a video for. There’s something wrong there. Either we’re very, very clever chaps and Hollywood has been doing it wrong for the last 100 years, or perhaps we’re talking out of our arses.

Quotes like these made Molyneux into something of a spokesman for the British games industry, in the mainstream as well as the specialty press. Whatever the intrinsic merits of claims like those above, they had the advantage of poking holes in exactly the sorts of games which British studios tended to lack the resources to do as well as the Americans.

During this period, British games still largely meant Amiga games. Thus it was tough for Molyneux, both in his role as spokesman for his industry and as a proud Briton, to admit that Bullfrog just couldn’t continue to develop their games on the Amiga first and remain competitive in the international market; the latest MS-DOS machines were pulling too rapidly ahead of Commodore’s trusty old platform. Bullfrog’s next big project after Populous II would be developed first on MS-DOS and then ported to the Amiga in slightly downgraded form — the opposite of the studio’s earlier approach. For, as Molyneux put it, “you can let your imagination run wild” on an MS-DOS machine.

The same project would be a welcome, much-needed departure in both form and content from the games Bullfrog had spent the last few years making. It would be a much grittier, more down-to-earth affair of rival corporations doing battle with one another in an oligarchic worldwide dystopia of the near future. As such, it was of a piece with many of the print fictions which young men like the Bullfrog crew were reading in the early 1990s — think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and, reaching just a little further back, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the original popularizer of cyberpunk cool. (Self-effacing as ever, Molyneux claimed that “I read the first three chapters of Neuromancer, but it all went a bit above my head.”) Still, Bullfrog did add their own sprinkling of dark British humor to the mountain of cyberpunk clichés. For many months, they called the game simply Bob, after the infamously ruthless British media mogul Robert Maxwell, whose suspicious death aboard his luxury yacht and the subsequent revelation of financial malfeasance throughout his empire dominated tabloid headlines during the period.

In the end, though, Bob became known as Syndicate. Bullfrog spent a full two years working on it, marking the longest gap between games in their entire history as a studio. They claimed the end result to contain as much code and graphics as every one of their previous games combined.

Whereas Populous and its descendants were played entirely from a single interface, Syndicate was a more disparate affair. As the owner of a tiny upstart corporation bent, naturally enough, on taking over the world, you had to allocate research funds for equipment and cybernetic enhancements for your army of operatives, whilst choosing missions to send them on from a Risk-like strategic map. But it was in the missions themselves, which played out in real time from an isometric perspective, that you spent the vast majority of your time. Here you had more direct control over your operatives than you did in Populous, but they still had minds of their own, which could cause them to react with a spontaneous burst of gunfire if, for example, an enemy agent popped up in their path; it might also cause them to refuse to obey an obviously dangerous command. The missions took place in living city streets replete with civilians as well as combatants, presenting ample opportunities for mayhem. Syndicate has been called a proto-Grand Theft Auto, what with the way it tempts its player to indulge in random violence and acts of destruction for their own sake.

Syndicate

Indeed, when it finally appeared in late 1993, just weeks before id Software’s landmark DOOM, Syndicate struck many as the natural British companion to that American game, another avatar of a movement toward ever more visceral forms of violence in games. As in DOOM, blood splashed everywhere in Syndicate with gleeful abandon, and much of the appeal of acquiring new weapons was in the visible carnage they created. This prompted a brief-lived round of nervous stock-taking in the magazines of both countries — until the same magazines, seeing that hordes of players loved the violence, learned to defer to the readers who buttered their bread.

Extreme though it was by contemporary standards, the violence in the finished Syndicate was reportedly toned down from earlier versions, where you had been allowed to kill babies and pets. Play testers “told us we were going too far,” mused Molyneux. “Funnily enough, they objected most to killing the puppies…” Yet he remained unapologetic on the whole:

We made Syndicate high in gore to be more realistic. I know this sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the player who’s violent, not us. All we’ve done is give a loaded weapon to the player and it’s up to them how to use it. I’ve always hated games that gloss over violence. Surely showing the realism of a violent act is better than disguising it? It’s not that Syndicate had done anything new with violence, it’s just that it shows it like it is.

For all the changes it evinced over what had come before, Syndicate was a typical Bullfrog game in other ways. It started out thoroughly entrancing, but went on way too long, with only a handful of fixed mission types on offer as you slowly — very slowly — took over the world. By the mid-game, you had discovered most of the cool gear and cybernetic enhancements, and what had started out fresh and exciting had begun to turn into a bit of a grind. Thus Syndicate became another Molyneux game that far more players started than finished. Nevertheless, its initial appeal was enough to make it Bullfrog’s biggest hit since the original Populous, and the game and its 1994 expansion pack are still fondly remembered by many today.

By this point, Bullfrog had grown from just a few employees to about forty, enough to have multiple projects on the boil at one time, all receiving varying degrees of attention from the hardworking and endlessly enthusiastic Peter Molyneux. Thus the next game arrived barely six months after Syndicate. It would prove to be one of Molyneux’s most influential creations of all.

The project had its genesis in the first game he ever made, a text-only business simulation called Entrepreneur, of which he had sold exactly two copies — one of them quite possibly to his mother — in 1983. That failure had continued to rankle even amidst all the success he enjoyed in later years, as did the urge to make another, less dry business simulation that would appeal to more people. “Then one day the perfect idea hit me,” Molyneux says. “I’d create a game where you control a theme park.” Molyneux:

I love theme parks, and it was a great excuse to do some really good research. It’s also something where you often go back and think, “If I’d been given the chance to design this place I wouldn’t have put this here, or that there, etc.” And it’s also something that people can immediately associate themselves with. If I tell you that this game enables you to design theme parks, then you immediately know what I’m talking about.

It was indeed a brilliant stroke, one with natural appeal well beyond the typical gamer demographic who enjoyed the likes of Syndicate. Visually at least, Theme Park would be the polar opposite of that game, cheerful and bright where it had been gritty and dark.

Theme Park

Released in mid-1994, Theme Park became a monster hit — bigger than Syndicate, even bigger than Populous after it was ported to every viable or semi-viable game-playing gadget in the world. Its bright and bouncy visual aesthetic presaged the Casual Revolution in games that was still some years away, while its impact on the themes and mechanics of games to come would prove even more pronounced. In particular, Rollercoaster Tycoon, a direct heir to Theme Park which was released by MicroProse in 1999, sold even better than Bullfrog’s take on the concept — in fact, became one of the best-selling computer games in history. Today amusement parks and roller coasters remain a staple of gaming, from the more elaborate examples of the breed available at online stores like Steam to more easygoing affairs that you can play right in your browser. Almost all of them owe not just a thematic (hah!) debt to Theme Park but a direct mechanical and visual one as well, from the thought bubbles that appear over the heads of the guests wandering through the park to their whimsically cartoony graphical style.

It thus pains even more than usual to note how horribly Theme Park itself has aged, even in comparison to most of the other early Bullfrog games. Few games evidence as profound a mismatch between their surface aesthetics and their underlying gameplay as this one does. The cutesy nature of the former can confuse you for a long time, disguising the fact that the latter really doesn’t represent as great a departure from the worldview of Syndicate as it seems to let on. At bottom, Theme Park is a nasty, cynical little game, amoral if not actively immoral — a game where your concern isn’t with the happiness of your guests at all, but strictly with the amount of money you can extract from them; a profitable theme park with miserable patrons is not only possible but the only practical road to success. This is the kind of game where you over-salt the patrons’ fries to get them to buy more soda, which cups you stuff to the brim with ice to… well, you get the picture. If you come to this game wanting to build a beautiful amusement park and show everybody who visits it a great time, as the Molyneux quote above would imply you can, you’ll wind up bankrupt and disillusioned in extremely short order.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/theme_park.mp4

It’s really hard to know what parts of Theme Park to attribute to intentional subversiveness and what parts to simple tone-deafness. The intro video is a perfect case in point. Was Bullfrog aware of just how weird and creepy this thing is? The dog has the right idea: “Hell, no, leave me at home!”

Even if you’re willing to play the game on its own cynical terms, it has all sorts of other problems. There’s a paucity of useful feedback on both a global and granular level, which often puts you in the supremely frustrating position of failing for reasons you can’t determine. The interface in general is inscrutable in too many places, the level of micromanagement required is exhausting, and, because this is a Peter Molyneux game, winning is a task so herculean that virtually no one has ever done so: after building your first successful park in Britain, you’re expected to choose another location elsewhere in the world and do so again, ad nauseum. None of these later parks are different in any fundamental way from the first — you have the exact same rides and shops and food stands at your disposal throughout — and so the whole exercise becomes absurdly repetitive.

Theme Park was a hugely innovative and massively influential game, but it just wasn’t a very good one, even in its heyday. Its appeal was always rooted more in what it purported to be than what it actually managed to be. Because everybody loves a theme park, right?

A ride goes haywire and a kid goes flying. I’m pretty sure this part is deliberately subversive…

Bullfrog’s second game of 1994 — also the last one which we’ll be visiting as part of this little survey today — might have appeared at the time to be an attempt to jump onto the 3D-action bandwagon unleashed by Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. In reality, though, Bullfrog had been experimenting with first-person 3D in-house for years. Those experiments finally led, after many detours and false starts, to Magic Carpet, whose namesake you got to fly — because, as Molyneux wryly put it, every other possible form of flight had already been exhaustively simulated by that point. As one of several wizards, your goal was to build up your arsenal of spells and mana in order to conquer all of the opposing wizards and take over the world. And then — remember, this was a Bullfrog game — you were expected to do the same thing in fifty or so more worlds.

The first Bullfrog game not to be ported at all to lower-powered platforms like the Amiga, Magic Carpet was a stunning technical achievement in its time. While other 3D action games segmented themselves into discrete levels made up of interior spaces only, it gave you a complete open-ended world to explore. It was a forthrightly artsy game, something DOOM and the rash of similar games which followed it certainly never aspired to be. In that spirit, it contained no words during actual gameplay, nothing to distract from the evocative wonder of its world. Bullfrog’s staffers talked in interviews about the joy they got just from drifting around above its landscapes before they’d put any enemies in — playing as they did so, they said only half facetiously, their Enya albums. Magic Carpet even had a special stereoscopic 3D mode, for those able to buy or make 3D glasses to suit.

The graphics in Magic Carpet remain strikingly beautiful to this day.

By the time you got four or five levels into it, however, it revealed itself to suffer from the standard set of Bullfrog problems. Each of its worlds was superficially different from the one before, but not in a way that really challenged you or introduced a sense of progression beyond the increasing level number on your status screen. The game shot its bolt at the beginning, then just kept giving you more of the same. Peter Molyneux spoke often in interviews about his desire to give gamers lots of value for their money by making big games. Yet, like songwriters with a knack for melody who have no clue how to take it to the bridge, he and his mates consistently struggled to find ways of varying their formulas so that their games weren’t just more of the same for hours on end. As it was, what you saw in the first hour of a Bullfrog game was what you would continue to see for the next hundred hours.

And for once, this Bullfrog game’s presentation and theme alone weren’t enough to save it on store shelves. Its abstracted and almost aggressively artsy personality combined with its high production costs and high system requirements to make it Bullfrog’s first outright money loser since Flood.

How, then, should we sum up these five busy years in the life of Peter Molyneux and his first company? We can feel certain that anything we do say must apply almost equally to his career since 1994; whether you love or hate his work, its strengths and weaknesses haven’t changed very much over the decades. An unkind assessment — of which there have been many in the last ten years in particular, as Molyneux’s real or perceived penchant for over-hyping and under-delivering has come home to roost — might peg him as a bit of a dilettante, an ideas man unwilling to do the hard work to turn his ideas into balanced games that remain playable and interesting over the long term. But the reality is, as usual, more complex than any single pejorative — or compliment, for that matter — can encompass.

Some keys to the puzzle of Peter Molyneux can undoubtedly be found in the scene from which he sprang. His design aesthetic, like that of so many British game developers, was to a large extent forged by the limited resources — in terms of both target hardware and finances — which they had at their disposal. Bullfrog’s stubborn reliance on procedurally-generated rather than handcrafted levels, often to their games’ detriment, can be traced back at least to Ian Bell and David Braben’s Elite and the vast eight-galaxy universe it packed into a 32 K BBC Micro via the magic of the Fibonacci sequence. When one didn’t have much space to store handcrafted levels and didn’t have many people to hand to make them, procedural generation seemed the only practical way forward. But Bullfrog stuck with it to the exclusion of other approaches for too long — long after other approaches became viable.

Other pieces of the puzzle are more idiosyncratic to Molyneux himself, a fellow whose own personality was always all but inseparable from that of his company. Already by the mid-1990s, his tendency to stretch himself in too many directions at once was starting to become an issue. During the period of Theme Park and Magic Carpet, Bullfrog also worked on something called Creation, where you would breed predatory fish in an underwater base to attack your rivals on the ocean floor. Molyneux even mooted linking Creation with Magic Carpet: “If you’re playing Magic Carpet, you will be able to jump off the carpet and into the ocean. The computer will then sense whether you have Creation on your hard disk and plunge you straight into that, based totally on the world you were just flying around [in].” Another work in progress, with the highly inadvisable title of MIST (My Incredible Superhero Team), would let you build and control your own superhero: “If you want to make him strong and give him rubber wings and death vision, then you can do that. But of course, they’ve all got their Achilles heel.” And then there was Biosphere, featuring a more elaborate, planet-wide take on genetic engineering along with a fictional context shamelessly ripped off from Douglas Adams, where you would “run a team of genetic and planet engineers who modify planets for shiploads of colonists. Unfortunately for you, the colonists are generally hairdressers and telephone engineers, so when they get there they’re pretty useless — and they’ll probably be eaten by dinosaurs. So you have to protect them.” None of these games were ever completed, despite a substantial amount of time and resources being devoted to each of them. Indeed, as the resources available to him increased, Molyneux’s proclivity for rushing enthusiastically down such blind alleys increased in equal measure.

Molyneux’s passionate prioritization of experimentation over the nuts and bolts of game design made him a less complete designer than, say, a Sid Meier. And yet he, along with other designers of a similar bent, have been scarcely less necessary for the evolution of their medium. Few if any designers have dared to put more new stuff out there than Molyneux, even if often in imperfect form. Such experiments can become the building blocks for more grounded designers to build upon, as the example of the badly flawed Theme Park begetting the absolutely brilliant Rollercoaster Tycoon proves in spades.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Theme Park, every Molyneux game from Populous on not only supported multiplayer sessions between players on separate computers[1]Multiplayer Syndicate was made available to the public only in the expansion pack.Populous, Powermonger, Populous II, Syndicate, and Magic Carpet long before anyone even began to think about adding a computer opponent. One might even call this fact the perfect riposte to all of my complaints about these Bullfrog games. If you played them alone, you were, in Molyneux’s mind anyway, playing them wrong in some fundamental sense. Complaints about the sameness of a game from level to level no longer carry much weight when you’re playing against that ultimate agent of unpredictability, a fellow human. While the nature of the times dictated that most people played them solo, there are nevertheless all sorts of anecdotes about the sharing of those early Bullfrog games among friends; my favorite might be the teenage next-door neighbors who made a 25-meter cable to run between their bedroom windows so that they could play Populous together every night to their hearts’ content. Stories like these, soon to be joined by tales of multiplayer DOOM, were clear signposts in their day to where much of gaming was heading, just as soon as the world’s telecommunications infrastructure caught up to the designers’ vision.

Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux have ironically suffered the opposite fate from that of the standard clichés about pioneers. Greatly appreciated in their own time for all of the bold new things they attempted to do and be, their games’ practical deficiencies seem all too obvious to our more jaded eyes of today. But, even if we can’t quite praise any one them as a standalone masterpiece, we can recognize the purpose they served in opening up so much virgin territory for exploration by later, often better games. And if Molyneux himself has sinned by promising too much too often, it should be recognized as well that his transgressions have never had their roots in greed or guile. He just wants to make really, really amazing games — wants to make lots of them, thereby to make lots and lots of people happy. There are worse character flaws to have.

(Sources: Retro Gamer 39, 40, 43, 69, and 71; New Computer Express of January 20 1990, October 27 1990, and May 11 1991; CU Amiga of October 1990, February 1991, December 1991, December 1992, November 1993, January 1994, and February 1994; Computer Gaming World of January 1991, April 1991, and December 1994; The One of April 1990, July 1990, December 1990, May 1991, July 1991, December 1991, May 1992, May 1993, June 1993, December 1993, October 1994, and March 1995; Amiga Format of February 1992, October 1992, 1992 annual, June 1994, and May 1995; Zero of December 1991; Edge of January 1994, June 1994, November 1994, March 1995, May 1995, July 1995, and November 1995; PC Zone of June 1993 and November 1994; PC Review of July 1992; Next Generation premier issue. Video sources include the documentary From Bedrooms to Billions and series 3 episode 3 of Bad Influence.

Populous II, Syndicate, Theme Park, and Magic Carpet are all available as digital purchases from GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Multiplayer Syndicate was made available to the public only in the expansion pack.

Comments
53 Responses

- Joshua Main

September 4, 2020 at 5:11 pm

So Peter Molyneux is basically Walt Disney?

- arthurdawg

September 6, 2020 at 3:10 pm

Bwahaahaahaahhh!!!

Awesome… I barely had time to swallow my coffee dude!

- Sarah Walker

September 4, 2020 at 5:38 pm

I was wondering when Bullfrog were going to pop up here again. Certainly, given the coverage from the UK PC gaming press circa 94/95 they did appear to be _the_ main development force in the country…

Slightly surprised that Magic Carpet lost money, given that they did go on to do a sequel a year later. The other interesting thing about it is that it was used to promote the Pentium; it even plays the ‘Intel Inside’ jingle if you run it on an original Pentium system.

Minor correction, Rollercoaster Tycoon was released by Hasbro after they bought out MicroProse.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:13 pm

It’s my understanding that the sequel to Magic Carpet was already in the works when the original shipped. It was decided that it made more financial sense to release it as-is than to cancel it. This accounts for the the poor fit and finish of the game.

Rollercoaster Tycoon did go out with the MicroProse name on the box in the United States at least.

- Sarah Walker

September 4, 2020 at 6:02 pm

Quick thought on Theme Park – did it retain the Midland Bank sponsorship outside the UK? That plus the manual (titled “New Business Portfolio”) does kind of give away what kind of game it is.

Having said that, if the cynicism doesn’t appeal (I personally think it’s fantastic), you can turn most of the business elements off and play it as something closer to a sandbox.

- Alianora La Canta

February 25, 2021 at 11:47 pm

No – the Midland Bank sponsorship was UK and PC-only; as far as I can tell, neither the ports nor the non-UK versions had the sponsorship. The latter is logical due to Midland Bank having only ever been a UK bank, but why the sponsorship was not extended to the many other platforms Theme Park appeared on is a mystery.

Yes, Theme Park was definitely a business simulator, if not a particularly involved one in “Sandbox” mode. The gentler mode worked better for me than the business side, and that applied as much to the later iterations of Bullfrog’s theme park games as the original.

- Chris D

September 4, 2020 at 6:11 pm

Brilliant article, as always. I’m familiar with most of the games here, but never quite realised they all followed the same pattern of having engaging intros followed by tediously drawn-out endgames – that seems like quite a solid insight into Molyneux and Bullfrog’s design philosophy.

One point I would raise – was Cyberassault 556 ever anything other than an April fool? I’ve never seen anything that indicated they’d actually worked on the game – it seems too insanely ambitious to be real, although I guess the April fool they printed in The One might have been inspired by a real project they’d been toying with.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:15 pm

Hmm, I’ll have to take a look when I get a chance. It’s possible I got sucked in by an April Fools gag. (In my defense, Molyneux’s descriptions are often so over-the-top that’s hard to tell…)

- Chris D

September 4, 2020 at 7:47 pm

It’s definitely an April fool – I got taken in at the time, and can still remember the crushing disappointment next month when the magazine fessed up. I just wondered if it was based on anything Bullfrog were actually working on. As a prank, it was pretty well executed, and surprisingly believable given that it was an era when truly giant leaps in what was possible in games came along every so often, like Elite. If you could get 8 whole galaxies into a BBC Micro with 32k of memory, why couldn’t you do something even more expansive with all the resources available on an Amiga?

I can well imagine that Cyberassault 556 was a game that Molyneux actually wanted to make, it’s lovingly described in that piece in The One, and sounds like something he would try to do if let off the leash.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 8:18 pm

Fair enough. Thanks! Must be some sort of record for an April Fool’s joke to bite someone thirty years later…

- Peter Olausson

September 5, 2020 at 3:26 pm

That Bullfrog had managed the Amiga “to perform at almost FIVE TIMES its normal processing speed” is definitely a giveaway. That the game would include 50 billion planets, quite less so …

- Ignacio

September 4, 2020 at 6:50 pm

Nice article! Thanks!
Two minor typos:
Greeks gods -> Greek gods
unpredictably -> unpredictabillty?

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:16 pm

Thanks!

- Norman Rafferty

September 4, 2020 at 7:05 pm

Great article, as always.

I can’t really agree with the thesis statement at the end. Your article points out that Molyneux was always a great raconteur and a savvy businessman. Maybe in the 1990s, he might have had a kind of joy for the gaming… but by 2010, he had become one of the most cynical and mercenary developers.

In 2012, Molyneux had a new company, 22 Cans, and they released, “Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the_Cube%3F
While Wikipedia’s writing charitably calls the game an “experiment”, it’s worth noting that the game had extremely mercenary pay-to-win features.
https://venturebeat.com/2012/11/06/the-hidden-truth-of-enigmatic-experimental-game-curiousity/
… And the eventual “surprise” was to simply be an unpaid spokes-person for 22 Cans’ next game, “Godus”. (A new height to the concept “paid in exposure”.)

That’s still not the end to the story. Godus was crowd-funding during a boom period but still failed to be completed on time, despite numerous influxes and yet another in-game cash shop. Molyneux would later respond to an interview, in ways common throughout his career.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/13/peter-molyneux-interview-godus-reputation-kickstarter/

From this interview, two quotes stand out:

“I have no idea how much money it costs to make a game and anyone that tells you how much it’s going to cost to make a game which is completely a new experience is a fool or a genius.”
This quote is very typical of Molyneux, because it leaves uswondering if Molyneux thinks himself to be a fool or a genius. The statement might sound self-effacing but it’s not.

“You have an idea, you think you need this much, but as most people will say with Kickstarter, if you ask for too much money up front because of the rules of Kickstarter, it’s very, very hard to ask for the complete development budget.”
This statement, unchallenged by the interview, is blatantly false. The “rules of Kickstarter” state specifically the opposite to be true. Here, Molyneux is throwing the crowd-funding model under the bus to blame for the failure of his own ambition. As your article points out, Molyneux was no stranger to these kinds of development problems and (by 2013) should have known better.

This later Molyneux had clearly evolved from the “games should be multiplayer” to “games should be multiplayer, online, and monetized.” Again, he was ahead of the curve, as a few years later gaming would be rampant with gacha-boxes, cash-shop DLC, and other monetizing incentives. Moyneux has a long career of predicting the future, but it was all too often as a mercenary, first.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:33 pm

Yeah… I think there are many valid criticisms to be raised against Molyneux: that he’s naive, impractical, careless with other people’s money, and a far better generator of ideas for great games than he is a designer of great games. But he’s just never struck me as in it strictly for the money. I think he rather tends to dig himself into a hole with the best of intentions, and then has to find a way to dig himself out — or rather his financial people do. He’s the kind of guy that you send out to buy lunch for the office, only to have him come back with a new radio for the break room because “there was this great sale!” I don’t blame the colleagues of such a character for being pissed off, but there’s something more complicated there than simple greed…

- Chris D

September 4, 2020 at 7:54 pm

I think it’s easy to look at Molyneux with your view clouded by his more cynical recent output, but I don’t think he’s as mercenary as he’s made out to be. Even stuff like Godus and Curiosity I suspect were means to an end that spiralled out of control rather than exercises in making money; I always thought he had grander plans that were stymied by some poor choices he made.

From what I’ve heard from people who worked for Lionhead, he put shedloads of his own money into the company to keep it going, and absolutely worked his nuts off.

- CAD

September 5, 2020 at 7:52 am

Also, I’d point out that John Walker’s interview (which was more character assassination as performance art) has rather written history’s final verdict on Molyneux, as a liar and a fraud, in stone. Unfortunate for anyone who remembers how earnest and pioneering much of his work was and what it contributed to the medium (including, doubtless, Walker himself).

- xxx

September 7, 2020 at 7:07 pm

It was a character assassination, no doubt about that, and I cringed all the way through it the first time I read it. But it seemed like something that needed to be done: to point out that the Emperor had no clothes. His early years were marked by flawed but inspiring and groundbreaking games, but by the time of that interview, his career had descended into “guy who promises you the moon, then presents you with a small rock with “MOON” carved into it.” Someone had to destroy the “eccentric genius” myth he’d built around himself.

I think the problem is one of scale. In the early 1990s, you could get a lot further with a good idea and a small team. Games were easier to develop, budgets were smaller, and people expected less from them. All those qualities are ideal for someone like Molyneux, who’s full of ideas and inspiration but apparently terrible at planning and execution. Now, when games cost astounding sums and require hundreds-strong workforces, ideas are a dime a dozen but good planning and execution are critical.

- Bruce Brenneise

September 5, 2020 at 11:39 am

Just a note on Molyneaux’s comments about the “rules of Kickstarter”. I don’t believe he’s referring to official rules, but rather the ruling strategy employed but many of the most successful Kickstarters in order to take best advantage of the site’s internal mechanisms for promoting campaigns.

- David Rugge

September 4, 2020 at 7:07 pm

I have fond memories of Syndicate, but it was indeed a grind after you gear all your agents up. It also has one of my favorite pieces of equipment, the Persuadertron. There’s nothing like having nearly off the civilians in the city following you around like the Pied Piper.

Also, minor spelling error:
after building you’re first successful park
you’re -> your

- David Rugge

September 4, 2020 at 7:09 pm

Looks like I had a spelling error of my own! Bleh.
“off the civilians” -> “all the civilians”

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:16 pm

Thanks!

- Mikko

September 5, 2020 at 8:47 am

I disagree a bit about the characterisation of Syndicate… for me, the original one got the game length just about right – the game style did change from the early fun of trying to avoid combat for as long as possible and creating hordes of persuaded civilians, to the latter maps being all about drugged-to-the-gills cyborgs lasering enemy hordes to ashes in 5 seconds – but it never got so tough to be a grind. I believe that was the only Molyneux game I actually finished.

I did buy the 1996 sequel, Syndicate Wars, but the magic was gone. I recall that I had a lot of trouble with getting it running well on my old 486 (or Pentium?) PC. Also, since it was one of the last MS-DOS games (from 1996), it was difficult to run under Windows in the late 90s.

- Olof Kindgren

September 4, 2020 at 7:08 pm

I loved Syndicate as a kid but I have wondered for the past 25 years why it didn’t get as much heat as Doom. I guess it comes down to popularity, because the amount and narure of needless killing in Syndicate far overshadow Doom.

Don’t know much about Peter but I did “play” his Curiosity game about 10 years ago. I think it was a brilliant experiment in how far you can take a game

(And found a typo “you’re first”)

- Geoff Dunbar

September 4, 2020 at 7:11 pm

I love this sentence:

“Molyneux’s proclivity for rushing enthusiastically down such blind allies increased in equal measure.”

But you probably meant “blind alleys”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2020 at 7:17 pm

:) Thanks!

- MH

September 4, 2020 at 8:41 pm

Correct me if I’m wrong — I very well might be, it’s been 20 years — but I want to make some counterpoints on Theme Park.

The article presents the new locations as something of a drag, but on the other hand the screenshots included have parks that could never be done as the first park. You needed a park to do well, which then gave you the resources and unlocks to just go all-out on a new place. Want to make a park where the only attraction is a water float that takes two years to complete? Go for it! Maybe build a half-park roller coaster on top? Feel free!

BUT if you wanted to do all that fun stuff, you had to have a moneymaker and find the unlocks first.

I find it absolutely fascinating that I’m picking up vibes that a lot of the criticisms presented are lifted from magazines of that era. The reviewers of which would have used cheat codes to get their park to work and do all the fun stuff in one park or at most two, so it’s natural they would have absolutely not understood the allure of a new, empty canvas for your megalomaniac projects. I remember going to a friend’s house and just scrolling through their list of parks, in awe at the massive setups they had. That’s something you would use multiple saves today for, probably.

Then there’s the game’s employees who all wanted money, the buggers. Their pay rise negotiation minigame was absolutely _inspired_ in that you had to factor in time: If you held your hand further back the workers’ hand would approach you faster, but if you waited too long you couldn’t reach them in time because the movement rate was limited.

I remember one time I felt victorious when I had given them the ABSOLUTE SMALLEST raise possible, after a longish strike, and then watching the news as people were striking for real and talking about not being able to feed their families and the triumphant feeling changing to somewhat subdued.

Yes, Hans. In Theme Park you are, indeed, the baddie.

- Phil B.

September 4, 2020 at 10:02 pm

Fantastic article. I’m a long-time reader, and adore your work; I just wanted to say that you articulated issues I’ve had with Bullfrog/Molyneux’s oeuvre that I had never quite put into words. I love the first hour and tire quickly afterwards… but I also see the seeds of important, actually-fun games that come out later. Thanks for that. (_The Future was Here_ is my second-favorite Platform Studies book, after _Racing the Beam_.)

- CAD

September 4, 2020 at 10:33 pm

While it struck a chord with me too, is it not true of an awful lot of PC games of the era that they massively outstayed their welcome? I was bored of the Settlers after the first level, Wolfenstein 3D after three, even Command and Conquer after the first half-dozen. The developer with the reputation for having fresh and new ideas in the tank for a title’s duration would have been the real novelty. I can’t even think of any off the top of my head.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

September 4, 2020 at 10:41 pm

My friend pointed me at the parody Twitter account Peter Molydeux. He just tweets Molyneux-like game pitches. Some of them are pretty great.

Imagine a multiplayer FPS where if you stop fighting, the increasingly prospering NPC community will start building a beautiful city.

My new game is pretty normal but roughly 230 hours in the game REALLY becomes incredible beyond words. Sure, many will give up beforehand but for those who give it a chance they will share a truly spiritual life changing experience.

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2020 at 7:32 am

:) That’s great.

- matt w

September 5, 2020 at 5:11 pm

There was a game jam based on it–you had to make a game based on a Molydeux (or Molyneux) tweet. Unfortunately the site seems to be down (or I can’t access it in my browser) but the “what if your only weapon was the pause button” game was brilliant. And apparently Molyneux himself gave an opening speech at the jam!

- JP

September 4, 2020 at 11:06 pm

Biosphere did eventually release, as 1996’s “Gene Wars”: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/genewars

“…Syndicate was a typical Peter Molyneux game in other ways.”

I’d be a bit wary of Famous Guy Credit Creep here, Molyneux was certainly involved with its development but multiple stories I’ve read about it over the years put Sean Cooper as the primary programmer and designer, along with a team of at least a dozen others. Molyneux was busy with other projects throughout its development.

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2020 at 7:32 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

September 5, 2020 at 1:04 am

The cynicism in Theme Park is still kind of a hallmark of its successors like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Hospital (and the jillions of games that are either directly or indirectly inspired by them). Making petty greed into a mordant joke seems like a very British thing to do. Later games must just have slapped on on a bit more comedy. Even the SimCity sequels took on a bit of that when they added comedy to the mix, some of which is pretty cynical about the value of the things you build or the decisions you make as mayor.

The pinnacle of this might be LucasArts’ AfterLife, which is a heaven-and-hell simulator that by definition is about finding the way to most efficiently reward/torment souls, heavily spackled with zany ’90s humor.

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2020 at 7:37 am

I think the cynicism in Rollercoaster Tycoon is different in quantity if perhaps not entirely in quality. The core joy of that game is in the laying out of efficient, creative, and beautiful parks; the money is just a means to this end. Theme Park initially appears to be the same type of game, but it’s really not. There are only a few approaches to park layout which turn out to be financially viable. It’s actually a fairly brutal zero-sum affair, despite it’s bright and cheerful surface aesthetics. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially for the modern player who comes to it with expectations spawned by later games with similar themes.

- Lisa H.

September 5, 2020 at 1:19 am

Huh. I played the heck out of Populous, but had never heard of Theme Park before this post. When you said “Then one day the perfect idea hit me,” Molyneux says. “I’d create a game where you control a theme park.” I thought you were going to say Rollercoaster Tycoon (which I had not known the release year of, I suppose), right up until you didn’t.

- Andrew Pam

September 5, 2020 at 8:05 am

“after building you’re first successful park in Britain” – typo for “your”.

- Andrew Pam

September 5, 2020 at 8:20 am

After reloading the article I see I was much too slow! :)

- cw

September 5, 2020 at 8:07 am

Best was the Sinister Theme Park mode (anyone remember how to unlock it?), where clowns would infiltrate your park then reveal themselves as Syndicate agents with Persuadatron and Minigun…

- Greg

September 5, 2020 at 1:54 pm

It’s funny, but as time has gone by, there’s a certain fondness that many of us have for those days when you had to labor intensively to get a game up and running. Magic Carpet was one such game, and I can still remember sitting with my Dad as we tried to get it to boot up, and when we finally did… well, it was magic in it’s own way. I havent played it in years, but do seem to remember it actually had some “bullet hell” elements to it which did eventually become too great to overcome, a bit of irony considering his quotes about PC games being designed so only the very best gamers could beat them. Anyways, great work as always, and look forward to coming back to Bullfrog and Molyneux for Dungeon Keeper (if he was still there by that point, I can’t remember.)

- Bernie

September 5, 2020 at 3:16 pm

Thanks Jimmy for another outstanding article! I I really appreciate all the research that shows through the writing .

I don’t really understand how this lenghty discussion about the player’s role and moral (inmoral) a tions, and the satirization thereof in theme park’s case, all the talk about the inherent “grindiness” of Bullfrog’s games, and only one other commenter has mentioned Dungeon Keeper ? C’mon , really ?

I sincerely hope you have a piece on Dungeon Keeper planned, because that’s the one game, IMHO, where all of Bullfrog’s “design sensibilities” finally came to fruition in a coherent whole.

Do you think arming and training cyborgs who eventually kill bystanders is cuestionable ? What if you played the Werdna, the Mangar, the Dark Queen or the Tyrantnraxus of the game ?

Do you feel unusure about mistreating and under-paying Theme Park employees ? What if they were foul creatures of the dungeon instead ?

See what i’m getting at ? It was really with Keeper that Bullfrog’s style started to make sense. I still have my original copy close at hand to fire it up whenever I get frustrated with NWN or other RPG’s , or with The Sims or MMORPG’s fod that matter. EVIL IS GOOD !

- Carl Grace

September 6, 2020 at 12:24 am

This sentence:

The first Bullfrog game not to be ported at all to lower-powered platforms like the Amiga,

Makes me so sad. when I first got my Amiga all my friends were jealous of its capabilities. Over the years they stayed essentially the same while the MS-DOS and consoles I proved exponentially.

Oh well.

- Chip

September 6, 2020 at 7:15 am

Great article! I have a sudden urge to take another run at Syndicate…

- Chip

September 9, 2020 at 10:41 pm

Managed to win Syndicate yesterday (something young me wasn’t able to do), really fits the MO here.

The economy breaks after the first couple of missions. The “tech-tree research” aspect is completed half-way through, making the next two-dozen levels pretty-much identical as your overpowered cyborgs machinegun everything that moves, and after getting all the way through, your prize is getting dumped directly to the credits. (Not even a “congratulations” message)

I wonder if they actually intended for anyone to play through the whole thing!

- Connie Salvador

September 6, 2020 at 8:25 pm

If nothing else, I think Molyneux is proof that people are complicated. He can say something incredibly arrogant and then in the next breath something incredibly humble. He’s weirdly prescient in broad strokes, yet fails to read the room on every game. The consensus seems to have settled on “mild sociopathy” to describe him. People say he’s fundamentally arrogant, but has learned how to say humble things to offset it. I don’t know if that’s fair, never having met him.

I think of him as a one-hit wonder. Populous was, as far as I can tell, the only successful (and good) game he ever actually made. The other amazing stuff that came out of Bullfrog (Syndicate & Dungeon Keeper), he was not involved with beyond giving all the press interviews about them. The vast majority of Bullfrog’s output, contrary to popular perception, was mediocre sequels. Everything Molyneux personally did after Populous were basically bad games with some good ideas in them, like Fable and Black And White. His reputation for over promising and under delivering is very well deserved, if you read his press leading up to both those releases.

Overall I think the gaming world is better off with Molyneux in it, and as Jimmy says, the press is probably a little too hard on him, but I do think he’s also kind of a tool. People are messy.

- Jrd

September 6, 2020 at 11:41 pm

> Magic Carpet even had a special stereoscopic 3D mode, for those able to buy or make 3D glasses to suit.

Not just a glasses mode! It had a random-dot stereogram mode as well, capitalizing on the “Magic Eye” book fad from the same time period. It was difficult to actually use for any period of time, but I remember playing a few levels this way just for the novelty value of it.

- ZUrlocker

September 7, 2020 at 2:50 am

He’s a fascinating guy. I saw him speak at GDC in 2001 (?) and he is obviously a big thinker. I remember buying his masterpiece Black & White but just not getting into it. Maybe it was me ;-)

- Sebastian Redl

September 8, 2020 at 2:23 pm

“better than discussing it”

Is that meant to say “disguising”?

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2020 at 2:32 pm

Yes. Thanks!

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- Carlo Savorelli

November 7, 2020 at 11:41 pm

I think this article doesn’t put Populous II in the proper context. Yes, I perfectly know that Molyneux downplayed It in several interviews: “I hated It with passion” “just more of the same” and such… And so what? Or, to rephrase, what better proof of the game’s greatness could you Imagine?
Reviews back then were absolutely beaming and assessed the game more correctly than today: with the new powers variety, the different strategies increased tenfold; the quicker pace you could have at the game by skipping levels according to performance, and the overall better rythm due to the sequence of deities to fight, this stands as a definitive improvement over the original and the only Bullfrog title to escape all the criticism found in the article (the grinding, the lack of direction, the shooting all the best bullets in the first hour of gameplay)… I repeat, Molyneux isn’t convinced by It, what better proof that we’re in front of Bullfrog’s very best. Because he was frontman and spokeperson, but It’s quite clear that after the initial Populous lucky strike, the creative team worked the best the farthest removed he was from a project.

X-COM
September 18, 2020

X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase kiosks. It didn’t come in a box designed by origamists from the school of abstract expressionism. It featured no full-motion video starring the best TV actors of the 80s; it had no voice-overs. It offered neither Super VGA graphics, nor General MIDI support. It wasn’t Doom-like, Myst-like, or otherwise like a hit game from the previous season; it didn’t steal the best features from several other successful games. It wasn’t even on a CD-ROM!

In short, if you plugged X-COM’s variables into the “success formula” currently in use by the majority of large game companies, you’d come up with a big, fat goose egg. According to the prevailing wisdom, there’s no way X-COM could survive in today’s gaming marketplace. And yet it sold and sold, and gamers played on and on.

— Chris Lombardi, writing in the April 1995 issue of Computer Gaming World

In the early days of game development, there existed little to no separation between the roles of game programmer and game designer. Those stalwart pioneers who programmed the games they themselves designed could be grouped into two broad categories, depending on the side from which they entered the field. There were the technologists, who were fascinated first and foremost with the inner workings of computers, and chose games as the most challenging, creatively satisfying type of software to which they could apply their talents. And then there were those who loved games themselves above all else, and learned to program computers strictly in order to make better, more exciting ones than could be implemented using only paper, cardboard, and the players’ imaginations. Julian Gollop, the mastermind behind the legendary original X-COM, fell most definitely into this latter category. He turned to the computer only when the games he wanted to make left him no other choice.

Growing up in the English county of Essex, Julian and his younger brother Nick lived surrounded by games, courtesy of their father. “Every Christmas, we didn’t watch TV, we’d play games endlessly,” Julian says. From Cluedo, they progressed to Escape from Colditz, then on to the likes of Sniper! and Squad Leader.

Julian turned fifteen in 1980, the year that the Sinclair ZX80 arrived to set off a microcomputer fever all across Britain, but he was initially immune to the affliction. Unimpressed by the simplistic games he saw being implemented on those early machines, which often had as little as 1 K of memory, he started making his own designs to be played the old-fashioned way, face-to-face around a tabletop. It was only when he hit a wall of complexity with one of them that he reassessed the potential of computers.

The game in question was called Time Lords; as the name would imply, it was based on the Doctor Who television serials. It asked two to five players to travel through time and space and alter the course of history to their advantage, but grew so complex that it came to require an additional person to serve in the less-than-rewarding capacity of referee.

By this point, it was 1982, and a friend of Julian’s named Andy Greene had acquired one of the first BBC Micros. Its relatively cavernous 32 K of memory opened up the possibility of using the computer as a referee instead of a bored human. Greene coded up the program in BASIC, staying faithful to Julian’s board game to the extent of demanding that players leave the room when it wasn’t their turn, so as not to see anything they weren’t supposed to of their opponents’ actions. The owner of the tabletop-games store where Julian shopped was so impressed with the result that he founded a new company, Red Shift Games, in order to publish it. They all traveled to computer fairs together, carrying copies of the computerized Time Lords packaged in Ziploc baggies. The game didn’t take the world by storm — Personal Computer News, one of the few publications to review it, pronounced it a “bored game” instead of a board game — but it was a start.

The two friends next made Islandia, another multiplayer strategy game of a similar stripe. In the meantime, Julian acquired a Sinclair Spectrum, the cheap and cheerful little machine destined to drive British computer gaming for the next half-decade. Having now a strong motivation to learn to program it, Julian did just that. His first self-coded game, and his first on the Spectrum, appeared in 1984 in the form of Nebula, a conquer-the-galaxy exercise that for the first time offered a computer opponent to play against.

The artificial intelligence disappeared again from his next game, but it mattered not at all. Rebelstar Raiders was the prototype for Julian Gollop’s most famous work. In contrast to the big-picture strategy of his earlier games, it focused on individual soldiers in conflict with one another in a Starship Troopers-like science-fictional milieu. Still, it was very much based on the board games he loved; there was a lot of Sniper! and Squad Leader in its turn-based design. Despite being such a cerebral game, despite being one that you couldn’t even play without a mate to hand, it attracted considerable attention. Red Shift faded out of existence shortly thereafter as its owner lost interest in the endeavor, but Rebelstar Raiders had already made Julian’s reputation, such that other publishers were now knocking at his door.

Rebelstar Raiders, the first of Julian Gollop’s turn-based tactical-combat games. Ten years later, the approach would culminate in X-COM.

It must have been a thrill for Julian Gollop the board-game fanatic when Games Workshop, the leading British publisher of hobbyist tabletop games, signed him to make a computer game for their new — if ultimately brief-lived — digital division. Chaos, a spell-slinging fantasy free-for-all ironically based to some extent on a Games Workshop board game known as Warlock — not that Julian told them that! — didn’t sell as well as Rebelstar Raiders, although it has since become something of a cult classic.

So, understandably, Julian went where the market was. Between 1986 and 1988, he produced three more iterations on the Rebelstar Raiders concept, each boasting computer opponents as well as multiplayer options and each elaborating further upon the foundation of its predecessor. Game designers are a bit like authors in some ways. Some authors — like, say, Margaret Atwood — try their hands at a wide variety of genres and approaches, while others — like, say, John Cheever — compulsively sift through the same material in search of new nuggets of insight. Julian became, in the minds of the British public at least, an example of the Cheever type of designer. “It could be said by the cruelest among us that Julian has only ever written one game,” wrote the magazine New Computer Express in 1990, “but has released various substantially enhanced versions of it over the years.”

Of those enhanced versions, Julian published Rebelstar and Rebelstar 2: Alien Encounter through Firebird as a lone-wolf developer, then published Laser Squad through a small outfit known as Blaze Software. Before he made this last game, he founded a company called Target Games — soon to be renamed to the less generic Mythos Games — with his father as silent partner and his brother Nick in an active role; the latter had by now become an accomplished programmer in his own right, in fact surpassing Julian’s talents in that area. In 1990, the brothers made the Chaos sequel Lords of Chaos together in order to prove to the likes of New Computer Express that Julian was at least a two-trick pony. And then came the series of events that would lead to Julian Gollop, whose games were reasonably popular in Britain but virtually unknown elsewhere, becoming one of the acknowledged leading lights of strategy gaming all over the world.

The road to X-COM traveled through the terrain of happenstance rather than any master plan. Julian’s career-defining project started as Laser Squad 2 in spirit and even in name, the next manifestation of his ongoing obsession with small-scale, turn-based, single-unit tactics. The big leap forward this time was to be an isometric viewpoint, adding an element of depth to the battlefield. He and Nick coded a proof of concept on an Atari ST. While they were doing so, Blaze Software disappeared, yet another ephemeral entity in a volatile industry. Now, the brothers needed a new publisher for their latest game.

Both of them had been playing hours and hours of Railroad Tycoon, from the American publisher MicroProse. Knowing that MicroProse had a British branch, they decided to take their demo there first. It was a bold move in its way; as I’ve already noted, their games were popular in their sphere, but had mostly borne the imprints of smaller publishers and had mostly been sold at cheaper price points. MicroProse was a different animal entirely, carrying with it the cachet that still clung in Europe to American games, with their bigger budgets and higher production values. In their quiet English way, the Gollops were making a bid for the big leagues.

Luckily for them, MicroProse’s British office was far more than just a foreign adjunct to the American headquarters. It was a dynamic, creative place in its own right, which took advantage of the laissez-faire attitude of “Wild” Bill Stealey, MicroProse’s flamboyant fly-boy founder, to blaze its own trails. When the Gollops brought in the nascent Laser Squad 2, they were gratified to find that just about everyone at MicroProse UK already knew of them and their games. Peter Moreland, the head of development, was cautiously interested, but with plenty of caveats. For one thing, they would need to make the game on MS-DOS rather than the Atari ST in order to reach the American market. For another, a small-scale tactical-combat game alone wouldn’t be sufficient — wouldn’t be, he said, “MicroProse enough.” After making their name in the 1980s with Wild Bill’s beloved flight simulators, MicroProse was becoming at least as well known in this incipient new decade for grand-strategy games of or in the spirit of their star designer Sid Meier, like the aforementioned Railroad Tycoon and the soon-to-be-released Civilization. The emphasis here was on the “grand.” A Laser Squad 2 just wouldn’t be big enough for MicroProse.

Finally, Moreland wasn’t thrilled by all these far-future soldiers fighting battles in unknown regions of space for reasons that were abstract at best. Who could really relate to any of that? He wanted something more down to earth — literally. Maybe something to do with alien visitors in UFOs… that sort of thing. Julian nodded along, then went home to do some research and refine his proposal.

He quickly learned that he was living in the midst of a fecund period in the peculiar field of UFOlogy. In 1989, a sketchy character named Bob Lazar had given an interview for a Las Vegas television station in which he claimed to have been employed as a civilian contractor at the top-secret Nevada military base known only as Area 51. In that location, so he said, the American Air Force was actively engaged in testing fantastic technologies derived from extraterrestrial visitors. The interview would go down in history as the wellspring of a whole generation of starry-eyed conspiracy theorists, whose outlandish beliefs would soon enter the popular media zeitgeist via such vehicles as the television series The X-Files. When Julian first investigated the subject in 1991, however, UFOs and aliens were still a fairly underground obsession. Nevertheless, he took much from the early lore and legends of Area 51, such as a supposed new chemical element — called ununpentium by Lazar, elerium by the eventual game — which powered the aliens’ spaceships.

His other major source of inspiration was the 1970 British television series entitled simply UFO. In fact, his game would eventually be released as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe, capitalizing on the association with a show that a surprising number of people there still remembered. (I’ve chosen to use the American name of X-COM globally in this article because all subsequent games in the franchise would be known all over the world under that name; it has long since become the iconic one.) UFO the television series takes place in the then-near-future of 1980, when aliens are visiting the Earth in ever-increasing numbers, abducting humans and wreaking more and more havoc. An international organization known as SHADO (“Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation”) has been formed to combat the menace. The show follows the exploits of the SHADO operatives, complete with outlandish “futuristic” costumes and sets and gloriously cheesy special effects. Gollop lifted this basic scenario and moved it to his own near-future: to the year 1999, thus managing to nail not only his decade’s burgeoning obsession with aliens but also its unease about the looming millennium.

The game is divided into two distinct halves — so much so that each half is almost literally an entirely separate game: each unloads itself completely from memory to run a separate executable file at the point of transition, caching on the hard drive before doing so the relatively small amount of state data which its companion needs to access.

The first part that you see is the strategic level. As the general in charge of the “Extra-Terrestrial Combat Force,” or X-COM — the name was suggested by Stephen Hand and Mike Brunton, two in-house design consultants at MicroProse UK — you must hire soldiers and buy equipment for them; research new technologies, a process which comes more and more to entail reverse-engineering captured alien artifacts in order to use your enemy’s own technology against them; build new bases at strategic locations around the world, as well as improve your existing ones (you start with just one modest base); and send your aircraft out to intercept the alien craft that are swarming the Earth. In keeping with the timeless logic of computer games, the countries of the Earth have chosen to make X-COM, the planet’s one real hope for defeating the alien menace, into a resource-constrained semi-capitalist enterprise; you’ll often need to sell gadgets you’ve manufactured or stolen from the aliens in order to make ends meet, and if you fail to perform well your sponsoring countries will cut their funding.

The “Geoscape” view, where you place your bases and use them to intercept airborne alien attackers. You can find a wealth of discussion online about where best to position your first base — but naturally, most people prefer to put it in their home town. Like the ability to name your individual soldiers, the ability to start right in your own backyard forges a personal connection between the game and its player.

This half of the game was a dizzying leap into uncharted territory for the Gollop brothers. Thankfully, then, they were on very familiar ground when it came to the other half: the half that kicks in when your airborne interceptors force a UFO to land, or when you manage to catch the aliens in the act of terrorizing some poor city, or when the aliens themselves attack one of your bases. Here you find yourself in what amounts to Laser Squad 2 in form and spirit if not in name: an ultra-detailed turn-based single-unit combat simulator, the latest version of a game which Julian Gollop had already made four times before. (Or close enough to it, at any rate: X-COM, the culmination of what had begun with Rebelstar Raiders on the Spectrum, is ironically single-player only, whereas that first game had not just allowed but required two humans to play.) Although the strategic layer sounds far more complex than this tactical layer — and, indeed, it is in certain ways — it’s actually the tactical game where you spend the majority of your time, fighting battles which can consume an entire evening each.

The “Battlescape” view, where tactical combat takes place.

For all their differences, the two halves of the game do interlock in the end as two facets of a whole. Your research efforts, equipment purchases, and hiring practices in the strategic half determine the nature of the force you lead into the tactical man-against-alien battles. Less obviously but just as significantly, your primary reward for said battles proves to be the recovery of alien equipment, alien corpses, and even live alien specimens (all is fair in love and genocidal interplanetary war), which you cart back to your bases to place at the disposal of your research teams. And so the symbiotic relationship continues: your researchers use what you recover as grist for their mill, which lets you go into tougher battles with better equipment to hand, thereby to bring back still richer spoils.

The capsule description of the finished game which I’ve just provided mirrors almost perfectly the proposal which Julian Gollop delivered to MicroProse; the design would change surprisingly little in the process of development. MicroProse thought it sounded just fine as-is.

The contract which the Gollops signed with MicroProse specified that the former would be responsible for all of the design and coding, while the latter would provide the visual and audio assets. MicroProse UK did hold up their end of the bargain, but had an oddly casual attitude toward the project in general. Julian remembers their producer as “very laid back — he would come over once a month, we would go to the pub, talk about the game for a bit, and he would go home.” Otherwise, the Gollops worked largely alone after their first rush of consultations with the MicroProse mother ship had faded into the past. Time dragged on and on while they struggled with this massively complicated game, one half of which was unlike anything they had ever even contemplated before.

X-COM’s UFOpaedia is a direct equivalent to Civilization’s innovative Civilopedia, its most obvious single nod to Sid Meier’s equally influential but very, very different game.

As it did so, much happened in the broader world of MicroProse. On the positive side, Sid Meier’s Civilization was released at the end of 1991. But despite this and some other success stories, MicroProse’s financial foundation was growing ever more shaky, as their ambitions outran their core competencies. The company lost millions on an ill-judged attempt to enter the stand-up arcade market, then lost millions more on baroque CRPGs and flashy interactivity-lite adventure games. After an IPO that was supposed to bail them out went badly off the rails, Wild Bill Stealey sold out in June of 1993 to Spectrum Holobyte, another American publisher. The deal seemed to make sense: Spectrum Holobyte had a lot of money, thanks not least to generous venture capitalists, but a rather thin portfolio of games, while MicroProse had a lot of games both out and in the pipeline but had just about run out of money.

Spectrum Holobyte sifted carefully through their new possession’s projects in development, passing judgment on which were potential winners and which certain losers. According to Julian Gollop, Spectrum Holobyte told MicroProse UK in no uncertain terms to cancel X-COM. On the face of it, it wasn’t an unreasonable point of view to take. The Gollops had been working for almost two years by this point, and still had few concrete results to show for their efforts. It really did seem that they were hopelessly out of their depth. Luckily for them, however, Peter Moreland and others in the British office still believed in them. They nodded along with the order to bin X-COM, then quietly kept the project on the books. At this point, it didn’t cost them much of anything to do so; the art was already done, and now it was up to the Gollops to sink or swim with it.

X-COM bobbed up to the surface six months later, when the new, allegedly joint management team — Stealey would soon leave the company, feeling himself to have been thoroughly sidelined — started casting about for a game to feature in Europe in the first quarter of 1994, thereby to make the accountants happy. Peter Moreland piped up sheepishly: “You remember that UFO project you told us to cancel? Well, it’s actually still kicking around…” And so the Gollop brothers, who had been laboring under strangely little external pressure for the past 26 months or so, were now ordered to get their game done already. They managed it, just — UFO: Enemy Unknown shipped in Europe in March of 1994 — but some of the problems in the finished game definitely stem from the deadline that was so arbitrarily imposed from on high.

But if the game could have used a few more months in the oven, it nonetheless shipped in better condition than many other MicroProse games had during the recent stretch of financial difficulties. It garnered immediate rave reviews, while its sales also received a boost from another source. The first episode of The X-Files had aired the previous September in the United States, followed by airings across Europe. Just like that, a game about hostile alien visitors seemed a lot more relevant. Indeed, the game possessed much the same foreboding atmosphere as the show, from its muted color palette to MicroProse composer John Broomhall’s quietly malevolent soundtrack, which he had created in just two months in the final mad rush up to the release deadline. He couldn’t have done a better job if he’d had two years.

X-COM: UFO Defense shipped a few months later in North America, into a cultural zeitgeist that was if anything even more primed for it. Computer Gaming World, the American industry’s journal of record, gave it five stars out of five, and its sales soared well into the six digits. As the quote that opened this article attests, X-COM was in many ways the antithesis of what most publishers believed constituted a hit game in the context of 1994. Its graphics were little more than functional; it had no full-motion video, no real-time 3D rendering, no digitized voices; it fit perfectly well on a few floppy disks, thank you very much, with no need for any new-fangled CD-ROM drive. And yet it sold better than the vast majority of those other “cutting-edge” games. Many took its success as a welcome sign that gaming hadn’t yet lost its soul completely — that good old-fashioned gameplay could still trump production values from time to time.

The original X-COM’s reputation has only grown more hallowed in the years since its release. It’s become a perennial on best-games-of-all-time lists, even ones whose authors weren’t yet born at the time of its release. For this is a game, so we’re told, that transcends its archaic presentation, that absolutely any student of game design needs to play.

That’s rather ironic in that X-COM is a game that really shouldn’t work at all according to many of the conventional rules of design. For example, it’s one of the most famous of all violators of what’s become known as the Covert Action Rule, as formulated by Sid Meier and named after one of his own less successful designs. The rule states that pacing is as important in a strategy game as it is in any other genre, that “mini-games” which pull the player away from the overarching strategic view need to be short and to the point, as is the case in Meier’s classic Pirates!. If they drag on too long, Meier tells us, the player loses focus on the bigger picture, forgets what she’s been trying to accomplish there, gets pulled out of that elusive state of “flow.”

But, as I already noted, X-COM’s tactical battles can drag on for an hour or two at a time — and no one seems be bothered by this at all. What gives?

By way of an answer to that question, I would first note that the Covert Action Rule is, like virtually all supposedly hard-and-fast rules of game design, riddled with caveats and exceptions. (Personally, I don’t even agree that violating the yet-to-be-formulated Covert Action Rule was the worst problem of Covert Action itself.) And I would also note that X-COM does at least a couple of things extraordinarily well as compensation, better than any strategy game that came before it. Indeed, one can argue that no earlier grand-strategy game even attempted to do these things — not, at least, to anything like the same extent. Interestingly, both inspired strokes are borrowed from other gaming genres.

The first is the intriguing mystery surrounding the aliens, which is peeled back layer by layer as you progress. As your scientists study the equipment and alien corpses brought back from the battle sites and interrogate the live aliens your soldiers have captured, you learn more and more about where your enemies come from and what motivates them to attack the Earth so relentlessly. It doesn’t take long to reach a point where you look forward to the next piece of this puzzle as excitedly as you do the next cool gun or piece of armor. By the time the whole experience culminates in a desperate attack on the aliens’ home base, you’re all in. Granted, a byproduct of this sense of unfolding discovery is that you may not feel like revisiting the game after you win; for many or most of us, this is a strategy game to play through once rather than over and over again. But on the other hand, considering the fifty hours or more it will take you to get through it once, it’s hard to complain overmuch about that fact. Needless to say, when you do play it for the first time you should meticulously avoid spoilers about What Is Really Going On Here.

Learning more about the alien invaders via an autopsy. The game was ahead of its time; the year after X-COM’s release, at the height of the X-Files-fueled UFO craze, the Fox television channel would broadcast Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? in the United States. (For the record, it was most assuredly the latter.)

X-COM’s other, even more brilliant stroke is the sense of identification it builds between you and the soldiers you send into battle. Each soldier has unique strengths and weaknesses, forcing you to carefully consider the role she plays in combat: a burly, fearless character who can carry enough weaponry to outfit your average platoon but couldn’t hit the proverbial broad side of a barn must be handled in a very different way from a slender, nervous sharpshooter. As your soldiers (hopefully) survive missions, their skills improve, CRPG-style. Thus you have plenty of practical reasons to be more loathe to lose a seasoned veteran than a greenhorn fresh out of basic training. And yet this purely zero-sum calculus doesn’t fully explain why each mission is so nail-bitingly tense, so full of agonizing decisions balancing risk against reward.

One of X-COM’s most defining design choices is also one of its simplest: it lets you name each soldier for yourself. As you play, you form a picture of each of them in your imagination, even though the game itself never describes any of them to you as anything other than a list of numbers. Losing a soldier who’s been around for a while feels weirdly like losing a genuine acquaintance. For here too you can’t help but embellish the thin scaffolding of fact the game provides with your own story of what happened: the grizzled old-timer who went out one time too many, whose nerves just couldn’t handle another firefight; the foolhardy, testosterone-addled youth who threw himself into every battle like he was indestructible, until one day he wasn’t. X-COM provides the merest glimpse of what it must feel like to be an actual commander in war: the overwhelming stress of having the lives of others hanging on your decisions, the guilty second-guessing that inevitably goes on when you lose someone. It has something that games all too often lack: a sense of consequences for your actions. Theoretically at least, the best way to play it is in iron-man mode: no saving and restoring to fix bad outcomes, dead is dead, own your decisions as commander.

Beginning with just a name you choose for yourself and a handful of statistics which the game provides, your imagination will conjure a whole personality for each of your soldiers. Dwight here, for example, likes guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music.

In one of those strange concordances that tend to crop up in many creative fields, X-COM wasn’t the only strategy game of 1994 to bring in CRPG elements to great effect. Ironically, these innovations occurred just as the CRPG genre itself was in its worst doldrums since Ultima I and Wizadry I had first brought it to prominence. Today, even as the CRPG has long since regained its mojo as a gaming genre, CRPG elements have become the special sauce ladled over a wide array of other types of games. X-COM was among the first to show how tasty the end result could be.

I have to say, however, that I find other elements of X-COM less appetizing, and that its strengths don’t quite overcome its weaknesses in my mind sufficiently to win it a place on my personal list of best games ever. My first stumbling block is the game’s learning curve, which is not just steep but unnecessarily so. I’d like to quote Garth Deangelis, who led the team that created XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the critically acclaimed franchise reboot that was released in 2012:

While [the original X-COM] may have been magnificent, it was also a unique beast when it came to beginning a new game. We often joked that the diehards who mastered the game independently belonged to an elite club because by today’s standards the learning curve was like climbing Mount Everest.

As soon as you fire up the original, you’re placed in a Geoscape with the Earth silently looming, and various options to explore within your base — including reading (unexplained) financial reports, approving manufacturing requests (without any context as to what those would mean later on), and examining a blueprint (which hinted at the possibility for base expansion), for example — the player is given no direction.

Even going on your first combat mission can be a bit of a mystery (and when you first step off the Skyranger, the game will kill off a few of your soldiers before you even see your first alien — welcome to X-COM!).

There’s certainly a place for complex games, and complexity will always come complete with a learning curve of some sort. But, again, X-COM’s curve is just unnecessarily steep. Consider: when you begin a new game, you have two interceptors already in your hangar for bringing down UFOs. Fair enough. Unfortunately, they come equipped with sub-optimal Stingray missiles and borderline-useless cannon. So, one of the first tasks of the experienced player becomes to requisition some more advanced Avalanche missiles, put them on her interceptors, and sell off the old junk. Why can the game not just start you off with a reasonable weapons load-out? A similar question applies to the equipment carried by your individual soldiers, as it does to the well-nigh indefensible layout of your starting base itself, which makes it guaranteed to fall to the first squad of marauding aliens who come calling. The new player is likely to assume, reasonably enough, that the decisions the game has already made for her are good ones. She finds out otherwise only by being kicked in the teeth as a result of them. This is not good game design. The impression created is of a game that is not tough but fair, but rather actively out to get her.

Your starting base layout. By no means should you assume that this is a defensible one. In fact, many players spend a lot of money at the very beginning ripping it up completely and starting all over again. Why should this be necessary?

You’ll never use a large swath of the subpar weapons and equipment included in X-COM, which rather begs the questions what they’re doing in there. The game could have profited greatly from an editor empowered to pare back all of this extraneous nonsense and home in on its core appeal. Likewise, the user interface in the strategic portion operates on the principle that, if one mouse click is good, ten must be that much better; everything is way more convoluted than it needs to be. Just buying and selling equipment is agonizing.

The tactical game’s interface is also dauntingly complex, but does have somewhat more method to its madness, being the beneficiary of all of Julian Gollop’s earlier experience with this sort of game. Still, even tactical combat, so widely and justly lauded as the beating heart of X-COM, is not without its frustrations. Certainly every X-COM player is all too familiar with the last-alien-on-the-map syndrome, where you sometimes have to spend fifteen or twenty minutes methodically hunting the one remaining enemy, who’s hunkered down in some obscure corner somewhere. The nature of the game is such that you can’t relax even in these situations; getting careless can still get one or more of your precious soldiers killed before you even realize what’s happening. But, although perhaps a realistic depiction of war, this part of the game just isn’t much fun. The problem is frustrating not least because it’s so easily soluble: just have the remaining aliens commit suicide to avoid capture — something entirely in keeping with their nature — when their numbers get too depleted.

All of these niggling problems mark X-COM as the kind of game I have to rant about here all too often: the kind that was never actually played before its release. For all its extended development time, it still needed a few more months filled with play-testing and polishing to reach its full potential. X-COM’s most infamous bug serves as a reminder of just how little of either it got: its difficulty levels are broken. If you select something other than the “beginner” difficulty, it reverts back to the easiest level after the first combat mission. In one sense, this is a blessing: the beginner difficulty is more than difficult enough for the vast majority of players. On the other, though… how the heck could something as basic as that be overlooked? There’s only one way that I can see: if you barely played the game at all before you put it in a box and shipped it out the door.

To his credit, Julian Gollop himself is well aware of these issues and freely acknowledges them — does so much more freely in fact than some of his game’s biggest fans. He notes the influence of vintage Avalon Hill and SPI board games, some of which were so demanding that just being able to play them at all — never mind playing them well — was an odd sort of badge of honor for the grognards of the 1970s and early 1980s. He would appear to agree with me that there’s a bit too much of their style of complexity-for-its-own-sake in X-COM:

I believe that a good game may have relatively simple rules, but have complex situations arise from them. Strategy games tend to do that very well, you know — even the simplest ones are very good at that. I think it’s possible to have an accessible game which doesn’t have amazingly complex rules, but still has a kind of emerging complexity within what happens — you know, what players do, what players explore. For me, that’s the Holy Grail of game design. So, I don’t think that I would probably go back to making games as complex as [X-COM].

Like poets, game designers often simplify their work as they age, the better to capture the real essence of what they’re trying to express.

But whatever their final evaluation of the first game, most players then and now would agree that few franchises have been as thoroughly botched by their trustees as X-COM was afterward. When the first X-COM became an out-of-left-field hit, MicroProse UK, who had great need of hits at the time to impress the Spectrum Holobyte brass, wanted the Gollops to provide a sequel within a year. Knowing that that amount of time would allow them to do little more than reskin the existing engine, they worked out a deal: they would give their publisher their source code and let them make a quickie sequel in-house, while they themselves developed a more ambitious sequel for later release.

The in-house MicroProse project became 1995’s X-COM: Terror from the Deep, which posited that, forty years after their defeat at the end of the first game, the aliens have returned to try again. The wrinkle this time is that they’ve set up bases under the Earth’s oceans, which you must attack and eradicate. Unfortunately, Terror from the Deep does little to correct the original’s problems; if anything, it makes them worse. Most notably, it’s an even more difficult game than its predecessor, a decision that’s hard to understand on any level. Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy? All in all, Terror from the Deep is exactly the unimaginative quickie sequel which the Gollops weren’t excited about having to make.

Nevertheless, it’s arguably the best of the post-original, pre-reboot generation of X-COM games. X-COM: Apocalypse, the Gollops’ own sequel, was a project on a vastly greater scale than the first two X-COM games, a scale to which they themselves struggled to adapt. It was riven by bureaucratic snafus and constant conflict between developer and publisher, and the resulting process of design-by-fractious-committee turned it into a game that did a lot of different things — turned-based and real-time combat in the very same game! — but did none of them all that well, nor even looked all that good whilst doing them. Julian Gollop today calls it “the worst experience of my entire career” and “a nightmare.” He and Nick cut all ties with MicroProse after its 1997 release.

After that, MicroProse lost the plot entirely, stamping the X-COM label onto games that had virtually nothing in common with the first one. X-COM: Interceptor (1998) was a space simulator in the mode of Wing Commander; Em@il Games: X-COM (1999) was a casual multiplayer networked affair; X-COM: Enforcer (2001) was a mindless shoot-em-up. This last proved to be the final straw;  the X-COM name disappeared for the next eleven years, until XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the reboot by Firaxis Games.

If you ask me, said reboot is in absolute terms a better game than the original, picking up on almost all of its considerable strengths while eliminating most of its weaknesses. But it cannot, of course, lay claim to the same importance in the history of gaming. Despite its flaws, the original X-COM taught designers to personalize strategy games, showed them how to raise the emotional stakes in a genre previously associated only with cool calculation. For that reason, it richly deserves its reputation as one of the most important games of its era.

(Sources: the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Amstrad Action of October 1989; Computer Gaming World of August 1994, September 1994, April 1995, and July 1995; Crash of Christmas 1988 and May 1989; Game Developer of April 2013; Retro Gamer 13, 68, 81, 104, 106, 112, and 124; Amiga Format of December 1989, June 1994, and November 1994; Computer and Video Games of December 1988; Games TM 46; New Computer Express of September 15 1990; Games Machine of July 1988; Your Sinclair of August 1990 and September 1990; Personal Computer News of July 21 1983. Online sources include Julian Gollop’s X-COM postmortem from the 2013 Game Developers Conference, “The Story of X-COM at EuroGamer, and David Jenkins’s interview with Julian Gollop at Metro.

The original X-COM is available for digital purchase at GOG.com, as are most of the other X-COM games mentioned in this article.)

Comments
60 Responses

- mycophobia

September 18, 2020 at 3:58 pm

“Bob Lazar had given an interview for a Las Vega television station”

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2020 at 5:48 pm

Thanks!

- Chris D

September 18, 2020 at 4:10 pm

Brilliant article, as ever Jimmy. The way you synthesise all these sources into a single narrative is really impressive, and your comments on the game are invariably spot on.

I loved UFO: Enemy Unknown, but given that I played it on an Amiga, it had all of the above problems plus painfully long waiting times between turns. On the relatively simple early levels, it wasn’t too bad, but on the complex urban terror missions with lots of aliens and civilians, you would have to wait up to ten minutes while the computer had it’s go. Even on an A1200. I used to have to play it while reading a book.

I can scarcely believe I had the patience to play it, but I certainly had plenty of spare time as a teenager, so doggedly stuck it out (without ever managing to complete it). As you say, the lure of the lore you got from capturing live aliens or dissecting dead ones was strong enough to overcome the ludicrous slowness of the AI on the Amiga version (which was otherwise splendid, and had beautiful 256 colour graphics).

- Captain Kal

September 25, 2020 at 10:01 am

I used to play the CD32 version. No saving between the battlescape missions that one!!!!

- Howard M. Lewis Ship

September 18, 2020 at 4:12 pm

Typo: “Las Vega” (missing the S).

I was no good at this when it came out, and no better at it when I got the modern version for my iPad. Still fascinating though.

- Benjamin Steele

September 18, 2020 at 4:59 pm

One of my older brother’s friends stopped by the house one afternoon when my brother was absent; I told him he was welcome to hang around until Ick got back. He watched me play X-Com for a little while, and then I offered the computer to him while I went off to do homework.

He was still playing when I got up in the morning to go to school.

I absolutely adored the original game. I thought the Firaxis reboot captured the magic pretty well.

Thank you for the story behind something that soaked up the better part of a year of my gaming time in high school.

- Josh T

September 18, 2020 at 5:03 pm

Meir -> Meier
Vega -> Vegas
Stringray -> Stingray (I think)
It think -> I think

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2020 at 5:50 pm

Thanks

- Andrew Pam

September 18, 2020 at 5:06 pm

“volitale industry” -> volatile

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2020 at 5:50 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

September 18, 2020 at 6:03 pm

“and as well as” is a bit redundant.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2020 at 7:39 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

September 18, 2020 at 6:04 pm

Chaos on the Spectrum was awesome; highly addictive, and the magazines wrote lots about it for a while. Truly a cult classic. Didn’t know it was written by the same guy as X-COM.

- Steve Kemp

September 22, 2020 at 7:25 am

Chaos is a game that I still return to 20+ years later, firing up an emulator to have a game every couple of months.

I’ve never played Lords of Chaos, or even the recent kickstarter-based sequel/reimaging. But the original holds up well.

- Pedro Timóteo

September 18, 2020 at 6:09 pm

Great post as always, but you’re probably tired of me saying that. :)

Maybe it was because of the piracy situation in Portugal, where, by 1994, I had been playing games for over a decade almost always without access to manuals — don’t get me started on Bard’s Tale, where I had to use a Multiface to show and allow me to copy to paper, by hand, the 4-letter spell codes from my ZX Spectrum’s memory, and then having to test one by one to guess what they did :) –, or the fact that I mostly grew up with British games and their idiosyncrasies, but I didn’t have any real problems with X-Com’s interface at the time. Then again, I was (and am) a big Julian Gollop fan (though to me he’ll always be the Chaos and Laser Squad guy, with X-Com being only his third-best game, but still one of my favorite games ever) so I was used to his user interfaces and terms (e.g. “action points”, these days mostly known as “time units”; “snap shots”, “opportunity fire”, and so on) already.

The “demolishing your base and building a more defensible one” thing is something I only ever heard about over a decade later, in the 2000s… I sometimes think the Internet makes a certain kind of player (probably the ones who tend to write FAQs and strategy guides) far too obsessed with “perfect builds” and “perfect strategies”. I never did that (didn’t even consider the possibility) the several times I beat the game in the 90s, and the game was perfectly winnable without it — and I’m far from being a great player. One MIGHT need to rebuild their base optimized for defense if playing on a higher difficulty level (with a bug-fixed version), I guess, but that’s not how the game was like before unofficial bugfix utilities or source ports appeared, much later.

Terror from the Deep is supposedly too hard because of the original game’s difficulty reset bug — MicroProse had complaints about the game being too easy even on higher difficulties (due to it being reset to “Beginner”), so they kept making it harder and harder… and, on an unrelated note, they also fixed the bug, so difficulty levels work again. Plus, those levels — especially those 2- and 3-part missions — are *huge*. :(

One thing we can agree on: the Firaxis remake, and its sequel, are very, very good (despite what some purists may say (“no time units! small squads!”)), and probably the best way these days to introduce newcomers to the series.

By the way, in his quote, Chris Lombardi was wrong: the game did support General MIDI. :) It was in fact how I played it back then, with a Roland SCC-1 (music) and SoundBlaster (sound effects) combo. (Unless they removed that option for the US release? I played the original European UFO…)

As for strategy games with mysteries, I can’t help thinking of another one of my favorite games of all time, Sid Meier’s (really Brian Reynolds’) Alpha Centauri. It’s mostly done with text interludes and subtext from tech videos and leader quotes, and yet it’s brilliantly (and chillingly) done, IMO. Hope you eventually get there. :)

- Pedro Timóteo

September 18, 2020 at 6:44 pm

I sometimes think the Internet makes a certain kind of player (probably the ones who tend to write FAQs and strategy guides) far too obsessed with “perfect builds” and “perfect strategies”.

To clarify: the problem with that kind of players, IMO, isn’t that they’d rather play a game that way (it’s their right, of course); it’s that they insist that that’s the only way to play properly, and everyone else is doing it wrong.

- Kaj Sotala

September 18, 2020 at 6:37 pm

As someone who loved the original X-Com and mostly ignored Terror in the Deep after trying it for 15 minutes, I thought that Apocalypse was pretty good. Not as good as the original, but it was clearly trying to do something novel and ambitious, and it gives a strong feeling that it could have been really great if only it’d had more time. (E.g. all the diplomacy with the different factions, that I think the developers explicitly mentioned was intended to be a lot more sophisticated in the original plan.) A good attempt to make a substantial revision to the original formula and take it somewhere new while still maintaining the essential spirit of the original, and which I still had a lot of fun playing.

And yeah, it probably would have been better game design in a sense to pick either turn-based _or_ real-time and stick with that. But… for me, this choice worked. If they had gone with pure real-time, I would have grumbled and felt unhappy about it “not being real XCOM”. This way, I got to try both, determine that real-time was more fun, and then feel like I had voluntarily picked the option that made for better gameplay.

- Noel

September 18, 2020 at 6:54 pm

An absolutely brilliant article. Well-researched and quite beefy.

I take a bit of an exception at the needlessly feminine gender pronouns though, especially since the author is a male and probably 98% of the audience who played this game were dudes. Enough of the political correctness already.

All-in-all, a fascinating read on one of the most looming works of art from my formative teen years.

I couldn’t play the game at all, except for a few short spurts on a friend’s uncle’s PC, and a one-time affair on a friend’s computer down the street. (I still fucking remember each play of the game if that tells the truth of its impact on my psyche.) My dad was always a Mac diehard, so I was relegated to the bargain bin of PC ports during those early years until Blizzard saved the day.

When the reboot of X-Com came out, I dumped countless hours and explored every inch of it a plethora of times over. Perhaps it was cathartic to have been able to finally play a version of that game which had me under a spell all those years.

- Premislaus

September 19, 2020 at 7:15 pm

>I take a bit of an exception at the needlessly feminine gender pronouns though, especially since the >author is a male and probably 98% of the audience who played this game were dudes. Enough of >the political correctness already.

That’s an extremely common English writing convention. Take your complaint to manuals of style authors.

- stepped pyramids

September 19, 2020 at 8:53 pm

Do you expect the author to change his writing style because you “take a bit of an exception” to it? Why not just get over it and move on?

- Sandra Day

September 20, 2020 at 3:55 pm

Yes, it’s annoying when writing assumes a gender that isn’t you, isn’t it? Gosh, that must be hard for you in this one tiny place on the entire internet and in the entire history of English writing.

- Sarah Walker

September 18, 2020 at 7:17 pm

If you’d asked me, age 10, what my favourite game was, I’d have answered UFO without any hesitation.

It’s fascinating just how compulsive the battle-research-build loop is. Every time I replay the game (must be about once a year), I’ll end up utterly absorbed in it for several days, despite there being absolutely no surprises left in the game. Should anyone be in doubt as to how much the Geoscape section adds to the game, have a look at Laser Squad’s other 1994 descendant, Sabre Team; a perfectly competent tactical game but a fraction as compelling. The sheer scope of UFO is what makes it. Possibly the best publisher intervention of all time?

Possibly it’s a result of having played it so much as a kid, but I find myself much more forgiving of the game’s flaws than Jimmy is (as I was with the Bullfrog games); I’ve long since learnt to never move on the first turn, to avoid half my squad being immediately lost to alien reaction fire, or to immediately change fighter & soldier loadouts on starting a new game, or to just not bother with night missions if I can avoid them (one of the mechanics that sounds great on paper but really doesn’t work that well in practice). The basic core of the game is so good that I’m prepared to put up with such issues.

Terror From The Deep on the other hand, must serve as a great study in how you can change so little in a game and so effectively break it. It’s pretty depressing to start up what was a full price game and discover so little changed since its predecessor; the battle-research-build loop doesn’t work as well a second time if the research tree is mostly unchanged, and while the underwater setting is a change it’s a pretty poor excuse to effectively undo everything achieved and discovered in the first game.

It’s only once you’ve played it for a bit that you discover that something’s badly wrong; while Jimmy’s right that it’s much more difficult than UFO it’s mostly not for deliberate reasons. The research tree, as it turns out, has been tweaked, but it’s buggy. It’s extremely easy to block progress and lock yourself out of victory due to researching artifacts in the ‘wrong’ order. The new terror missions would be a welcome addition of variety to the game if anyone had actually playtested them; I’ve spent hours hunting for ‘the last alien’ only to find the AI stuck in a cupboard or wandering in circles somewhere, issues that UFO didn’t suffer from to anything like the same degree. All in all it’s just no fun to play. Curiously it got higher scores in the UK magazines than UFO did, something I can only assume was the result of publisher pressure.

Apocalypse on the other hand… it’s a very, very flawed game, but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for it. The basic battle-research-build loop still mostly works (and the research tree is different this time!), and the detailed city with opposing factions, along with the implementation of the alien life cycle, are genuinely impressive. When the game comes together, which I’ll admit it often doesn’t, it’s brilliant.

- stepped pyramids

September 19, 2020 at 8:59 pm

Sequels to groundbreaking works (not just games, but music, movies, books) are often overrated by critics relative to the original work at the time of release. The charitable explanation for this is a priming effect — the reviewers go into the sequel expecting a great game.

- Doctor Casino

September 21, 2020 at 5:44 pm

Great comment. I love the point about the battle-research loop and how much more compelling the game is with base-building and the overall strategic element. I think it complements Jimmy’s points about the imaginary stories one can build up about the squad members, etc. I’m reminded of Scott McCloud’s arguments about how much of comic books take place in the readers’ head, in between the panels — likewise, I think you could say that a great deal of this game’s “plot” as *experienced* (and its emotional impression of forever being barely ahead of impending doom) happens in the player’s head, in the space between the Geoscape and the tactical view.

- David Boddie

September 18, 2020 at 9:06 pm

“UFO the television series takes place in the then-near-future of 1980, when aliens are visiting the Earth in ever-increasing numbers, abducting humans and wreaking more and more havoc. An international organization known as SHADO (“Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation”) has been formed to combat the menace. The show follows the exploits of the SHADO operatives, complete with outlandish “futuristic” costumes and sets and gloriously cheesy special effects.”

You forgot to mention the awesome opening titles!

- CdrJameson

September 19, 2020 at 1:36 pm

Another interesting-but-flawed series from Thunderbirds puppet-master Gerry Anderson!

I played UFO in the mode of earlier, semi-depressing (Anderson frequently let the aliens win) alien-invasionathon Captain Scarlet. All my units were called Captain Puce, Corporal Beige or whatever colour the size of the roster reduced me to.

UFO managed the ‘enemy unknown’ scarily well. Chryssalids, Blaster Bombs and the later Sectoids turned everyone into Commander Brown (trousers) the first time you met them.

This personalisation feature was great, but the big steps for Gollop’s strategy games for me were firstly that they were absolutely lethal. No attritional ‘tank’ builds here – any shot from the darkness was potentially lethal. Secondly that ‘simple rules, complex situtations’ idea with the destructable scenery. Setting fire to barns, smoking out opponents and using civvies to see round corners were all possible,

- Michael Muñoz

September 18, 2020 at 9:21 pm

You should have mentioned Phoenix Point, as it is the true spiritual successor of the original X-COM franchise, as it is was created by Julian Follow himself. It has been out almost a year on Epic, but they have just announced it is launching on Steam December 10th, including all DLC”s to date.

- Zack

September 19, 2020 at 12:26 am

He probably doesn’t mention it because it is ultimately irrelevant to the subject of the article ; many games tried to do X-COM after it released, for instance. Beside, Phoenix Point isn’t terribly good right now. Ironically, it is plagued by many of the original X-COM flaws !

- Jason Dyer

September 18, 2020 at 9:42 pm

Honestly felt like the Terror from the Deep problem was simply the level size; the two-part level at the end of original X-COM was acceptable as a climax, but the game had multi-part levels all the time and ended on a four-part mission instead.

I never had any issues with the difficulty, and I’m nothing close to a strategy maven. (I would in fact describe my strategy game skills as “below average” — I could never beat Civilization over beginner difficulty, to give some comparison.) I never did tear out the opening base and I don’t recall ever having it get demolished by the aliens at any point, so it can’t be *that* sub-optimal?

Same with the weapons — I guess some of them might be useless but I have no idea which ones. I never thought in min-max terms and I was fine. Eventually, when I could shoot with alien guns I upgraded to those, but that seems normal?

- Brian Roy

September 19, 2020 at 4:19 am

I think it comes down really *to* the alien tech. Since you could research them in any order (depending on what you recovered from missions), there was no reason to ever bother with plasma pistols or plasma rifles; the heavy plasma was simply better. Anybody who couldn’t carry one, you might as well leave on laser rifles until you simply ran out of other things to research and researched the plasma rifle.

On the topic of research, I also learned early to wait for as long as possible before researching personal body armor and then tearing through the armor chain as quickly as possible after. Ironically, I tended to feel safer before armor was researched for one simple reason: Researching personal body armor triggers Snakemen. And Snakemen bring Chrysalids with them. Since an alien with a heavy plasma is going to kill you just as dead whether you’re wearing the tier 1 armor or not, it’s not worth the increased danger/difficulty. If you put off researching it, you can effectively *skip* Snakemen, and almost never see them or Chrysalids except for in alien bases.

- Brian Roy

September 19, 2020 at 4:12 am

For the record, the long range missiles that you need to buy for the Interceptors at the very beginning of the game are Avalanche missiles. The Avenger was the end-game interceptor/troop carrier. The cannon does have a purpose: it’s pretty much the only weapon you can use to take down Very Small UFOs without destroying them. But since the game hardly every uses Very Smalls and they’re hardly worth the effort of dealing with in terms of risk vs. resources…yeah, pretty much useless.

I didn’t realize that the Gollops were directly responsible for Apocalypse, no wonder Phoenix Point reminds me so strongly of it. Phoenix Point much more clearly apes X-COM: Apocalypse than X-COM: UFO Defense.

I’ll always remember X-COM with great fondness (which is why I’ve bought it so many times; I think I own a copy from each collection and re-release it’s had). When my parents bought it for me for Christmas, our computer couldn’t run it. It wouldn’t be until the following July that we upgraded the computer and I could finally play. I play pretty much all tactical games and even a lot of third-person shooters by the rules I learned in X-COM: Try to stay in pairs, always crouch, engage at range, stay out of sight when you’re not taking a shot.

- Brian Roy

September 19, 2020 at 4:20 am

“Apes” is the wrong word. “Descends from” would be better.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2020 at 6:39 am

Ouch. Thanks!

- Andrew Nenakhov

September 19, 2020 at 7:49 pm

For all it’s flaws, Apocalypse delivered me a single greatest burst of adrenaline when my three commandos were caught in the middle of the room with those headcrab-type aliens swarming from all sides. Played in real-time, my guys were shooting pistols from both hands, killing off wave after wave of aliens, barely surviving in the end.

But in general, the game was hard to play and hard some weird weird alien graphics. Interestingly, next to nice 3d models of weapons and vehicles and other stuff.

- Gál Hegedűs

September 19, 2020 at 2:34 pm

I always found unjust that while Julian Gollop thrived even after leaving the Speccy behind, Mike Singleton who similarly made a legendary unique game (with sequels or similar ones) on the platform slowly faded into oblivion.

Anyway Chaos is THE GAME on the Zx Spectrum.

- Pedro Timóteo

September 19, 2020 at 8:06 pm

Midwinter (ST, Amiga) was pretty popular, I think.

- Mayhaym

September 19, 2020 at 4:04 pm

I discovered Laser Squad on the Amstrad CPC via my friends older brother (who also had a hand in introducing me to industrial music and table top RPGs), played it to death on my Atari ST later. Still my favorite squad level strategy game.

- Andrew Nenakhov

September 19, 2020 at 7:42 pm

It’s very easy to fix starting base. Just put two hangars in the left and right corners, and demolish the bottom ones. Hangars are cheap, and your base quarters are right next to entry points for aliens, making them easy to thwart.

This game is great, I play it to defeat evil aliens every few years. Interestingly, I never did with reboot: the animated base is great, but somehow I miss free roaming the globe, and i don’t like the overall constraints the reboot puts me it.

However, X-Com 2 is way better in this regard, because as a member of the resistance, such constraints and limited time for missions make a lot more sense in this setting.

- Wolfeye Mox

September 20, 2020 at 3:02 am

I just realized that I have most of the X-com franchise on Steam, even though I’ve only played Enemy Unknown. I guess I got an X-com bundle or got them during a sale, I forget. After reading this article, I’m not sure if I’d enjoy the older games, sounds like they’d be too difficult, and the reboot might have made some good changes. I put a lot of hours into Enemy Unknown, it’s one of my favorite games. Still haven’t gotten X-com 2, the sequel to Enemy Unknown, because I haven’t had the money. Oy vey.

Anyway, I usually hate turn based strategy games. Can’t stand Civilization and games of that ilk. I’ll always prefer RTS games like Empire Earth and Starcraft, or hybrid games like Total War.
But, X-com, and similar games like Shadowrun Returns, hit that sweet spot of controlling a small squad, so turns go by relatively fast. Being able to personalize the soldiers was a cool feature. I always ended up reloading saves if I lost one, because I got attached to them.

It was nice to read about how the franchise got it’s start, and a bit more information about the games I have sitting in my Steam library. I might not play ever the original X-com games, but it’s still nice owning a bit of gaming history.

- Pingback: X-COM - The Digital Antiquarian - Techinfinitylife

- Nikolai Kondrashov

September 20, 2020 at 7:35 pm

Thank for a lovely article, as usual! UFO: Enemy Unknown was loved very much in Russia and played everywhere (although probably never paid for). Aside from gameplay I loved the graphics very much. Does anybody know who drew it?

Laser Squad was loved as well by the Spectrum users, of whom there were still many well into the 90’s. Interesting that Julian left the Spectrum to keep making his game, but the hardcore Russian Speccy fans later did a real-time UFO “port” of sorts: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=13106

- Avian Overlord

September 21, 2020 at 4:40 am

“Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy?”

Yes, actually. The release version of X-COM had a bug where the difficulty would always be set to the easiest level no matter what you actually picked. However, no one knew that at the time so all their initial feedback was that the game was too easy even on superhuman. And TfTD was designed to rectify that. At least, that’s the story I’ve heard.

Although it’s also worth noting that X-COM is a game that feels harder than it actually is. It will kill your dudes with impunity, but they’re pretty replaceable. And every iteration of X-COM down to the recent remakes has a problem that the difficulty just collapses in the endgame once you get the endgame tech online.

- BoardGameNut

September 21, 2020 at 10:07 pm

Great article! Even though I was a big time video gamer during the time of XCOM, I was more on the C64 because I didn’t own a PC. My friend showed me XCOM, but I never got a chance to play it until a few years ago. I was hooked instantly with the just “one more turn” syndrome much like Civilization. I also played it with the OpenXCom project that reimplemented it true to the original but fixed the game breaking bugs in it. It was a truly a masterpiece of it’s time,and I would stay it still holds up quite well.

I eventually got around to playing XCOM2, and I was duly impressed by it as well. It was definitely more streamlined and added much better character progression to the squad mates over the original and it’s 2012 predecessor making it a far better game. What’s interesting to me is how the designer of XCOM2012 and XCOM2 got back to board game roots of more modern board game designs that is reflected in it’s more streamlined gameplay. The new XCOM’s do play more like a tactical board game where I could see the actions being a set of player cards for each unit type and you’re moving your pieces across the board. I think that is part of the reason for it’s more modern day rejuvenation of the turn based tactics game genre. I hope you have a follow up about how the new XCOM’s have greatly impacted modern day tactical combat games because I see it all over even in Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle from Nintendo (excellent game in it’s own right).

- James H.

September 22, 2020 at 11:28 am

Long time lurker; first time commenter.

“X-COM” is absolutely my favorite game of all time, because it came at exactly the right moment in my childhood.

This was a great writeup. Amazing to know about the context and business decisions behind the game, which I had no idea about.

Also, the disappointment in knowing that your favorite/strongest soldiers had weak resistance vs. psionic attacks later on…that was great. We all had our weaknesses!

Funny (or fitting) that in one’s youth, abstract difficulty and bad initial on-boarding into the game felt way less punishing. I saved up my allowance money for this game, and I was going to figure it out, no matter what. I can’t see the adult me completing these games today.

Cynically, one could also say that the initial difficulty made the Official Strategy Guide an easier sell. I certainly had my copy!

- Bogdanow

September 22, 2020 at 9:09 pm

Great article!
I had been playing X-Com:Terror From The Deep as a elementary school student. I somehow skipped original X-Com. It was a really difficult game and I have never finished it. The best thing was a launcher that made it possible to set a few way-points working as a long range precise artillery, great fun to use, but it worked only underwater. That made surface missions a much more difficult undertaking.

- XCOMFAN

September 23, 2020 at 5:58 am

X-COM was definitely ahead of its time, as a fan from the first game in the series I continue to play it. I just wished that there would be more of these types of games out there. As a fan, I bought all the titles to date and all the DLCs available.

- Patryk

September 24, 2020 at 4:51 pm

Great article, as usual, thanks! I remember a public appearance of Gollop who told a funny anecdote that originally he had intended to name the organization as X-CON. However, he or someone else came to the conclusion that this will sound like a game about ex-cons, and they renamed it.

- Michael

September 24, 2020 at 5:57 pm

I have so much respect for your prose, Jimmy, that I’m almost shy about pointing out that you’ve used a malapropism – “hone in on” – not once, but twice in this article. https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hone-in/

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2020 at 7:25 pm

Thanks! Although I only see one instance… (If I used the same idiom twice in the same article, that’s a problem in itself.)

- Michael

September 25, 2020 at 6:00 pm

The first time it was “honed” rather than “hone,” which could be how you missed it.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2020 at 7:06 pm

Ouch… one time too many to hone or home. Thanks!

- Kevin Butler

September 28, 2020 at 6:23 pm

Excellent article as always. I never played the original PC version of this game. My introduction occurred from the Xbox 360 versions of XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM Enemy Within. I thought they were really good turn-based games and also the research aspect added another dimension. In other words, how a game should be put together.

Unfortunately, I did notice one typo: “…It was riven by bureaucratic…” probably should be driven instead of riven.

Again, excellent article.

Kevin Butler

- Jimmy Maher

September 29, 2020 at 8:29 am

Thanks, but as intended. “Riven” meets “shot through with” or “plagued by” in this context.

- Anon

October 1, 2020 at 8:47 am

The great thing is UFO Defence is still going! There is a missing group which has made Openxcom a full overhaul of the game as well as an extended version which can be modded, it’s 100% worth noting.

- Gilles Duchesne

October 4, 2020 at 4:25 pm

Sources nitpick: you’ve mentioned “Amiga Format” twice

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2020 at 6:17 am

Thanks!

- Sebastian Redl

October 16, 2020 at 10:00 pm

I was just old enough to play the sequel (or not – I was frequently terrified) when it came out, so I missed the original. Therefore my fond memories are of that game.

In hindsight, it’s unbelievable just how badly they managed to bungle what was effectively a reskin. Aside from the mentioned tech tree bugs, which I of course managed to stumble into, there was also the gauss weapon issue.

The gauss tech line was the equivalent of the laser weapons in the first game: the only advanced weapon that isn’t reverse engineered.

But while there was one alien vulnerable to lasers and pretty much nothing else, the gauss weapons had no such reason for existing.

- John Elliott

October 23, 2020 at 9:10 pm

‘The game being rushed out, still with bugs’ is a problem that also affected Chaos — there are text and sprites in the game for features that were never implemented, and some of its bugs attained memetic status among players.

- Pingback: Deeper Into The Cloud – Guru Shrine

- Andy Bailey

May 13, 2021 at 9:38 am

I had a chance to speak with Jullian Gollop about UFO a couple of years ago.

One thing that I notice is that some of the sound effects that I first heard in UFO, especially sounds like the opening of doors, I’ve heard in numerous places since. I wanted to find out whether the sounds were originally created for UFO, or whether they were taken from sound libraries. Unfortunately Julian didn’t know where they came from, but we still had a good talk about multiplayer gaming in general.

He also signed my original UFO instruction manual, and a friends copy of Lords of Chaos, and that totally made my day.

Transport Tycoon
October 2, 2020

Anyone who has followed the career of the British game developer Chris Sawyer down through the years knows that he prefers to go his own way. This was true from the very beginning.

In 1980, when Sawyer was fourteen years old, Sinclair Research subcontracted out the manufacture of the ZX80 — the cheap microcomputer that was about to take all of Britain by storm — to the Timex plant located in his hometown of Dundee, Scotland. From that moment on, Dundee was a Sinclair town. And small wonder: by 1983, with the cheap and cheerful Sinclair Spectrum pushing Britain toward the status of the most computer-mad nation on earth on a per-capita basis, the house that Uncle Clive built had become a significant part of the city’s economy. Half of the Dundee kids who were interested in computers seemed to have gotten jobs at the Timex plant, while the other half had just gotten Speccys for their living rooms.

Sawyer was no less fascinated with computers than his peers, but he was also a dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast. Just as the Spectrum boom was nearing its peak, he saved up his money to buy… a Camputers Lynx, one of those oddball also-rans of the 1980s which are remembered only by collectors today. And when it became clear that this first computer of his was destined for orphandom, he chose to invest in a Memotech MTX, another doomed machine.

His strange taste in hardware proved a blessing in disguise. With very little software available for the likes of a Lynx or MTX, Sawyer was forced to learn how to make his own fun, forced to become a programmer of games rather than a mere player of them. He would read about a game for another, more popular platform in a magazine, look carefully at the screenshots thereof, and make his own version that played as he imagined the original must.

One day in 1984, Sawyer’s chemistry teacher called him aside. Knowing that his student liked to program, the teacher showed him a newspaper article he had clipped out, telling how another local boy had made £1000 selling his games. Sawyer was inspired. By the time he moved to Glasgow to attend university in the fall of that year, he had made contact with Memotech themselves, who were eager for software of any stripe for their struggling machine. Absolutely no one — least of all the soon-to-be-bankrupt Memotech — got rich off the MTX, but Sawyer did make enough money to buy a printer and floppy-disk drive.

Even after Memotech bit the dust, he continued to go his own way as stubbornly as ever. Instead of a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST like his friends were buying, he scraped together the last of his Memotech earnings to buy an Amstrad MS-DOS machine, another definite minority taste at the time among gamers in Britain.

Once again, though, the road less traveled proved advantageous. In need of a job just after graduating from university, he contacted Jacqui Lyons, a former literary agent who had made a spectacular debut as Britain’s first ever software agent when she auctioned off to the highest bidder the porting rights to Ian Bell and David Braben’s game Elite, a sensation on the BBC Micro that went on to become the British game of its decade, thanks not least to her efforts. Now, Sawyer learned from her that the British industry had need for MS-DOS specialists — not so much for the domestic or even continental European market, but in order to bring its games to American shores, where MS-DOS was fast becoming the biggest platform of them all. Thus Lyons gave Sawyer a contract to port StarRay, an enhanced version of the old arcade classic Defender, from the Amiga to MS-DOS (the end result would be published in the United States as Revenge of Defender). When that went well, he was entrusted with the MS-DOS port of Virus, the long-awaited second game from David Braben himself.

Sawyer spent the next five years doing yet more ports. He worked alone from his Scottish home, evincing already the reclusive tendencies that would eventually get him labelled one of gaming’s greatest “enigmas,” whilst building a reputation for speed and efficiency that would also never desert him. He was arguably better versed in the tricky art of Intel assembly language than any other person in the British games industry; he refused to write in a high-level language, a resolve he has stayed true to to this day. “I enjoyed the work and it paid well,” he remembers, “though I became very frustrated that often I was unable to finish a contract because I’d caught up with the original game’s programmer and had to wait for him before I could convert the remainder of the game. My solution was to take on two conversions at the same time.” He developed a particularly good relationship with Braben, becoming the only programmer besides himself to which the latter was willing to entrust the hallowed name of Elite. In 1991, Sawyer coded Elite Plus, an enhanced version of the game for the latest MS-DOS machines; he then ported Frontier: Elite II, its belated, ambitious, and ultimately underwhelming sequel, to MS-DOS in 1993.

Up to this point, Chris Sawyer had been widely and fairly judged as a technician rather than a creative force. The teenager who had cloned games he had never actually seen from magazine reviews seemed every bit the father of the man who still earned his living by making other people’s games look and play as well as possible on alternative hardware. But now came the great leap that would elevate his name into the firmament where lived the superstars of British game development — names like David Braben, Peter Molyneux, and David Jones (another product of the tech-obsessed city of Dundee, as it happened). Sawyer may have been a late arrival, but in the final reckoning he would outshine all of them in terms of the sheer quantity of pounds his games brought in.

As so often happens when you look closely at such things, Sawyer’s inexplicable dizzying leap into original game design is perhaps less inexplicable or dizzying than it first appears. Certainly his first masterstroke wasn’t made from whole cloth. It sprouted rather from the fertile soil of Railroad Tycoon from MicroProse Software, Sid Meier’s brilliant 1990 game of railroad logistics and Gilded Age financial warfare. Sawyer:

I was fascinated with Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon game. I played it for hours and hours; it was definitely my favorite game at the time. The viewpoint was just an overhead 2D map, though, and I wondered whether [an] isometric viewpoint would be better, and if other modes of transport should be included. I was inspired.

So, while he was waiting for his better-known colleagues to send him the next chunks of their own games for conversion to MS-DOS, Sawyer began to tinker. By the time Elite II was wrapping up, he had an ugly but working demo of an enhanced version of Railroad Tycoon which did indeed shift the viewpoint from vertically overhead to isometric. “I decided to devote all my time to the game for a few months and see what developed,” he says. He convinced a talented free-lance artist named Simon Foster, who was already an established name in commercial graphics but was looking to break into games, to provide illustrations, even as he made the bold decision to step up to cutting-edge SVGA graphics, at more than twice the resolution of standard VGA. At the end of that few months, he was more convinced than ever that he had a winner on his hands: “Even people who didn’t normally play computer games would sit for hours on end, totally engrossed in building railway lines, routing trains, and making as much profit as possible.” He soon made his train simulator into an all-encompassing transportation simulator, adding trucks and buses, ships and ferries, airplanes and even helicopters.

The choice of publisher was obvious. Jacqui Lyons connected him with MicroProse’s British office, who immediately saw the potential for marketing the game as a pseudo-sequel to Railroad Tycoon; thus it was agreed that it would be known as Transport Tycoon. It shipped under that name in Europe and North America in time for the Christmas of 1994. And just like that, Chris Sawyer’s days of toiling as an anonymous porter were behind him, as he took his place among the stars. His elevation was richly deserved based on his game’s surface qualities alone.

Indeed, its groundbreaking interface is as good a place as any to begin to sing Transport Tycoon’s praises. Any long-running, in-depth historical project such as this one of mine winds up becoming a form of time travel for its propagator, who comes to live a part of his life in the past which he studies. The fact is, I just don’t have much time to play modern games that aren’t on the syllabus. My near-complete immersion in ludic antiquity means that I get some sense of how these old games must have looked to the people who saw them for the first time. When I fired up Transport Tycoon after years of playing VGA games sporting interfaces that were technically mouse-driven but still lacking most of the flexibility we’ve come to expect from a modern GUI, my jaw dropped to the proverbial floor. Transport Tycoon plays, looks, and even sounds completely different from any of its peers of 1994.

Transport Tycoon

But no need to take my word for it: Julian Gollop, the mind behind the iconic X-Com series, happened to visit MicroProse while the folks there were playing around with a pre-release version of Transport Tycoon. He describes it as looking “awesomely sophisticated” in comparison to anything else on the market: “Especially the interface, because he [Sawyer] had essentially programmed his own Windows-style interface on top of DOS, which in itself must have been quite a lot of effort, let alone making the actual game. The X-Com interface was incredibly primitive by comparison.”

Windows, windows everywhere. All of them are dynamically updated in real time, all of them are interactive, and all of them can be dragged where you will.

As Gollop notes, Transport Tycoon’s interface is built around windows which you can open and close whenever you wish and drag around the screen to wherever you want them. All of these windows are updated in real time. If you bring up a view of a vehicle, you see it going about its business there in its window, moving through the same world that fills the screen behind it. Bring up ten vehicles, and you can watch all of them at once with a little judicious clicking and dragging. Click on a certain icon in any of those windows, and the main view jumps to the location of that vehicle. In the context of its time, all of this is absolutely stunning.

But we should step back now and cover the basics. Transport Tycoon presents 100 years of shipping — by railroad, by road, by sea, and by air — stretching from 1930 until 2030. It plays in real time, but is nevertheless a sedately paced, even relaxing affair on the whole. You begin with a modest bank loan and a map full of cities, factories, and natural resources craving connection, and go from there. Up to seven computer opponents can join you, or you can play with another human via a modem link-up, but competition isn’t the real heart of the game’s appeal. No, the core appeal — the thing that will bring you back to it over and over — is laying out your transportation network as efficiently as possible, then sitting back to watch it in action. You need to raise and lower land at times, build tunnels and bridges at others. You need to see to the signals on your railroad to ensure that traffic moves briskly but safely. And of course you need to purchase the vehicles themselves and assign them their routes. It’s almost indescribably satisfying to watch your network in action, just as it’s almost impossible to resist tweaking it constantly to squeeze that much more efficiency out of it. Transport Tycoon is a software toy of the highest order, as well as a series of endlessly intriguing spatial puzzles. (How can I get from Point A to Point B most effectively when I’ve already built all this other stuff in between?)

As with Railroad Tycoon, the economy of the world in Transport Tycoon is to at least some extent linked to your actions as a transportation mogul. And also as in Railroad Tycoon, subsidies will occasionally pop up to bring attention to under-served places. (These windows too are interactive. Clicking them once brings you to the first location mentioned; twice brings you to the second. The interface never ceases to amaze.) Hardcore puzzlers can take the subsidies as challenges; these places have often remained unlinked because getting between them is hard for one reason or another.

For all the obvious and acknowledged inspiration of Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon gradually reveals a very different personality. Whereas Sid Meier’s game is at least as much a cutthroat business simulation as a model-railroad set, Chris Sawyer’s really is all about its busy little vehicles, lacking the stock trading of the earlier game or even its rate wars. Here you compete with your opponents for the choicest spots on which to build stations and terminals, and try to serve your mutual customers better so as to win more of their business, but none of it ever feels quite so life-or-death. This is a much more easygoing experience.

Unlike Railroad Tycoon with its maps based on different regions of the real world, Transport Tycoon take place in a landscape of the imagination — more specifically, the computer’s imagination; each new map is randomly generated. This makes its relationship to real history that much more attenuated. Although its timeline covers some decidedly fraught decades in our world, wars are never fought in its, and crises of any stripe are unheard of. Big-picture circumstances never change at all beyond more and more people needing to haul both themselves and more and more of their stuff from place to place.

Pleasantness is an underrated quality in games, as it perhaps is in people, but it’s one that Transport Tycoon has in spades. After a long stressful day, watching this bustling but orderly little world is a nice way to unwind, even if you’re not actually doing all that much. This was by design; Sawyer says that he consciously created “something that was fun to watch as well as rewarding to play.” Simon Foster’s graphics are the perfect compromise between clarity and detail. Nothing is static; everything in the environment, not just the vehicles that drive through it, is moving, changing, developing. Buildings go up before your eyes, towns expand, crops appear and then disappear on the farms as you haul them away, forests grow and are cut and grow again. Meanwhile John Broomhall, MicroProse’s long-serving in-house composer, outdoes himself with a jazzy soundtrack that screams mid-century Americana. Despite the game’s British origins, the whole experience evokes that time of boundless American optimism and prosperity before the costs of Progress became clear, back when better living and heavy industry were synonymous. It’s a soothing balm to our current disillusioned, pandemic-addled souls.

Then again, Transport Tycoon needs every ounce of good will it can generate — because, taken purely as a piece of zero-sum game design, it’s horribly, hopelessly broken. Pretty much none of the mechanisms that surround the core simulation engine — the things that ostensibly make Transport Tycoon into a proper game rather than just a software toy — work properly.

The drawn-out length of the thing is a good starting point for a discussion of its flaws. Transport Tycoon runs at only one speed; there is no fast-forward function. By my calculation, playing through the full 100 years would take you somewhere north of 30 hours if you never paused it at all in order to plan your construction projects. This is problematic in itself; some other, shorter options for playing a complete game would hardly have gone amiss. Yet it’s made worse because the rest of the game just isn’t set up to support such an extended length.

There’s a limit of 40 trains, 80 road vehicles, 50 ships, and 80 airplanes in the game. If you’re expanding with any degree of energy whatsoever, you’ll begin to hit those limits before you’re a third of the way in. After this, all you can do is optimize to take advantage of the newer vehicles which allow you to haul more stuff more quickly. But there’s nothing that compels you to do so beyond the siren song of your inner perfectionist because the economy is completely broken. Your finances might be mildly challenged during the first few years of a game of Transport Tycoon, especially if you choose the Hard difficulty level, but after that you have all the money in the world; you couldn’t go bankrupt if you tried.

This effectively infinite bankroll makes cost-benefit analysis meaningless, causing what ought to be interesting dilemmas — the meat of a good strategy game — to become moot. Consider: you need to run a railroad line over some very uneven terrain in order to connect a farm to a factory. In theory, you should be forced to balance the delays caused by steep grades on a track against the considerable cost of raising and lowering land to avoid them. In practice, though, you need do no such thing: money is flowing like water, so you just flatten out the land without giving it a second thought. Or: you need to choose which locomotive to employ for a vital but short jaunt between two neighboring cities. In theory, you should contemplate whether buying the latest 120-mile-per-hour silver streak of an engine is really worth the money on a local commuter route like this one, where the train will spend as much time loading and unloading in the station as traveling. In practice, though, you just buy the silver streak, because why not? What else are you going to do with your money?

Transport Tycoon likes to present itself as a hardcore business simulation. Don’t believe it for a second.

And as for the competition… oh, my. Your computer opponents succeed only in annoying the heck out of you with their epic stupidity; they’re forever building absurd Gordian knots of roads and rails that go absolutely nowhere, inadvertently blocking you from reaching the places that you actually need to get to. Building your way around their mess is a challenge of a sort, to be sure, but not a very satisfying one in that it demolishes any semblance of the clean, efficient networks that are such a pleasure to watch in action. Like a lot of players, I usually just turn the computer opponents off completely so I can concentrate on my own logistical works of art. The only way to get a really enjoyable competitive game out of Transport Tycoon is presumably to connect two computers, each with a real human behind the screen. (Unfortunately, I was never able to test that side of the game myself, as getting such a link-up working in DOSBox today is a tall order indeed.)

The artificial “intelligence” of your computer opponents provides the most vivid demonstration this side of a populist politician of what happens when extreme ambition collides with extreme incompetence. Its stupidity has become so legendary that at least one web page is devoted to showcasing the best or worst — depending on how you look at it — of its roads to nowhere.

Beginning about twenty years in, maintenance begins to annoy you even more than the computer players. Every vehicle in the game has a service life which, once exceeded, results in a constant stream of schedule-destroying breakdowns. It’s an interesting mechanic in theory, but utter tedium in practice. When you get a message that a vehicle is getting old, you have to manually send it to the nearest depot, wait for it to arrive, and then manually replace it with a newer version. There’s nothing fun or challenging about doing so; nor, what with all the money you’ve banked by this point, are there any financial concerns to balance. It’s just pure busywork. Not coincidentally, it’s right when vehicles start to age out of service that I tend to bail on most of my games of Transport Tycoon — and, if anecdotal evidence is any guide, I’m far from alone in that. If you become one of the few to persevere, however, you’ll eventually reach the late stages, where you get to contemplate manually pulling up all of your railroad tracks to replace them with monorail tracks. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it would be.

The end of a century of Transport Tycoon — a screen shockingly few players ever see.

Recluse that he is, Chris Sawyer has given very few in-depth interviews over the course of his career. He did, however, talk with Retro Gamer magazine at some length in 2015. I was particularly intrigued by one thing he said there, in response to a question about how much input MicroProse had in shaping the finished Transport Tycoon: “I think they did suggest some changes, but few made it into the game — either it wasn’t possible to do what they wanted or I was too stubborn!” I do have to wonder if those rejected suggestions might have fixed some of the game’s obvious, fundamental issues. But then again, the all-important Christmas deadline was just as likely the real determiner. MicroProse was one of the publishers most prone to releasing games before their time, and Transport Tycoon actually reached stores in far better shape than many of their other games.

A game with as many fundamental design issues as this one has shouldn’t be recommendable. And yet I find Transport Tycoon impossible not to like, much less to hate. The presentation is just so slick and charming, and building out your transportation infrastructure is just so soothing and satisfying, that the game transcends its faults for me, blows a hole through all of the critical facilities which tell me that a game needs to succeed as a whole to receive the label of classic. In fact, it leaves me in what feels perilously close to an ethical dilemma, as my critic’s brain wrestles with my player’s heart. The closest point of comparison I can offer is a game that is as different as can be from Transport Tycoon in most other ways: the CRPG Ultima VII. Please bear with me while I engage in the supreme arrogance of quoting myself:

Classic games, it seems to me, can be plotted on a continuum between two archetypes. At one pole are the games which do everything right — those whose designers, faced with a multitude of small and large choices, have made the right choice every time. Ultima Underworld, the spinoff game which Origin released just two weeks before Ultima VII, is one of these.

The other archetypal classic game is much rarer: the game whose designers have made a lot of really problematic choices, to the point that certain parts of it may be flat-out broken, but which nevertheless charms and delights due to some ineffable spirit that overshadows everything else. Ultima VII is the finest example of this type that I can think of. Its list of trouble spots is longer than that of many genuinely bad games, and yet its special qualities are so special that I can only recommend that you play it.

The special qualities of Transport Tycoon are special enough to yield the same recommendation. Most games focus on destruction in one way or another; the designer presents you with a complete, functioning system, and then you go through and tear it all down. How wonderful to be able instead to point at a smoothly humming thing of beauty on the screen and know that you built that.

So, the superlative reviews that followed Transport Tycoon’s release were perhaps justified in spite of it all. “If you like the kind of ‘toying around’ and micromanagement offered by SimCity,” wrote Computer Gaming World magazine, “you might find that your romantic partners will split up with you, you will lose your job, your pets will starve, your computer will overheat, and you won’t even notice.” PC Gamer, the emerging populist rival to that older, more high-toned magazine, simply said that Transport Tycoon was “as good as PC gaming gets.” Edge magazine in Britain wrote that “it’s clear that Railroad Tycoon was a mere rehearsal. Transport Tycoon takes open-ended strategy games a giant step further.”

The game proved popular enough that MicroProse released a modestly enhanced Transport Tycoon Deluxe the following year, with optional fixed instead of randomly generated maps, with an editor for making your own versions of same, with new environments (arctic, tropical, or the ultra-whimsical Toy Land), and with some tweaks to gameplay (railroad signals grew somewhat more complex and flexible, and the timeline was shifted twenty years forward to run from 1950 to 2050, with a correspondingly more futuristic selection of vehicles on offer by the end). Rather bizarrely, however, no effort was made to fix the game’s fundamental issues of poor artificial intelligence, too much busywork, a broken economy, and an over-extended play time. In this sense, the deluxe edition was a colossal missed opportunity. Transport Tycoon is a really fun game even with all of its infelicities; without them, it could have been a staggeringly great one.

Indeed, Transport Tycoon’s peculiar combination of fascination and frustration caused it to become one of those games that players felt a compulsion to somehow fix. Ten years worth of fan-made patches and tweaks finally yielded in 2004 to the first release of OpenTTD, an open-source clone of the game. The latter has continued to receive updates ever since, and has joined the likes of FreeCiv and NetHack as a staple of what we might call “hacker gaming.” As such, it evinces both the typical advantages and disadvantages of its species. A huge array of options and add-ons is available to correct every one of the problems I’ve outlined above and then some, but the process of choosing the right ones and putting them all together can be daunting, enough so as to drive away the player who just wants a fun, balanced game that plays well right out of the (virtual) box.

But enough of that; this is intended to be a review of the original Transport Tycoon rather than its later incarnations. In any such review, the obvious point of comparison remains its inspiration of Railroad Tycoon. This fact is not always to Transport Tycoon’s benefit: it cannot be denied that the older game is also the more fully-realized. There are many reasons to prefer it: its carefully honed balance, the verisimilitude provided by its deeper connection to real history, its slightly more advanced train management (I dearly miss in Transport Tycoon the ability to change your trains’ consists automatically at stations), the fact that you can reasonably expect to finish a single game in an evening or two. And yet there’s something to be said as well for Transport Tycoon’s more easygoing personality and more pronounced sandbox flavor, not to mention its groundbreaking interface and delightful aesthetic presentation. If I had to choose one, the critic and the pedant in me would demand that I take Railroad Tycoon. But luckily, we don’t really have to choose, do we?

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of October 1991 and March 1995; Edge of December 1993, February 1994, and February 1995; Electronic Entertainment of March 1995; Retro Gamer 4, 8, 58, 74, 98, and 138. Online sources include a Wired profile of Chris Sawyer and a EuroGamer interview with him, as well as his own home page.

Transport Tycoon has never received a digital re-release. I therefore take the liberty of hosting a version here that’s ready to run; just add the Windows, Macintosh, or Linux version of DOSBox. Do note, however, that most modern players prefer OpenTTD, which is free in all senses of the word.)

Comments
40 Responses

- Aula

October 2, 2020 at 5:40 pm

“died-in-the-wool” should be “dyed-in-the-wool”

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2020 at 5:55 pm

Thanks!

- Sarah Walker

October 2, 2020 at 7:20 pm

The original 1994 manual has a claim by Chris Sawyer that he felt it important to note that the AI didn´t cheat, and played by the same rules as the player. It quickly becomes obvious that this is a blatant lie…

I wonder if a more cutthroat approach to the business side could have helped the game side of TT without hurting the toy side of it? Imagine if you had to actually compete for routes, setting prices, having some measure of quality of service, etc. It would be better than what the game _actually_ does, in closing industries as soon as you build a service in order to provide some form of challenge.

I loved TT as a kid, and still fire it up from time to time. But I’ve only actually gotten to 2030 _once_.

- Buck

October 2, 2020 at 8:05 pm

I think Transport Tycoon Deluxe introduced a fast mode, at least I remember it always being there and that’s the version I started with.

OpenTTD has a lot of modules but I never found them very interesting. The most important one is the open graphics package so you don’t need your original TTD installation, and you’re good to go.

The most important advantage of OpenTTD compared to the original is in the base game: better pathfinding and much more advanced train signals. You can build really impressive stations and intersections with them, e.g. buiding terminus stations where incoming and outgoing trains don’t block each other. The real fun lies in eventually going from A to B connections to building a real network, where you can send a train from any station to any other station, and managing its inefficiencies and bottlenecks. The economy is still broken with the basic settings, but it doesn’t really matter.

It also doesn’t have the restrictions of the original regarding the numbers of trains and stations.

So, even the vanilla version OpenTTD is way more than just a clone of the original.

- Sol_hsa

October 2, 2020 at 8:06 pm

” the ability to change your trains’ consists automatically”

Contents?

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2020 at 8:08 pm

“Consist” is a railroading term, meaning simply the number and type of cars attached to a given locomotive.

- Nate

October 11, 2020 at 7:55 am

I read the sentence many times and still didn’t get this. Perhaps say something less esoteric here? Or explain the background for those who aren’t rail gamers?

- OP

October 2, 2020 at 9:06 pm

“more than twice the resolution of standard VGA”

Isn’t SVGA (640×480) more than four times the resolution of VGA (320×200)?

“Transport Tycoon plays, looks, and even sounds completely different from any of its peers of 1994.”

I don’t know about that. At least to my eye the visuals in the game seem completely lifted from Simcity 2000, which was released over a year earlier (original Mac version, PC version came out in early 1994).

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2020 at 11:05 pm

I understand that’s mathematically correct, but it seems counter to the way we think of such things.

SimCity 2000’s interface was also advanced for its day, but Transport Tycoon’s is more still flexible. Also prettier, in my view.

- Not Fenimore

October 2, 2020 at 9:19 pm

Heh, good timing – most of the things you’re praising it for are also features of Factorio, which I just got in the last few weeks and have been playing a bunch since then. ;)

- Sebastian Redl

October 17, 2020 at 9:23 am

How do you even find time to comment here?

- John Dromedar

October 2, 2020 at 10:49 pm

The open source version is called OpenTTD, not Open Transport Tycoon. I assume they deliberately avoid mentioning the original title for legal reasons.

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2020 at 11:05 pm

Thanks!

- Peter Orvetti

October 2, 2020 at 11:31 pm

Did the 1987 SSI game “President Elect” ever cross your screen? It would be on the periphery of your explorations here, but it is still generally considered the best election simulation game ever.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2020 at 7:03 am

I’ve certainly heard about it, but never played it. An election does strike me as a problematic subject for a game. If you’re doing it fairly at least, it’s all about soft power and social interactions — not things games tend to do particularly well. I tend to suspect the model would be simplified in very unsatisfactory ways — i.e., buying more advertisements buys you more votes, which isn’t at all how it works in real life. And the removal of elections from their historical context is also problematic. But I’m kind of talking out of my posterior here, given I’ve never played it.

There was also the Doonesbury election game which came out in 1996. Oddly, I don’t know of any in the same mold that followed. A cynic could probably make a great game about manipulating the rickety American system to “elect” a candidate with a decided minority of the vote. The recent article by Barton Gellman in the Atlantic could practically serve as the design document.

- Peter Orvetti

October 3, 2020 at 3:00 pm

The Doonesbury game (an update of the first game in a series called “Power Politics”) is not very good. More recent election games add detail and complexity at the expense of realism. I think one reason why political junkies like me return to “President Elect” is that it did a good job of keeping things realistic (in terms of how particular candidates would perform in particular states), and it has a fun Election Night experience. But it’s also very out of date — U.S. elections now are radically different than the 1960-1988 scenarios the game offers.

- xxx

October 4, 2020 at 7:13 pm

If you’re looking for a game that tackles politics in a realistic and remarkably successful way, I can’t recommend 1988’s Hidden Agenda highly enough. (Try the Macintosh version, which had graphics — it helps considerably with the immersion.)

The pitch: You’re the new president of an unstable Central American banana republic during the Cold War, and your job is to survive for three years — not just to remain in power for three years, but to literally not get killed. Everyone wants something from you, you can’t make them all happy, and most of them will take rejection badly. I think I learned more about politics from that game as a kid than I did from any television or newspapers.

- Michael

October 6, 2020 at 8:30 pm

Long before any of these, the first computer-assisted game of electoral politics was probably the “Election Year” PBM by Flying Buffalo, Inc. Supposedly, they still offer it, but you pretty much have to provide the required 6-10 players yourself.

- Jonathan Badger

October 13, 2020 at 8:45 am

All the versions of Hidden Agenda had graphics, as far as I know. The MS-DOS version on the Internet Archive has graphics that look very Mac-like and were probably taken directly from that version

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Hidden_Agenda_1988

- patziert

October 3, 2020 at 12:12 am

As you describe the appeal, feel and innovations of this game, I cannot help but being reminded of The Settlers, a 1993 RTS/city-building-game, which also offers this experience of being real-time, very busy, yet calm and relaxing and having it’s business to be very pleasant to watch. In fact in German the term “Wuselfaktor” (scurry factor? – kinda hard to translate) to describe the joy of watching your very busy settlers scurrying around and engaging in their various works. It also features a degree of emphasis on logistics, terrain and a strong one on production chains. It has a similar interface design with an icon bar and windowed menus and statistics (though less advanced, it’s 1996 sequel goes full TT with tracking cameras etc.), colorful and very animated graphics in a axiometric view and in it’s 1994 PC version full SVGA support. It also happens to be a single programmer gamer. In Germany it turned out not only as a founding stone of it’s own long-running series but a whole tradition of German “Aufbauspiele” (build-up games – the intersection of RTS, city-builders and economic simulations) like Anno, Tropico or Patrician/Port Royale, which since then has become the backbone of the German games industry.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2020 at 6:55 am

The Settlers has certainly crossed my radar, but I never dug into it. Somehow the premise never grabbed me. But maybe I should give it another look. My wife might love it; I’d be almost sure she would love it if it wasn’t for the combat aspect.

- Pingback: Pixel Scroll 10/2/20 In The Case Of An Emergency Landing, Your Pixel May Be Used As A Scroll | File 770

- Richard Moss

October 3, 2020 at 12:34 pm

What a funny coincidence that you and I would both look at Chris Sawyer and Transport Tycoon for our respective games history projects at the same time — I just published my broader-looking take on his career a few days ago at https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/28 [audio, but first half is available in text], which I think serves as a good companion piece to your design-centric critique.

It’s interesting how so much of Chris’s genius as a designer rests on his idiosyncratic abilities as a programmer — by which I refer to his hand-optimised assembly code and knack for making complex systems work efficiently and simply, if not always well.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2020 at 9:01 pm

That interview was quite a coup for you. Chris Sawyer rarely speaks. It’s great that you could get him on the record a bit more.

- Alex

October 3, 2020 at 3:02 pm

Great article ! I don’t usually comment but Transport Tycoon is a really special game for me.

I owned the original as a kid (played on a 486). I spend countless hours on it although I pretty sure I never reached the end screen. A few years later I got a copy of the deluxe version, it came included with a game magazine (1). Since then, I still play from time to time using OpenTTD.

You’re right about the AI being bad and the lack of real challenge: the game has real weaknesses. I feel that for those who fell in love with the game, they don’t matter: It’s all about the open-ended transport building aspect.

The fact that fans have put so much effort into improving the game, patching the original and eventually OpenTTD is quite extraordinary. To this day there is a large following, one just need to check the Transport Tycoon forums (2).

> “Ten years worth of fan-made patches and tweaks finally yielded in 2004 to the first release of OpenTTD, an open-source clone of the game.”

It’s worth nothing that initially, and for quite some time, the improvement and tweak to the game where patches (in assembler). This is refereed to as TTDPatch. The amount of changes that were made to the game this way is quite astonishing although ultimately there were limits to what could be realistically achieved.

One might assume OpenTTD was born from the same effort, as next step from TTDPatch but wasn’t the case. If I remember correctly, OpenTTD was initially created by a single programmer who released the source code (in C) one day. At that point the game was really a clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It did not have the improvement of TTDPatch.

For a while many people continued to use TTDPatch. There were many discussion and people raising concern about the legality of OpenTTD / the way it was reversed engineered. The forum (2) still has discussion from back in 2004.

Since then OpenTTD has seen many contribution and improvement, way beyond what TTDPatch could provide. And this is still ongoing. There is no doubt in my mind that OpenTTD is the best way to play the game, expect for the historical perspective.

I encourage anybody to give OpenTTD a try. It’s true that it has many option and optional content. That being said, it’s perfectly playable out of the box and that’s probably the best starting point.

Buck: I am pretty sure ou’re right about Transport Tycoon Deluxe having a fast mode. I was surprise to read that wasn’t the case in the original. (but then again it was a long time ago)

(1) FYI It was the french gaming magazine “Generation 4”. At the time they commonly included a free game. Those would always be older game of course.
(2) https://www.tt-forums.net/

- Joshua Main

October 3, 2020 at 6:59 pm

Don’t forget his follow-up\sequel,Rollercoaster Tycoon!

- Adam

October 3, 2020 at 8:41 pm

I don’t normally comment on articles but this is something you missed.

I have a version released before transport tycoon deluxe and after the original release which has an alien landscape.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2020 at 8:52 pm

There was a standalone scenario editor that was released between the original game and the Deluxe version. It included the Martian environment. It wasn’t so much something I missed as just a little further down in the weeds than I felt the need to go. ;)

- Sarah Walker

October 5, 2020 at 8:44 am

The World Editor also ditched the real vehicle names. I always found it mildly infuriating that I couldn’t build a Concorde or an InterCity 125 anymore after installing it.

It did have the benefit of allowing you to change the starting year, up to 1965 I think. This meant that I could actually build diesel & electric trains and jet aircraft, as on a 486/25 the game ran so slowly that you were never going to get out of the depression/WW2/austerity years naturally.

- mycophobia

October 4, 2020 at 8:33 pm

i believe “coincedentally” should be “coincidentally”

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2020 at 6:18 am

Thanks!

- Michael

October 6, 2020 at 8:37 pm

“wars are never fought in its”

in it?

- Jimmy Maher

October 7, 2020 at 10:39 am

Thanks, but as intended.

- minusf

October 10, 2020 at 2:17 pm

> Click on a certain icon in any of those windows, and the main view jumps to the location of that vehicle. In the context of its time, all of this is absolutely stunning.

I think neither windows nor macos have actually caught up yet with Transport Tycoon’s amazing GUI.

- RavenWorks

October 23, 2020 at 3:40 am

“Transport Tycoon has never received a digital re-release”

it appears to be on both the iOS and Android app stores!

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2020 at 5:27 am

Those are remakes, not re-releases.

- Chris Floyd

November 15, 2020 at 6:41 pm

Your mention of the laughably confused opponent AI in Transport Tycoon reminded me of what Sid Meier said in his recent memoir about the AI in Railroad Tycoon: It was conceived and added entirely in the last week of development!

Great article. Chris Sawyer is indeed one of a kind.

- Jonathan O

February 22, 2021 at 6:05 pm

“…the choicest spots on which to built stations and terminals…” should be “…the choicest spots on which to build stations and terminals…”

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2021 at 8:25 am

Thanks!

- Alianora La Canta

March 22, 2021 at 1:57 am

The demo of Transport Tycoon I had allowed play using just the trains for 2 years. I think I may have played that 100 times before my parents decided to get a CD-ROM specifically to play the full version of the then brand-new Deluxe version of the game. (We definitely had the Martian land scheme at one point, but not for very long).

I remember getting rather frustrated with the multiplayer mode at times because it required not only a Laplink cable*, but perfectly-synchronised pressing of a particular button. Which, let me tell you, is difficult to do when the computers in question aren’t in the same room as each other… We then had to immediately pause the game to make sure we didn’t trip over each other on our very first runs. After that, it was very satisfying as a multi-player experience… …except when one of us forgot ourselves and hit that big, tempting Pause button (which paused it for everyone – not good if someone was trying to build a run at the time because Transport Tycoon didn’t allow it).

* – For those who have never encountered one, the Laplink cable used each computer’s printer port as a relatively fast method of connecting two home computers in the pre-Ethernet/USB era. Less user-friendly than current methods of networking, it did enable multiplayer gaming at least. Let’s say we were glad when, in 1998, a formal Ethernet network was installed.

This reminds me of a quirk It was possible to go bankrupt in Transport Tycoon… …if one played too well. One member of my family was eventually put off from the game because, 20 years before they were set to win… …they discovered Transport Tycoon’s bank balance has a 32-bit number limit. One moment, they had £2.1 billion in the bank. The next, an unfeasibly large number starting with a minus.

The world editor edition of Transport Tycoon (but not the original) had a speed increaser. However, that only doubled the speed, which takes the amount of time needed to finish the game from 40 hours to 20. (Yes, this is the downside of giving new players the luxury of 5 minutes per month in which to construct those initial runs). The more flexible speed settings of OpenTTD are, for me, an essential quality-of-life improvement, and that version I still play today (though for myself, I still haven’t got past 1987. Starting businesses afresh is too much fun!)

Master of Magic
October 23, 2020

Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one. While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that would take place in a fantasy rather than science-fictional milieu. As soon as the one game was finished, he wrote up a design document for the next one and shared it with the rest of the SimTex staff. Within two weeks, they were charging full-speed ahead on Master of Magic. It would ship under the MicroProse imprint in time for the Christmas of 1994, only a year after its predecessor, despite being one of the most complex strategy games yet made for a computer. If there’s no rest for the wicked, it would seem that Barcia and company had been very bad indeed.

Given the new game’s title and its short development cycle, one might suspect it to be little more than a reskinned Master of Orion. In reality, though, such could hardly be further from the truth. Master of Magic is a wildly different experience from Master of Orion, enough so that one would scarcely guess it to have come from the same designer. Where Master of Orion is polished to perfection, its every element carefully considered and tested, Master of Magic is a far more ramshackle affair, a pile of diverse ideas thrown together — some more fully realized than others, some literally not working at all if we want to get pedantic about it. Nevertheless, it all comes out okay in the end; the game’s variety, generosity, and sheer chutzpah win through. Master of Magic is simply fun —  every bit as much fun as Master of Orion. Just don’t try this at home, budding designers.

Master of Orion was frequently billed as “Civilization in Space” by a slightly lazy press. It’s therefore ironic to note that it’s actually Master of Magic which betrays a major influence from Sid Meier’s 1991 magnum opus. Barcia began laying down the basics of his first game in the late 1980s, and thus its mechanics and interface are most indebted to the conquer-the-galaxy board and computer games which appeared before that point. By the time he started on Master of Magic, however, Barcia had had plenty of time to play and admire Civilization and to clone some of its approaches. It’s thus at least a bit more defensible to call Master of Magic “Fantasy Civilization,” as was and is done from time to time, even if doing so still falls well short of a complete description. Certainly the magazine Computer Gaming World made no bones about it in its review of the game:

The city display will be familiar to players of Sid Meier’s Civilization. In fact, we wouldn’t want to suggest that the same code was used, but it sure looks like it could have been. From the graphic representation of the buildings themselves to the rows of farming, working, and rebelling citizens, the city display is a near-verbatim copy of the earlier design.

The city-management screen in Master of Magic, which is almost a carbon copy of the one in Civilization. Many of the systems behind it work exactly the same as well.

This, then, is one important aspect of Master of Magic. You start with a single village which you must grow and develop. Meanwhile you send out settlers to found other cities, or armies to conquer ones that already exist. You improve your cities by ordering their populations to build structures that increase their production or otherwise cause them to function more efficiently. All of this will be very familiar indeed to any Civilization veteran. That said, the city-building side of Master of Magic is generally simplified in comparison to Civilization. There is, for example, no tech tree to research in order to unlock new types of buildings. Instead buildings themselves unlock other buildings, as shown by a handy chart included in the manual: constructing a builder’s hall unlocks the granary, shrine, library, miner’s guild, and city walls; constructing a granary unlocks the farmer’s market; etc., etc. Steve Barcia, who was eager for understandable reasons to ensure that the similarities to Civilization weren’t overstated, explained the simplifications by noting that the two games had fundamentally different design goals: “Civilization focuses on internal problems. In Master of Magic, it’s the external; it’s conquest.”

The main Master of Magic screen, where you examine the map and move your units around. While it departs a bit more from the layout of Civilization than does the city-management screen, the inspiration remains obvious, right down to the shortcut keys.

So, although you move your units around the map exactly as you do in Civilization — to be fair, that game in turn borrows the approach from the much older Empire — things go in a dramatically different direction once combat begins: Master of Magic places much more emphasis on combat than does Civilization. In the latter game, each unit moves independently over the map; in Master of Magic, you form larger armies by “stacking” up to nine units together. When two units bump into each other on the world map in Civilization, one loses and is completely destroyed and the other wins and survives completely intact, all depending on a single roll of the virtual dice which is compared against their respective attack and defense ratings. In Master of Magic, by contrast, combat takes place on a separate screen, with plenty of room for your tactical genius to make its presence felt. Units here can be “wounded” by having only some of their number killed, needing time to heal and replenish themselves.

Fighting a tactical battle. Given that I have only one group of halberdiers against seven groups of zombies and and one of skeletons, my best option here is to flee — assuming I don’t have a Turn Undead spell at my disposal, that is.

But the most important addition of all to the combat model, the game’s first real stroke of genius, is that of experience points: as units fight and survive battles, they become better, tougher and stronger, able eventually to punch well above their rookie weight. Granted, Civilization too has the barest inkling of this; a unit which wins a battle there has a chance of becoming a “veteran,” with a bonus to its attack and defense. Master of Magic, however, takes the concept to another level entirely. And then it adds a second stroke of genius: heroes, individual captains who can be recruited to join your cause and lead your armies into battle. They too earn experience and improve their skills; you can even find or make magical weapons and armor for them.

A hero levels up.

In the context of its own day, Master of Magic thus joined Julian Gollop’s X-COM, which was released about six months before it, as one of the foremost exemplars of a new trend in strategy games, that of using CRPG elements to forge a more personal, even emotional bond between the player and the figures she commands. It works brilliantly here, just as it does in X-COM. You come to identify deeply with your units and especially your heroes as you nurture their development, and come to mourn the loss of one of them almost like that of a real friend.

The debt which Master of Magic owes to the CRPG genre extends to other areas as well. Its randomly generated maps are seeded not just with neutral and enemy towns but with “fallen temples,” “abandoned keeps,” and “mysterious caves.” You can send your units and heroes to confront what is found within, if you dare; your reward for doing so is booty and the experience they earn, assuming they survive. Just exploring the world, revealing and clearing out more and more of the map, is thoroughly enjoyable even before you meet any of the computer players who are doing the same thing.

Do we dare to enter the fallen temple?

But it’s the game’s third and final layer rather than the city building or unit management that is its most defining attribute, not to mention the source of its name. The fact is that you really do play a master of magic, a wizard competing to conquer the world against up to four other wizards under the control of the computer. As such, you have spells at your disposal… boy, do you have spells. The magic system draws heavily from Magic: The Gathering, the collectible card game of fantasy combat that took the culture of tabletop gaming by storm in the early 1990s. Magic here is divided into five “books”: Life, Nature, Sorcery, Chaos, and Death. When you begin a new game, you choose your wizard from a list of fourteen possibilities, each of which specializes in one or two books of magic and has some other individual advantage to boot. Or, if you’re playing at one of the higher difficulty levels, you can also build your own wizard from scratch.

Most hardcore players wouldn’t think of playing with anything other than a customized wizard; you see one of them being made here. Not being much of a power gamer, I’m generally happy taking one of the fourteen pre-made wizards, which offer plenty of variety in themselves.

Either way, you enter the game with just a few low-level spells in your particular book or books. In place of the technological research trees of Civilization and Master of Orion, here you research new spells. Their number and variety are positively mind-boggling: there are 40 spells associated with each book, plus 16 that everyone can learn regardless of specialty, for a total of no less than 216 in the game as a whole. But Master of Magic borrows a trick from Master of Orion to great effect: not all of the potential spells in your books are available for research on any given playthrough, meaning that the sort of rote strategies that are possible in climbing Civilization’s static research tree cannot be relied upon here. Because you get a different set of possible spells even if you play the very same wizard twice in a row, you constantly have to think on your feet. Needless to say, your overall strategy must be dictated to a large extent by the spells that show up in your research list. If you gain early access to Floating Island, for example, you have a handy means of crossing oceans before your opponents may be able to; if not, you might need to build expensive shipyards early on in at least some of your coastal cities.

Hmm… which spell should I research next?

Your source of spell-research points is mana, which you harvest from the land’s so-called “places of power.” It’s the most essential resource in the game, and thus the source of some agonizing decisions. For mana, you see, is not only important for research. You must balance the amount of it which you devote to research against that which goes to casting spells in the field and that which goes to improving upon your innate spell-casting capabilities; this last category of mana, in other words, serves as your wizard’s equivalent to experience points.

You change the ratio of mana you devote to various purposes by manipulating the three staffs to the left.

The thoroughgoing watchword of Master of Magic is variety, applying not only to the list of spells but to every aspect of the game. The sheer amount of stuff here would be impressive in a modern game, and was well-nigh unprecedented at the time of this one’s release. In addition to choosing one of fourteen starting wizards, you choose a starting race for her to command from another fourteen possibilities; each of these races comes with its own unique set of units to be unlocked and raised, as well as a unique mix of buildings that it can erect in its towns. You can choose a world with small, medium, or large land masses, with weak, normal or powerful magic. All these possible starting parameters alone ensure that the game will take a long time indeed to get old. Then, once you actually begin to play, you find an absurdly wide array of monsters to contend with, heroes to recruit, and magical arms and armor to dredge up. And then there are all those spells: spells to buff your units and heroes and to nerf your enemies’, to summon fantastical creatures to join your ranks, to disrupt your foes’ own magic. Eventually your powers become downright Biblical, as you control the winds and blight your enemies’ fields and forests — but be aware that they can potentially do the same things to you. By way of a final touch, you have not one but two complete worlds to explore and conquer; there are two separate dimensions in the game, the relatively mundane Arcanus and the magic-rich realm of Myrror. You can move between them by means of special portals on the landscape which you must discover and secure — or, inevitably, via yet another spell you can research. It will take you a long, long time to see everything that Master of Magic has to offer.

You can explore and conquer two different planes. This map shows part of just one of them.

Master of Magic’s huge diversity of content does as much as its theme and its core mechanics to give it a very different personality from that of its predecessor Master of Orion. I love both games just about equally, but most others I’ve talked to tend to express a marked preference for one or the other. Board-game aficionados often speak of two schools of design, named after their typical continents of origin: the Eurogame, where a fairly small number of moving parts is carefully tuned for a perfectly coherent, perfectly balanced, Neoclassical experience; and the “Ameritrash” game, which is distinguished by its Romantic exuberance in throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix, just to see what will happen. It’s hopefully clear by now that Master of Magic is very much the latter sort of game. While there are whole worlds of emergent strategy to be found in all of its variety, there are also moments of friction when things don’t quite gel.

The most disappointingly half-baked aspect of Master of Magic is, perhaps not coincidentally, its one feature that actually was lifted wholesale from Master of Orion: its diplomatic model. You communicate with the other wizards here just as you do the leaders of the other alien races in the older game, but it’s harder to divine why you should do so. In some circumstances, it’s possible to win a game of Master of Orion without ever firing a shot in anger, by persuading your counterparts to vote you into supremacy via clever diplomacy. Master of Magic, however, lacks any equivalent victory condition; the only way to win here is to wipe out your foes. This fact turns your negotiations over treaties and favors into an even more cynical exercise than it is in Master of Orion; it’s a foregone conclusion that absolutely everyone is only playing for time before unsheathing their trusty daggers for the backstab. Further, there’s little ultimate point to all of your diplomatic contortions. Any opposing wizard who agrees to a peace treaty is probably weak enough that you can defeat her in war, or is just trying to milk a little bit more tribute out of you before she declares war on you three turns later. There’s very little reason to ever even initiate diplomatic relations, other than perhaps to trade for a spell you have an urgent need for. I know that I tend to ignore diplomacy entirely, and have never felt overly disadvantaged by it — a statement one could never make about Master of Orion. When playing Master of Magic, I do sometimes find myself missing the intricate dance of negotiation in Master of Orion, which can be as exciting as any space battle — but then, Master of Magic is, as I’ve already noted, a very different game.

Those who’ve played Master of Orion will find this menu very familiar. Alas, it’s used to far less compelling effect here.

One consequence of your inability to schmooze your way to victory is a drawn-out endgame, a problem all too typical of these types of grand-strategy games which Master of Orion manages to deftly avoid thanks to its Galactic Council. There comes a point in every game of Master of Magic when you know you’re going to win — or the opposite. Assuming it’s to be the former, everything becomes a bit rote from that point on, even as conquering those last pesky cities of your enemies can be quite time-consuming. Although you can win by advancing all the way up the spell-research tree and casting the “Spell of Mastery” instead of wiping out all of your opponents militarily — this is the game’s equivalent of blasting off for Alpha Centauri in Civilization — that process is even more time-consuming. And because all of the enemy wizards rush to attack you with everything they have as soon as you start to research the Spell of Mastery, your game is still guaranteed to end in genocidal total war.

Master of Magic also runs afoul of another typical problem of its genre which its predecessor mostly manages to sidestep: the micromanagement bugbear. Most players develop a consistent pattern for building up their cities early on, one which they vary only under special circumstances. While the game does offer a “vizier” who can manage your cities for you, his choices tend to be hopelessly nonsensical. A way of setting up building queues in advance for each city, coupled ideally with a default queue you could define for yourself, would have been a wonderful addition. As it is, you’re in for an awful lot of busywork in the later stages of building your fantasy empire.

One final area of the game that’s frequently singled out for criticism is the artificial intelligence of your opponents, which leaves a lot to be desired. In the grand tradition of Civilization and Master of Orion, cranking up the difficulty level doesn’t make the other wizards smarter; as far as I can determine, it doesn’t actually change their set behaviors at all. What it does do is cheat on their behalf ever more egregiously, by giving them bigger and bigger production bonuses. Many understandably find this solution to the problem of making the game challenging for the veteran player to be less than ideal.

Still, a recent development in the small but surprisingly active world of ongoing Master of Magic fandom provides an object lesson in being careful what you wish for. Just this year, a group of fans, working in association with the current owners of the game’s intellectual property, released Caster of Magic, a comprehensive patch/expansion that, among many other things, dramatically upgrades the artificial intelligence. Personally, I find it no fun whatsoever, and I’ve heard many others say the same thing. Playing against its smart, ruthless, ultra-agressive enemy wizards only served to clarify for me what I really enjoy about Master of Magic: exploring the worlds, building up my units and heroes, researching and trying out new spells. For me, it’s as much experiential CRPG as zero-sum strategy game. If I could add something to the game, it would be more diverse encounter areas, possibly with elements of story to them, to further emphasize these qualities. This is not to say that you’re wrong to play in a different way, wrong to enjoy the game for other reasons; certainly there are many who love what Caster of Magic does to the game. It does, however, serve to illustrate that the field of ludic artificial intelligence, which is so often characterized as simply the struggle to make the computer play just like a human, becomes more complicated than that formulation just as soon as it collides with real-world game design.

Caster of Magic is in fact merely the latest example of a long tradition of patching Master of Magic, stemming from the fact that the game as originally released desperately needed all the patching it could get. Both before and after their acquisition by Spectrum Holobyte in 1993, MicroProse was among the publishers most prone to ship games before their time in response to external financial pressures. As one of the company’s big titles for the Christmas of 1994, Master of Magic fell victim to this unfortunate tendency. In yet another marked contrast to Master of Orion, Steve Barcia’s second grand-strategy game shipped so riddled with bugs that it was essentially unplayable; the game crashed more often than not during battles. (“Save every turn, save before every battle, save every time you can,” became the player’s rule of thumb as summarized by Computer Gaming World.) A series of patches gradually solved the worst of the issues, but there remain to this day spells in the game that don’t quite work correctly. Master of Magic could have used its own incarnations of Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes, the two outsiders who took an early interest in Master of Orion during its development and offered so much feedback and practical advice over the months that followed that co-designer credits wouldn’t have been out of order. Failing that, just a few more months in the oven and a round or two of proper testing could have done much for it.

Although its overall reception was gravely impacted by its unconscionable state at the time of its release, a small group of players fell in love with the game for its crazy multitudinousness and kept its memory alive for years, then decades. They did so not least because Master of Magic became the opposite of Master of Orion in one final, supremely ironic way: whereas Master of Orion spawned about a thousand 4X rule-the-galaxy copycats of varying degrees of quality, nobody else has ever done a game quite like Master of Magic. The year after it appeared, New World Computing released Heroes of Might and Magic, a superficially similar blending of strategy and CRPG elements, but one that was dramatically different in the details: it was a more tightly focused effort, with pre-crafted maps in place of randomly generated worlds, a modest but carefully tuned suite of spells and creatures in place of a decadent cornucopia of same, and a multi-mission story-oriented campaign in place of a wide-open sandbox to play in. When Heroes of Might and Magic — admittedly, a superb game in its own right — became the hit that Master of Magic had not, it became the model for fantasy strategy games going forward.

So, Master of Magic remains a unique experience to this day. While it’s definitely no paragon of balanced game design, its rambunctious riot of possibility ensures that it stays interesting over the long term; this is one quality that it certainly does share with Master of Orion. In fact, I like to play Master of Magic just like I play that game: I throw the dice to set up the parameters of my world, my wizard, and my minions, and then have at it, assured that, whatever awaits me, it will be completely different from the last time I played. That’s the kind of variety that can keep you playing a game forever.

Each race has its own set of city names. Those of the barbarians are real-world German cities — including Flensburg, where my wife grew up. What’s up with that?

(Sources: Computer Gaming World of September 1994, December 1994, January 1995, May 1995, and October 1995; PC Gamer of January 1995; Electronic Entertainment of January 1995; Computer Player of February 1995; Next Generation of January 1995; InfoWorld of December 1994; Interactive Entertainment CD-ROM of October 1994 and November 1994; Hyper of June 1995.

Master of Magic is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
35 Responses

- Ignacio

October 23, 2020 at 4:27 pm

Very interesting!
There is a “Master of Master” at one point which should be replaced by “Master of Magic”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2020 at 9:07 pm

Thanks!

- Emily Bowman

October 23, 2020 at 5:27 pm

My first real 4X game! I’ve gone on to play the classics and many modern ones, but this has a special place in my heart. In fact, I first found out about it from the Prima guide you use for the lede, that’s still sitting on my bookshelf! I read that all the way through, fascinated by everything about it, before I was able to get a copy. (It helps that they were quite entertaining writers.) One of the most fascinating parts was how strategy revolved around synergizing both spells from two or three sets of books, units from two races, and spells with races and it just became so unwieldy so quickly that you had no choice but to pick something and go full steam ahead.

It really was one of the first ‘deckbuilding’ games; you never quite knew what you were going to draw with your book picks (and finds), or in what order, but you powered through it. There’s been a huge surge in deckbuilding games, and I hope something of this kind of grand scope in a fantasy world shows up again someday, slightly more refined. And of course, with even bigger and weirder skill trees!

- David Rugge

October 23, 2020 at 6:02 pm

Of the many big differences between Caster of Magic and Master of Magic, the one that changes gameplay the most for me is the decision to award fame for razing cities rather than deducting fame as in the original game. It encourages you to build one big stack of nasty monsters and burn your opponents to the ground rather than capturing cities. This is a good thing for ending the game early, but a problem for those times that you might want to run a kinder, gentler game. It’s also jarring to be used to playing the higher difficulties of the original only to find that the AI on “Fair” is more than a match for me in Caster.

The sheer variety of spell combinations in either the original or Caster leads to some weird units wandering the map: elite armies of wraithform steam cannons floating slowly across Myrran to blast their opponents into dust, the small but deadly lionhart halfling slingers, and the notorious flying invisible warships.

The heroes are still the most fun aspect of the game, even in their somewhat nerfed state in Caster of Magic.

The only thing I would wish for in a new patch is updated graphics. (Sadly, I suspect that would be one of the tougher things to update) There are many units, especially Orc engineers, Orc shaman, and Orc magicians, which look nearly identical to each other on the overland map.

- Brian Long

October 23, 2020 at 6:28 pm

Heroes of Might & Magic was a reimplementation of King’s Bounty, an earlier (Apple 2 era) New World Computing Game. I’m not sure how much of an influence Master of Magic was?

- Brian Long

October 23, 2020 at 6:28 pm

GREAT article btw! :)

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2020 at 9:08 pm

I never claimed it was. ;)

- Stephen Horne

October 23, 2020 at 7:40 pm

Just a guess, but the train of thought for barbarian cities with German names might be that a famous barbarian Conan is Arnold Schwarzenegger who is from Austria which is close enough to Germany.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2020 at 9:09 pm

There’s also all that business about the Germanic tribes who sacked Rome…

- Suk Chan Lee

October 23, 2020 at 7:51 pm

It might be worth noting that Master of Magic does have an alternate win condition (research and cast the spell of mastery) though practically speaking a military victory almost always ends up being much faster anyway.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2020 at 9:22 pm

I completely forgot about that! I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually won that way, for just the reason you state.

- Jogy

October 23, 2020 at 8:25 pm

“This is a game which could have greatly used alternate victory conditions of some stripe”

There is one – casting the Spell of Mastery. It takes long time and large amount of mana, but when you do it, you win the game – it is a bit similar to building and holding a Wonder in Age of Empires.

See https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Spell_of_Mastery

- Victor

October 25, 2020 at 5:34 pm

Master of Magic has an impressive community. https://masterofmagic.wikia.com has more then 800 long pages with informations, tables and strategies, 25 years after the release!

- Alex Smith

October 23, 2020 at 8:41 pm

And Master of Master also runs afoul of another typical problem of its genre

I assume Master of Master was going to be the culminating game of the “Master Game Universe” much like Endgame was the culminating film for the MCU.

- hissun

October 23, 2020 at 8:54 pm

Excellent. I always loved this game, even when it is was new. It would suite a re-work to new engine like Master Of Orion had.

- Rowan Lipkovits

October 23, 2020 at 9:18 pm

“nobody else has ever done a game quite like Master of Magic”

I always enjoyed a quick round of SSG’s “Warlords” as a “tastes great, less filling” alternative to MoM.

- Buck

October 24, 2020 at 8:57 am

For me, three other aspects define Eurogames better: focus on indirect conflict over direct conflict, more or less predictable playing time, and keeping games “close” until the finish. Risk e.g. has a very tight set of rules, but is generally not considered a Euro: it has direct conflict and can go on forever. Compare with a classic Euro like Settlers, where conflict is mostly indirect (a scramble for resources) and, unless you artifically delay it, someone usually wins within an hour.

I’d call a game like Master of Orion “tight”, but I don’t have a good name for the opposite. “loose” doesn’t sound right.

- Buck

October 24, 2020 at 9:01 am

I don’t know why my reply ended up here, so I’ll add that Warlords is a game I immediatelly thought of, too. It is closer to what a pure Master of Orion with fantasy and heroes would look like.

- Jussi Kujala

October 23, 2020 at 10:12 pm

I loved Master of Magic and I hope for a modern remake. Civilization 6 exists but nobody has bothered to make a better Master of Magic 26 years after.

- Victor

October 25, 2020 at 5:40 pm

Slitherine bought the rights to Master of Magic in 2019. Let us hope for Master of Magic 2 ;-)

- David Rugge

October 26, 2020 at 4:09 pm

The closest modern game to Master of Magic that I’ve played is Endless Legend. It’s got a (sort of) fantasy setting, tactical combat, a variety of monsters, hero quests, and varied factions. If it only had a real magic system and not a tech tree it would check off all of the Master of Magic features.

I think I really would prefer a MoM remake pretty much as-is mechanically, except with better graphics (my daughter pointed out that the Chimeras look like flying shoes!) and less time between turns.

- M. Casey

October 24, 2020 at 1:26 am

Great job as always Jimmy.

Simtex shined brightly and burned out too soon. MoO1 was a masterpiece, MoM was close. Even their forgotten adaptation of the board game 1830–though *extremely* niche–was excellent, for what it was.

- Sean

October 24, 2020 at 5:42 am

Great article! I’ve been a huge fan of MoM since the 90s, playing with my friend on his computer.

I’ve been playing Caster of Magic on my Raspberry Pi! I like some of the changes, like the addition of building queues.

Check out the Warlock games for a modern take on MoM!

- Victor

October 25, 2020 at 5:43 pm

Seravy is working hard on ‘Caster of Magic 2’ too ;-)

- Warlords Guy

October 24, 2020 at 6:14 am

“But the most important addition of all to the combat model, the game’s first real stroke of genius, is that of experience points: as units fight and survive battles, they become better, tougher and stronger, able eventually to punch well above their rookie weight. Granted, Civilization too has the barest inkling of this; a unit which wins a battle there has a chance of becoming a “veteran,” with a bonus to its attack and defense. Master of Magic, however, takes the concept to another level entirely. And then it adds a second stroke of genius: heroes, individual captains who can be recruited to join your cause and lead your armies into battle. They too earn experience and improve their skills; you can even find or make magical weapons and armor for them.”

It seems to me that the game designers’ must have played some “Warlords”, developed by Steve Fawkner and published by Strategic Studies Group, which pre-dated MoM by 4 years. The core loop of a wargame with heroes who gain experience points and power, and units which do likewise, and then which move around in stacks to conquer land or strongholds, is clearly an inspiration for MoM,

- Victor

October 25, 2020 at 5:42 pm

And Warlords is for years after ‘Sword of Aragon’ by SSI ;-)

- Richard Kettering

October 24, 2020 at 8:05 am

You know, from reading this whole article, I have a *strong* suspicion the “Age of Wonders” series is a spiritual successor to this game, at least in general design.

Most of the major gameplay tropes – even some pretty fine-grained design choices (like customizing your wizard, and picking different schools of magic) seem to be incredibly similar.

The one nice thing that AoW 3 did (I’m unfamiliar with the earlier entries in the series) was offering alternate victory conditions; there’s essentially a wonder-like victory that requires you to build up affinity with various races in the game (and thus ends up dodging the usual problem such things have where they’re basically just a matter of min-maxing industrial production), and there’s also a (basically) capture-the-flags victory where you have to hold the ground around several magic seals of power that are in awkward-to-defend places.

—

Anyways – thanks for this excellent article – I’d never actually played Master of Magic, but I’ve heard of it as a groundbreaking title, so it was great to get a nice clean story behind it.

- John

October 24, 2020 at 5:48 pm

People have taken various stabs at Master of Magic-likes and spiritual successors over the years. My impression is that it often doesn’t end well. To be be fair, that impression is almost entirely due to the infamously disastrous launch of Stardock’s Elemental: War of Magic.

As for Master of Magic itself, I wish I liked it more. I enjoy the early game in much the same way I do the early game in Civilization. I like the exploration and the sense of possibility. I’d even argue that the early game in Master of Magic is more interesting than the early game in Civilization because the world is so mysterious and there’s so much more to do. The late game, unfortunately, is a miserable slog. The map is far, far too big and the game drags on forever. It does not help that the enemies you defeat eventually respawn. Winning a magic victory may take longer as far as the number of turns goes, but I suspect that it’s much shorter in real time, as it involves fewer combats and less tedious micromanagement.

It will surprise no one that may favorite thing about SimTex’s Master of Orion 2 is the “small galaxy” option. I’ve never seen, oh, the top third of the tech tree in Master of Orion 2 because my games end before I can get there, and I love it.

- Jimmy Maher

October 25, 2020 at 10:08 am

I don’t entirely disagree with you. I also like the exploration aspect of Master of Magic best; I’d love to see the encounter areas expanded a bit more, to contain little vignettes of adventure for your heroes. I could imagine enjoying Master of Magic immensely with no enemy wizards at all — just a world map to completely explore and “civilize.” The zero-sum aspects are among the weakest parts of the game in my opinion.

- turol

October 25, 2020 at 12:52 pm

It is in fact possible to achieve this kind of “sandbox” mode with some save editing. The game only checks for victory when an enemy wizard is banished so if there are no enemy wizards in the first place it will never trigger unless the player casts the Spell of Mastery. Unfortunately my reverse-engineering notes and tools were for an old version of MoM and not the unofficial patch.

- Michael Davis

November 27, 2020 at 12:06 am

You can also simulate this game mode in a slightly more brute-force way: play a game on easy, dominate the enemy wizards, surround their final cities with unkillable forces… then just keep on playing to your heart’s content. Once I’d get 97-98% of the map charted my curiosity for what could remain would finally wane ^^

- TomR

October 27, 2020 at 4:55 am

Having grown up with the HoMM series I’ve always enjoyed fantasy-civ type games. Sierra’s Lords of Magic was another underrated gem in this niche; and the Age of Wonders series bore the mantle of the same crown well.

- Juan Uys

October 31, 2020 at 12:38 pm

The “Civilization in Space” concept pops up in Sid Meier’s “Memoir!” as well:
https://imgur.com/prtptIc

- Georg

October 31, 2020 at 6:01 pm

Wow, you actually made me download it once again, having played it 25 years ago!

And you’re spot on. Some aspects of the game don’t work, but everything else is so much FUN! The only thing better than summoning fantastic creatures and hiring heroes is hiring heroes who can themselves summon fantastic creatures!

It’s interesting that 4x games are usually judged by their mechanics (many viable strategies, difficult decisions…). In this perspective, it shouldn’t matter much whether you are fighting with mass-produced units with different numeric values, or individual heroes and monsters like sky drakes and demon lords. But it does!

Btw, the overland UI is still bad in caster of magic – enemy moves are way too fast so you don’t know what’s going on. And I really miss something like civ IV cultural borders. Still a blast to play!

- jeff morris

November 5, 2020 at 1:48 am

Is uncanny how much your description applies to Total War games, and the Warhammer line in particular. Progression focused strategic/tactical gameplay, heroes leading armies, absurd amounts of content.

Opening the Gold Box, Part 7: Back to the Roots
November 6, 2020

We made it simple yet complex enough for those people who really got into it. We added graphics and made it a beautiful game with a totally transparent interface. It took all the ugly stuff out of playing a military strategy game and left the fun and the gameplay. That was a conscious effort. It wasn’t just, “Gee, I like artwork in wargames, so let’s throw it in.”

— SSI marketing manager Karen Conroe, speaking about Panzer General in 1996

When we last checked in with Joel Billings and his crew of grognards turned CRPG mavens at SSI, it was early 1994 and they had just lost their Dungeons & Dragons license, by far their biggest source of revenue over the past seven years. While Billings continued to beat the bushes for the buyer that his company plainly needed if it was to have any hope of surviving in the changed gaming landscape of the mid-1990s, it wasn’t immediately obvious to the rest of the in-house staff just what they should be doing now. Ever since signing the Dungeons & Dragons deal with TSR back in 1987, virtually all they had worked on were games under that license; SSI’s other games had all come from outside studios. But now here they were, with no Dungeons & Dragons, no clear direction forward, and quite possibly no long-term future at all. Instead of devoting their time to polishing up their résumés, as most people in their situation would have done, they plunged into a passion project the likes of which they hadn’t been able to permit themselves for many years. And lo and behold, the end result would prove to be the game that turned their commercial fortunes around, for a while anyway.

The project began with Paul Murray, an SSI stalwart who had first begun to program games for the company back in 1981. Most recently, he had been assigned to port Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, SSI’s ambitious and expensive attempt to prove to TSR that they deserved to retain the Dungeons & Dragons license, to the Super Nintendo console. But cash-flow problems during 1993 had forced Billings to shelve the port, leaving Murray without much to do. So, he started to tinker with a style of game which SSI hadn’t done in-house in nearly a decade: a traditional hex-based wargame, based on World War II in Europe. From the beginning, he envisioned it as a “lite” game, emphasizing fun at least as much as historical accuracy — i.e., what old-timers called a “beer and pretzels” wargame. In much of this, he was inspired by a Japanese game for the Sega Genesis console called Advanced Daisenryaku, which had never been officially imported to the United States or even translated into English, but which he and his office mates had somehow stumbled upon and immediately found so addicting that they were willing to struggle their way through it in Japanese. (When Alan Emrich from Computer Gaming World magazine visited the SSI offices, he saw them all playing it “with a crude translation of the Japanese manual lying beside the Sega Genesis.”)

After Dark Sun was released to disappointing sales, thus sounding the death knell for the Dungeons & Dragons license, Murray continued to poke away at his “fast and fun little wargame,” which he called Panzer General. And a remarkable thing happened: more and more of his colleagues, both those in technical and creative roles and those ostensibly far removed from them, coalesced around him. Even Joel Billings and his right-hand man Chuck Kroegel, who between them made all of the big decisions in the executive suites, rolled up their sleeves and made their first active contributions to the nuts and bolts of an SSI game in years. They did so largely after hours, as did many of the others who worked on Panzer General. It became a shared labor of love, a refuge from those harsh external realities that seemed destined to crush SSI under their weight.

At this point, a music fan like me finds it hard to resist comparisons with some of great dead-ender albums in the history of that art form, like Big Star’s Third. If SSI’s beer-and-pretzels wargame doesn’t have quite the same heft as an artistic statement like that one, it is true that the staff there felt the same freedom to experiment, to make exactly the game they wanted to make, all born from the same sense that there was nothing really left to lose. Desperation can be oddly freeing in that respect. Billings still speaks of Panzer General as the most satisfying single project he’s ever been involved with. After the extended detour into Dungeons & Dragons, he and his like-minded colleagues got to go back to the type of game that they personally loved most. It felt like going home. If this was to be the end of SSI, how poetically apt to bring things full circle before the curtain fell.

But make no mistake: Panzer General was not to look or sound like the ugly, fussy SSI wargames of yore. It was very much envisioned as a product of the 1990s, bringing all of the latest technology to bear on the hoary old wargame genre in a way that no one had yet attempted. It would be the first SSI game to require high-resolution SVGA graphics cards, the first to incorporate real-world video clips and voice acting, the first to take full advantage of the capabilities of CD-ROM. Luckily, the nature of the game lent itself to doing much of this on the cheap. Instead of filming actors, SSI could simply digitize public-domain newsreel footage of World War II battle scenes. Meanwhile the voice acting could be limited to a single Reichsmarschall giving you your orders in the sort of clipped, German-accented English that anyone who has ever seen a 1950s Hollywood war movie will feel right at home with. Thanks to the re-purposed media and plenty of free labor from SSI staffers, Panzer General wound up costing less than $400,000 to make — barely a third the cost of Dark Sun.

In addition to all of its multimedia flash, Panzer General evinced a lot of clever design. During 1994, strategy-game designers seemed to discover all at once the value of personalizing their players’ experiences, by giving them more embodied roles to play and by introducing elements of story and CRPG-style character progression. X-COM and Master of Magic are the first two obvious examples of these new approaches from that year, while Panzer General provides the third. One can only assume that SSI learned something from all those Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs.

The overall structure of Panzer General draws heavily from Advanced Daisenryaku. It’s a scenario-based rather than a grand-strategy game. If you choose to play the full campaign, you begin on September 1, 1939, leading the Wehrmacht into Poland. You then progress through a campaign which includes 38 potential scenarios in all, covering the Western and Eastern Fronts of the war in Europe as well as the battles in North Africa, but you’ll never see all of them on a single play-through. Panzer General rather uses a Wing Commander– style campaign tree: doing poorly will lead you to the “loser scenario,” and can eventually get you drummed out of the military entirely; doing well leads you to the next stage of world domination, with additional rewards in the form of “prestige points” which you can spend to improve your army. There’s an inherent design tension in such an approach, which I discussed at some length already in the context of Wing Commander: it gives beginning or unskilled players an unhappy experience by punishing them with ever more brutally difficult missions, even as it “rewards” the players who might actually have a chance of beating those missions by bypassing them. Within its chosen framework, however, Panzer General’s campaign is very well-executed, with plenty of alternative outcomes on offer. In the absolute best case — in game terms, that is — you can invade and defeat Britain in 1940, as Adolf Hitler so conspicuously failed to do in real life, then go on to take Moscow, and finally attain the ultimate Panzer General achievement: conquering Washington, D.C.

As that last unlikely battle in particular would suggest, Panzer General’s fidelity to real history is limited at best. You don’t have to look too far to find veteran grognards complaining about all the places where it falls short as a simulation, perhaps most notably in its near-complete disinterest in the vagaries of supply lines. But then again, the realism of even those wargames that strive more earnestly for historical accuracy can be and often is exaggerated; those games strike me more as arbitrary systems tweaked to produce the same results as the historical battles they purport to simulate than true simulations in the abstract.

The most important thing Panzer General has going for it is that, historically accurate or not, it’s fun. The interface is quick and well-nigh effortless, while the scenario-based approach assures that you’re only getting the exciting parts of warfare; your forces are already drawn up facing the enemy as each scenario begins. And the game is indeed very attractive to look at, with the flashier elements employed sparingly enough that they never start to annoy.

Still, its true secret weapon lies in those aforementioned CRPG elements. Even as you play the role of a German general who collects more and more prestige, accompanied by more and more exciting battlefield assignments, the units you command also move from battle to battle with you, improving their own skills as they go. The effect comes close to matching the identification which X-COM so effectively manages to create between you and your individual soldiers; you can even name your units here, just as you can your soldiers in that other game. You develop a real bond with the units — infantry, artillery, tanks, airplanes, in places even ships — who have fought so many battles for you. You begin to husband them, to work hard to rescue them when they get into a jam, and find yourself fairly shattered — and then fairly livid — when an enemy ambush takes one of them out. You can even mold the makeup of your army to suit your play style to some extent, by choosing which types of units to spend your precious prestige points on. This makes your personal investment in their successes and failures all the greater; the emotional stakes are surprisingly high in this game.

Each scenario in Panzer General begins with some vintage newsreel footage, an approach which has ironically aged much better than the cutting-edge green-screened full-motion-video presentations of so many of its contemporaries. Unlike them, Panzer General has remained an aestheically attractive game to this day.

The map where all of the actions take place. The game is entirely controlled by clicking on your units and the strip of icons running down the right side of the screen. You can mouse over a unit or icon to see a textual description of its status and/or function at the bottom or top of the screen — as close as any 1995 game got to the tool tips of today. SSI’s overarching priority was to make accessible a genre previously known for its inscrutability.

Clashes between units take place right on the main map, accompanied by little animations which spice up the proceedings without overstaying their welcome.

A unit-information screen, showing not only its raw statistics but a running tally of its battle record. You can name your units and watch them collect experience and battle citations as the war goes on.

You can tailor the makeup of your army by spending prestige points to purchase units that suit your style of play.

While his staff beavered away on Panzer General, Joel Billings continued to cast about for a buyer for his company before it was too late. It wasn’t easy; with the loss of the Dungeons & Dragons license he had lost his most enticing single asset. All of SSI’s core competencies were profoundly out of fashion; CRPGs in general were in the doldrums, and wargames were niche products in an industry that had little shelf space left for anything beyond the broadly popular. Nevertheless, he managed in the end to make a deal.

The backstory leading up to that deal has much to tell us about the waves of mergers and acquisitions that had been sweeping the industry for years by this point. It begins with The Software Toolworks, a company founded by an enterprising kit-computer hacker named Walt Bilofsky all the way back in 1980. He quietly built it into a major player in educational and consumer software over the course of the next decade, by jumping early into the distribution and media-duplication sides of the industry and through two blockbuster products of the sort which don’t attract the hardcore gamer demographic and thus seldom feature in histories like this one, but which had immense Main Street appeal in their day: The Chessmaster 2000 and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The combined sales of these two alone exceeded 750,000 units by 1989, the year The Software Toolworks acquired Mindscape.

The latter company was formed in 1983 by one Roger Buoy, and went on to make a name in educational software as well as with innovative games of a slightly intellectual bent: the civilian-spaceflight simulation The Halley Project; a line of bookware text adventures; the early point-and-click graphic adventures developed by ICOM Simulations; Balance of Power, Chris Crawford’s seminal anti-wargame of contemporary geopolitics. Then, too, Mindscape imported and/or distributed many additional games, including those of Cinemaware. But as the decade wound down their bottom line sank increasingly into the red, and in December of 1989 Buoy sold out to The Software Toolworks for $21.5 million.

In the years that followed that acquisition, The Software Toolworks moved into the Nintendo market, releasing many games there under the Mindscape imprint; console titles would make up 42 percent of their overall revenue by 1994. At the same time, they continued to enjoy great success on computers, with the Mavis Beacon series in particular. That entirely fictional typing teacher — a black woman at that, a brave and noble choice to have made in the mid-1980s — became an odd sort of virtual celebrity, with other companies going so far as to ask for her endorsement of their own products, with journalists who joined much of the general public in assuming she was a real person repeatedly asking for interviews. In 1994, The Software Toolworks’s annual sales hit $150 million. On May 12 of that year, the Pearson Group of Britain bought the fast-growing company.

Pearson was a giant of print publishing, both in their homeland and internationally. Formed in 1843 as a construction company, they began buying up magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, building themselves a veritable print empire by the 1970s, with such household names as Penguin Books in their stable. Their sudden plunge into computer software in 1994 was endemic of what we might call the second wave of bookware, when it was widely anticipated that interactive multimedia “books” published on CD-ROM would come to supplement if not entirely supplant the traditional paper-based variety. Bookware’s second wave would last little longer than its first — it would become clear well before the decade’s end that the Internet rather than physical CD-ROMs was destined to become the next century’s preferred method of information exchange — but while it lasted it brought a lot of big companies like the Pearson Group into software, splashing lots of money around in the process; Pearson paid no less than $462 million for The Software Toolworks. Being unenamored with the name of the entity they had just purchased, Pearson changed it — to Mindscape, an imprint that had heretofore represented only a quarter or so of The Software Toolworks’s overall business.

But the wheeling and dealing wasn’t over yet. Within weeks of being themselves acquired, the new Mindscape entered into serious talks with Joel Billings about the prospect of buying SSI. The latter was manifestly dealing from a position of weakness. The Dungeons & Dragons license was gone, as was the reputation SSI had enjoyed during the 1980s as the industry’s premiere maker of strategy games; that crown had been ceded to MicroProse. The only really viable franchise that remained to them was the Tony La Russa Baseball series. Nevertheless, Mindscape believed they saw talent both in SSI’s management and in their technical and creative staff. Said talent was worth taking a chance on, it was decided, given that the price was so laughably cheap. On October 7, 1994, an independent SSI ceased to exist, when Mindscape bought the company for slightly under $2.6 million. Billings was promised that it would be business as usual for most of them in their Sunnyvale, California, office, apart from the quarter of existing staff, mostly working on the sales and packaging side, who were made redundant by the acquisition and would have to be let go.

Once that pain was finished, a rather spectacular honeymoon period began. Mindscape was able to give SSI distribution they could only have dreamed of in the past, getting their games onto the shelves of such mainstream retailers as Office Depot and K-Mart. And in return, SSI delivered Panzer General. Released just a month after the acquisition was finalized, it garnered a gushing five-out-of-five-stars review from Computer Gaming World, who called it “not just a wargame but an adventure” in reference to its uniquely embodied campaign. Add to that its attractive multimedia presentation and its fun and accessible gameplay, then sprinkle over the whole the eternal American nostalgia for all things World War II, and you had a recipe for one of the breakout hits of that Christmas season — the first example of same which SSI had had since Eye of the Beholder back in 1991. Helped along no doubt by Mindscape’s distributional clout, it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies in its first fifteen months. Eventually it surpassed even the sales figures of Pool of Radiance to become SSI’s most popular single game ever. In fact, Panzer General still stands today as the most successful computerized wargame in history.

The game’s success was positively thrilling for Joel Billings, now ensconced as a “regular, full-time employee” of Mindscape, complete with a 401(k) plan and eligibility for the Executive Bonus Plan. His real passion had always been wargames; those were, after all, the games he had originally founded his company in order to make. To have come full circle here at the end of SSI’s independent existence, and to have done so in such smashing fashion at that, felt like a belated vindication. There was only one slight regret to mar the picture. “I wonder what would have happened if Panzer General had come out before the Mindscape acquisition…” he can’t help but muse today.

Taken as a whole, Panzer General deserved every bit of its success: it was and is a fine game. For some of us then and now, there is only one fly in the ointment: we have no desire to play a Nazi. I’ll return to a range of issues which Panzer General raises about the relationship of games to the real world and to our historical memory in my next article. For today, however, I have another story to finish telling.

To say that Mindscape was initially pleased with their new acquisition hardly begins to state the case. “We rocketed!” thanks to Panzer General, remembers Billings: “Mindscape loved us!” And why not? As an in-house-developed original product with no outside royalties whatsoever to pay on its huge sales, Panzer General alone recouped two and a half times the cost of purchasing SSI in its first year on the market. A set of three shovelware collections which between them included all of the old Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons CRPGS also did surprisingly well, selling more than 100,000 profit-rich copies in all before the final expiration of even SSI’s non-exclusive deal with TSR forced them off the market on July 1, 1995.

In the longer run, however, the mass-market ambitions of Mindscape proved a poor fit with the nichey tradition of SSI. To save production costs and capitalize on the success of Panzer General, SSI used its engine as the basis of a 5-Star General series, first presenting World War II from the perspective of an Allied general in Europe, then moving farther afield to a high-fantasy setting, to outer space, to World War II in the Pacific. Although those games certainly had their fans — Fantasy General in particular is fondly remembered today — the overall trend line was dismayingly similar to that of the Gold Box games: a rather brilliant initial game followed by a series of increasingly rote sequels running inside an increasingly decrepit-seeming engine, resulting in steadily decreasing sales figures. By the time the engine was updated for Panzer General II, People’s General, Panzer General III, and, Lord help us, Panzer General 3D Assault, a distinct note of desperation was peeking through. SSI’s other attempts to embrace the mass-market, such as a series of real-time strategy games based on the tabletop-miniatures game Warhammer, felt equally sterile, as if their hearts just weren’t in it.

Certainly Joel Billings personally found the mainstream market to be less than congenial. In February of 1996, he was promoted to become the head of Mindscape’s entire games division, but found himself completely out of his depth there. Within six months, he asked for and was granted a demotion, back to being merely the head of SSI.

But even SSI was no longer the place it once had been; it seemed to lose a little more of its identity with each passing year, as the acquisitions and consolidations continued around it. Mindscape was bought by The Learning Company in 1998, after Pearson’s realization that software — at least software shipped on physical media — was not destined to be the future of publishing writ large. Then Mattel bought The Learning Company in 1999. They closed SSI’s Sunnyvale offices the following year, keeping the name as a brand only. That same year, they sold The Learning Company once again, to the Gores Technology Group, who then turned around and sold all of the gaming divisions to the French publisher Ubisoft in 2001. SSI was now a creaky anachronism in Ubisoft’s trendy lineup. The last game to ship with the SSI name on its box was Destroyer Command, in February of 2002 — almost exactly 22 years after a young Joel Billings had first started calling computer stores to offer them something called Computer Bismark.

Billings himself was long gone by 2002, cast adrift with the final closing of SSI’s Sunnyvale offices. Thoroughly fed up with the mainstream-gaming rat race, he returned to the only thing he had ever truly wanted to do, making and selling his beloved wargames. For almost two decades now he’s run 2 By 3 Games with Gary Grigsby and Keith Brors, two designers and programmers from the salad days of SSI. They make absurdly massive, gleefully complex, defiantly inaccessible World War II wargames, implemented at a level of depth and breadth of which SSI could only have dreamed. And, thanks to the indie revolution in games and the wonders of digital distribution, they manage to sell enough of them to keep at it. Good for them, I say.

Melancholy though SSI’s ultimate fate proved to be, they did outlive their erstwhile partners TSR. After flooding their limited and slowly shrinking market of active Dungeons & Dragons players with way too many campaign settings and rules supplements during the first half of the 1990s, TSR saw the chickens come home to roost right about the time they parted ways with SSI, when sales of the paperback novels that had done much to sustain them to this point also began to collapse. For all that they had never been anyone’s idea of literary masterpieces, the early Dungeons & Dragons novels had been competently plotted, fast-paced reads that more than satisfied their target demographic’s limited expectations of them. For years, though, editorial standards there as well had been slowly falling, and it seemed that readers were finally noticing. After the Christmas season of 1996, Random House, who distributed all of TSR’s products to the bookstore trade, informed them that they would be returning millions of dollars worth of unsold books and games. TSR lacked the cash to pay Random House, as they did to print more product. And, laboring under a serious debt load already, they found there was no one willing to lend them any more money. They were caught in a classic corporate death spiral.

The savior that emerged was welcome in its way — any port in a storm, right? — but also deeply humiliating. Wizards of the Coast, the maker of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering which had done so much to decimate TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons business in recent years, now bought their victim from Lorraine Williams for about $30 million, with much or most of that sum going to repay of the debts TSR had accrued.

Still, TSR’s final humiliation proved a welcome development on the whole for their most famous game; in the eyes of most gamers, Wizards became a better steward of Dungeons & Dragons than TSR had been for a long time if ever. They cut back on the fire hose of oft-redundant product, whilst streamlining the rules for new editions of the game that were more intuitively playable than the old. Ironically, many of the new approaches were ported back to the tabletop from digital iterations of Dungeons & Dragons, which themselves found a new lease on life with Interplay’s massive hit Baldur’s Gate in 1998. Meanwhile the “open gaming” D20 license, which Wizards of the Coast launched with great fanfare along with the official third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, drew from the ideals of open-source software. While tabletop Dungeons & Dragons would have its ups and downs under Wizards of the Coast, it would never again descend to the depths it had plumbed in 1997. A world without Dungeons & Dragons now seems all but unimaginable; in 1997, it was all too real a prospect.

All of which is to say that Dungeons & Dragons will continue to be a regular touchstone here as we continue our voyage through gaming history. Whether the computerized versions of the game that came after the end of an independent TSR and SSI are up to the standards of the Gold Box line is of course a matter of opinion. But one thing cannot be debated: the story of Dungeons & Dragons and computers is far from over.

(Sources: As with all of my SSI articles, much of this one is drawn from the SSI archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Other sources include the book Designers and Dragons, ’70 to ’79 by Shannon Appelcline; Computer Gaming World of June 1994, September 1994, December 1994, and January 1995; PC Review of June 1992; Retro Gamer 94 and 198; Chicago Tribune of December 2 1985 and December 6 1989; New York Times of June 13 1994. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Joel Billings, the Video Game Newsroom Time Machine interview with Joel Billings, and the Mental Floss “profile” of the fictional Mavis Beacon.

Oddly given its popularity back in the day and its ongoing influence on computer wargaming, the original Panzer General has not been re-released for digital distribution; this is made doubly odd by the fact that some of the less successful later games in the 5-Star General series have been re-released. It’s too large for me to host here even if I wasn’t nervous about the legal implications of doing so, but I have prepared a stub of the game that’s ready to go if you just add to the appropriate version of DOSBox for your platform of choice and an ISO image of the CD-ROM. A final hint: as of this writing, you can find the latter on archive.org if you look hard enough.)

Comments
39 Responses

- The Eidolon

November 6, 2020 at 5:52 pm

As the dad of three teenage daughters… D&D seems to be pretty mainstream right now. Online campaigns have really taken off due to covid and videoconferencing. It’s tough to compare to TSR’s heyday, as TSR kept poor records and some of the money may have been flat out embezzled back then. But anecdotally, D&D is quite mainstream and popular right now, even with groups (such as female players) with which it struggled in the 80s. And the influence of D&D is even broader, with RPG-like elements common in a wide variety of game software.

- Andrew Pam

November 6, 2020 at 6:20 pm

And entertainment media appear to have noticed that there are plenty of well-known actors who publicly admit to playing D&D, sometimes even on set in downtimes. It’s become almost trendy, so I’d certainly say it’s once again “flirting with the mainstream” in 2020. Historians should be very cautious of writing “never again”!

- Premislaus

November 6, 2020 at 7:37 pm

Yes, I think Digital Antiquarian somehow missed the massive sucess D&D 5e enjoyed in recent years.

- Premislaus

November 6, 2020 at 7:41 pm

D&D also appeared in popular yet not directly related TV shows (Stranger Things) and games (Life is Strange) which again speaks of its mainstream appeal.

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2020 at 9:28 pm

My impression was that, while the name of Dungeons & Dragons remains quite recognizable, it’s less frequently played today than it used to be in its tabletop — as opposed to digital — incarnations. I wouldn’t cite Stranger Things as a great counterexample, given that it uses the game as 1980s nerd kitsch. However, we do have a show on television here in Denmark where some folks play together, with a popular comedian as dungeonmaster, and it’s filmed and broadcast just like that. It’s popular enough that it got renewed for a second season.

So, it’s possible that I was indeed understating its current popularity. Thanks!

- matt w

November 7, 2020 at 4:59 am

I guess you’ve changed the passage that this discussion was referring to, but I’m another vote for D&D being popular among the kids these days. My sixth-grade child started playing it with his friends before everything went remote (one of the first things we had to cancel when we locked down was a session with his friends) and remote sessions have been keeping him sane since March–he’s in one group with his old friends and another at school. My third-grader plays in one of those groups too.

Also Vin Diesel managed to get a film made based on his D&D character.

- xxx

November 8, 2020 at 9:01 pm

The other commentators are correct: D&D is enjoying a resurgence in popularity the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the 1980s. Let’s just hope it doesn’t spawn any more awful movies or cartoons.

One thing that’s particularly noteworthy about D&D 3rd Edition, published by Wizards of the Coast after the TSR acquisition, is how obviously inspired it is by the Gold Box rules. 2nd Edition had fairly loose rules for the mechanics of combat (movement, position, engagement), and many groups would play combats without visual aids or just sketch a quick map of the battlefield on a piece of scratch paper. The Gold Box games came up with an interpretation of those rules that played well on a simple grid.

Lo and behold, when 3rd Edition came out, it felt like the Gold Box games transposed to a tabletop: a grid-based map with the same rules for movement, flanking, disengagement, etc. I’d be willing to bet my left arm that the designers of 3E played a fair amount of Pool of Radiance back in the day.

- Jason Dyer

November 10, 2020 at 4:33 pm

As the father of a middle-school-aged child, I can attest that tabletop D&D is still very, very, big.

They’re playing on discord now, but that’s just because of circumstances.

- Andrew Pam

November 6, 2020 at 6:13 pm

“SSI was now a creeky anachronism” – typo for “creaky”, I assume? Unless this is some sort of reference?

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2020 at 9:29 pm

Nope, just a typo. ;) Thanks!

- Alex Smith

November 6, 2020 at 7:03 pm

“Fantasy General is particular is fondly remembered today”

in particular

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2020 at 9:30 pm

Thanks!

- Aula

November 6, 2020 at 7:15 pm

“Reichmarschall” should be “Reichsmarschall”

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2020 at 9:31 pm

Thanks!

- Hans

November 6, 2020 at 8:11 pm

I admit I’ve never played Panzer General before (I always pictured it as being one of those dry, complicated, boomer WW2 games) but you’ve inspired me to track it down and have a bit of a blitz.

- Antilegomena

November 7, 2020 at 5:51 am

I’m curious about how wargame is defined in the context of Panzer General being the best selling in history. I can think of a few series, like Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, with installments that I know have sold more, but it sounds like you would categorize those separately from Wargames proper.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2020 at 7:40 am

I would define computerized wargames in this context as recognizable descendants of the tabletop variety: hexes, turn-based, a fairly granular focus on the capabilities of different units, etc.

- Funker

November 7, 2020 at 4:59 pm

Panzer General isn’t actually a wargame. It is a puzzle game, and each scenario has a trick you have to figure out to advance. It uses units labeled “infantry” and “air” but might as well be the different symbols used by Candy Crush.

- Jack

November 8, 2020 at 3:31 am

I would argue most wargames are efficiency puzzles (not saying that’s a negative thing though!).

- Jonathan Badger

November 13, 2020 at 9:22 am

I don’t know sales numbers, but it is interesting how similar both Advance Wars and Fire Emblem are to Panzer General in the way they all based on a series of scenarios rather than grand strategy. Although Jimmy brings up the (unknown to me) Advanced Daisenryaku which may be the origin of this in wargames, and being Japanese, perhaps Advance Wars and Fire Emblem may be copying from that and not Panzer General.

- Heike

November 7, 2020 at 6:06 pm

A game where you get to play the Nazis and win WWII, exterminating the Jews in the process. No wonder it was a smash hit in America, a place always more welcoming to fascism than Europe ever was.

- matt w

November 8, 2020 at 3:45 pm

a place always more welcoming to fascism than Europe ever was.

There is a lot of historical complexity to this, including the influence of Jim Crow America on Hitler, but for this to be true surely you have to exclude 1920-1945 from “ever”?

- Alex Smith

November 8, 2020 at 3:57 pm

Not to mention current popularly elected governments in Hungary and Poland, the very narrowly averted triumph of the far right in Austria and Italy, and recent scandals involving police and military personnel in Germany. But yes, the country that just rejected the reelection of its wannabe fascist president is a far greater hotbed than Europe.

Of course at the end of the day it’s not a competition. Your apparent prejudice against Americans is not a credible stand for the mindset of people who enjoy wargames, even if a game where you only get to play as one of greatest forces of evil in history is a little discomforting in a modern context.

- matt w

November 8, 2020 at 11:03 pm

Though it may well be true that this kind of game couldn’t have been marketed in Europe in the ’90s. I assume Jimmy is going to talk about this next update, as he’s mentioned.

The ethos of tabletop wargames like Avalon Hill’s is a little discomfiting. When I was playing them with my brother in the 80s we didn’t have any particular qualms about playing the Germans, though I think my mom was somewhat disturbed by it. (We are Jewish.) But they sure did seem to emphasize the German side a lot, from Blitzkrieg to PanzerBlitz to the Squad Leader sequel Cross of Iron, which had rules like “SS troops and Russians can execute prisoners whenever they want.” Lotta mythologizing of Erwin Rommel too. And Advanced Squad Leader eventually got bought up by Curt Schilling, whose WWII memorabilia collection included a lot of Nazi stuff.

- Alex Smith

November 9, 2020 at 6:46 am

I agree with you. Just to be clear, my reply was directed at Heike even though it is embedded under yours. I am certainly not saying there are not people in the US that have an uncomfortable association with Nazi symbolism. I do think that in wargaming, however, the fascination with the German side is more that they have the best toys (which was quite a determent to the actual war effort since they were producing way to many incompatible vehicles with their fast diminishing industrial capacity). Shermans may have won the war because the Allies could produce an overwhelming number, but King Tigers are far more sexy.

I think it’s also because conquering Europe is quite a bit more difficult than stopping someone from doing it. So that is interesting from a pure gaming challenge perspective. They used to say all the most popular wargames centered around the “three N’s” NATO, Nazis, and Napoleon. The unifying thread is continent-wide warfare, not wholesale genocide of religious minorities. Heike stating the overwhelming joy here for hundreds of thousands of war gamers is thoughts of exterminated Jews is being pretty hateful, ironic don’t you think?

- Robert

November 8, 2020 at 3:47 pm

It’s an honor to have such a distinguished political scientist and psychologist comment on this article. Your understanding of the world really is quite a sight to behold.

- Rufus Landale

November 9, 2020 at 9:01 am

I always helpfully mention Axis war crimes whenever I play them in any sort of game. So we don’t forget and inhuman monsters like Unit 731 are never forgotten as evil needs to be called as such.

- Illinois Nazi

November 10, 2020 at 3:37 am

Can confirm. I play videogames purely out of dislike for the Jews.

- Obligatory

November 10, 2020 at 6:21 am

I hate Illinois Nazi.

- Jonathan Badger

November 13, 2020 at 9:34 am

Actually, at least what I found disturbing about Panzer General wasn’t the glorification of Nazis or fascism but how it divorced itself from the historical context. Hitler and swastikas were notably absent and the conquest was depicted as not arising out of any ideology but simply the desire for conquest; basically the Napoleonic Wars with better weapons.

- Ross

November 13, 2020 at 10:41 pm

Yeah, I can see why they would want to do it that way, even though the net effect is almost exactly the opposite of what they were aiming for by divorcing the “Cool tank” aspect from the underlying ideology.

It feels like this is a recurring theme in games featuring Nazis – it always feels like the designers discarded the Nazi ideology as bullshit, but completely bought into their narrative about their military prowess and are thus kind of befuddled by the fact that this indestructable military somehow managed to get defeated (When, in actuallity, the Nazi war machine suffered greatly from the extent to which the party line required ignoring objective reality)

- Bitmap

November 9, 2020 at 6:40 pm

“SSI’s other attempts to embrace the mass-market, such as a series of real-time strategy games based on the tabletop-miniatures game Warhammer, felt equally sterile, as if their hearts just weren’t in it.”

The two Warhammer games “Shadow of the Horned Rat” and “Dark Omen” were not developed by SSI developers. They were developed by a Mindscape development team which only did game conversions before (porting games to different systems). SSI managers did handle the management of Mindscape’s development efforts, but no SSI managers appear in the Warhammer games’ credits as far as I can see.

Source: English-language interview with producer Richard Leinfellner on German-language podcast Stayforever, https://www.stayforever.de/2020/07/dark-omen-interview-inkl-transkript/

Also, for the developers these games very obviously were a labor of love. While the first game already weaves a fine atmosphere but suffers from poor graphics, poor controls and excessive difficulty, the second is an altogether excellent game. Due to its simulation of regiment warfare, morale and use of terrain, it’s actually the best believable and fun simulation of medieval fantasy warfare by far, at least until the later Total War games.

- Jay

November 13, 2020 at 12:06 pm

Yes. I have to second here that Dark Omen is and remains fantastic. It kind of occupies a similar mindspace (Mind…scape? Oh no.) like, say, a Jagged Alliance 2 for me. A strategy game that was probably a bit too harsh and weird to ever be more than the “reasonably big in Germany and Russia” status these kinds of games often have, but that is so singularly well executed that there hasn’t ever really been anything like it that could hope to surpass it.

Total War, while approaching its simulation of warfare similarly, has a different focus. I like those too, but Dark Omen is still something else.

- Mikko

November 11, 2020 at 7:42 pm

Personally, I much preferred a 1995 SSI game, Steel Panthers, to the slightly earlier Panzer General – and I do believe that Steel Panthers was also a major hit series for SSI. The game was a little bit more involved, but probably would also rank as a “beer and pretzels” strategy game by SSI’s standards.

Steel Panthers had some of the similar addictive CRPG-style elements, especially in the campaign modes, as you had commanders and units that accumulated experience, improved their skills, and gained promotions. For the German campaign, in lieu of Nazi assaults on America, these elements led to the emergent – and more-palatable – goal of trying to keep your veteran units alive until the end of the war against increasingly desperate odds, massive artillery and air bombardments, and such.

It was actually a bit chilling to to realize at some point that the main reason I was sending the raw recruit support units to the deadliest places instead of the veterans was that I was playing favorites and trying to keep my virtual “old friends” away from harm’s way…

Meanwhile, for the Soviet campaign, the initial equipment was pretty terrible and the units were badly trained, but if you could keep some of them alive through the first years of retreat, there was a great satisfaction in seeing those elite level units, with upgraded equipment, assaulting Germany in 1945.

- Laertes

November 11, 2020 at 8:44 pm

There are modernised versions of Steel Panthers, for example:
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Camo_Workshop/WW2/WW2_page.html

- Kevin Butler

November 12, 2020 at 4:18 am

It is interesting to note that the original, Japanese version of Advanced Daisenryaku was released for the Sega Genesis in 1991 but was enver released into the United States. Just rehashing that it inspired Panzer General, which was released in 1994 and its play is loosely similar for obtaining objectives and what taskings you had to achieve to go onto certain campaign paths.

Oddly enough, this game would get released onto the Sega Saturn. The Japanese release World Advanced Daisenryaku: Kotetsu no Ikusakaze occurred in 1995 by Sega of Japan. In 1996, a company called Working Designs released the game as Iron Storm. Both versions were a re-incarnation of Advanced Daisenryaku, in a sense. The same basic premise was transferred over and the units were expanded out. In addition, graphics were improved but the same basic premise of campaign moded existed. You had to do certain things in order to advance on the best path. One of the bigger problems with this game was that the translation from Japanese to English had a lot to be desired.

Iron storm, though, was still a relatively fun game but many people who have played this and Panzer General feel that Panzer General is the cleaner and overall better of the two.

I wrote both a game guide and review of this game:

Game Guide: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/saturn/573971-iron-storm/faqs/22829

Review: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/saturn/573971-iron-storm/reviews/54536

Thank you

- Alberto

November 15, 2020 at 5:17 pm

> Panzer General rather uses a Wing Commander– style campaign tree: doing poorly will lead you to the “loser scenario,” […] There’s an inherent design tension in such an approach, which I discussed at some length already in the context of Wing Commander

I think Panzer General is a much better example of the pros and cons of this kind of style. In Wing Commander a loss might get you more difficult missions, but they are always winnable, and a pair of victories suffice to get you back on the right track – when I played it, I managed to get the good ending in my first run, never reloading, despite staying on the losing path for the most part of the game.

Panzer General is much more punishing in this context: if you lose a big part of your army, or some crucial unit like the elite engineers in the later scenarios, it becomes practically impossible to escape the steak of defeats awaiting the survivors. On the other hand, if one aims to conquer the world it is almost mandatory to win decisively from the very onset.

I personally think that in Panzer General this game mechanic is justifiable. Given the historical context, the struggle for survival and the fight against an unstoppable force can be seen as part of the immersion. Meanwhile, a player can enjoy the the ever-changing scenarios and technologies. I can however see how other players may find it disheartening.

- Lisa H.

November 16, 2020 at 12:00 am

the steak of defeats awaiting the survivors

…tee hee.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2020 at 8:22 am

It’s nice that there’s at least a consolation prize…

Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Panzer General
November 20, 2020

I apologize for liking German generals. I suppose I ought not to.

— Desmond Young

When I attempted to play the SSI computer game Panzer General as part of this ongoing journey through gaming history, I could recognize objectively that it was a fine game, perfectly in my wheelhouse in many ways, with its interesting but not overly fiddly mechanics, its clean and attractive aesthetic presentation, and the sense of unfolding narrative and personal identification that comes with embodying the role of a German general leading an army through the campaigns of World War II. But for all that, I just couldn’t enjoy it. When I conquered Poland, I didn’t feel any sense of martial pride; all I could see in my mind’s eye were the Warsaw ghettos and Auschwitz. I found I could take no pleasure in invading countries that had done nothing to my own — invasions that were preludes, as I knew all too well, to committing concerted genocide on a substantial portion of their populations. Simply put, I could take no pleasure from playing a Nazi.

So, Panzer General prompted me to ask a host of questions about the way that we process the events of history, as well as the boundaries — inevitably different for each of us — between acceptable and unacceptable content in games. At the core of this inquiry lies a pair of bizarrely contradictory factoids. The Nazi regime of 1933 to 1945 is widely considered to be the ultimate exemplar of Evil on a national scale, its Führer such a profoundly malevolent figure as to defy comparison with literally anyone else, such that to evoke him in an argument on any other subject is, so Godwin’s Law tells us, so histrionic as to represent an immediate forfeiture of one’s right to be taken seriously. And yet in Panzer General we have a mass-market American computer game in which you play a willing tool of Adolf Hitler’s evil, complete with all the flag-waving enthusiasm we might expect to see bestowed upon an American general in the same conflict. If the paradoxical attitudes toward World War II which these factoids epitomize weren’t so deeply embedded in our culture, we would be left utterly baffled. For my part, I felt that I needed to understand better where those selfsame attitudes had come from.

I should note here that my intention isn’t to condemn those people whose tolerance for moral ambiguity allows them to enjoy Panzer General in the spirit which SSI no doubt intended. Still less do I want this article to come across as anti-German rather than anti-Nazi. The present-day population of Germany is still reckoning with those twelve terrible years in their country’s long and oft-inspiring history, and for the most part they’re doing a decent job of it. As an American, I’m certainly in no position to cast aspersions; if a different game had crossed my radar, this article might have been about the legacy of the American Civil War and the ongoing adulation in many American cultural corners of Confederate generals who fought for the privilege of continuing to enslave their fellow humans. As always here, my objective is to offer some food for thought and perchance to enlighten just a bit. It’s definitely not to hector anyone.

Prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp greet their liberators, April 1945.

The occasional reports which reached the Allied countries of the horrors of the Holocaust during the early and middle years of World War II were widely dismissed, unfortunately but perhaps understandably, as gross exaggerations. But when American and British armies finally began to liberate the first of the concentration camps in late 1944, those reports’ veracity could no longer be denied. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces attacking Germany from the west, made it a point to bear witness to what had taken place in the camps. He ordered that all of his men should pass through one or more of them: “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.” Eisenhower also made special provisions for bringing journalists to the camps to record the “evidence of atrocity” for readers back home and for posterity.

After the war, the hastily convened Nuremberg trials brought much more evidence of the Holocaust to light, not just for the assembled panel of judges but for ordinary people all over the world; the proceedings were covered in great detail by journalists. But after the trials concluded in late 1946, with eleven defendants having been sentenced to death and a further seven sentenced to prison terms of various lengths, the Western political establishment seemed to believe the matter was settled, evincing a devout wish just to move on that was out of all keeping with the crimes against humanity which had been uncovered. To understand why, we need look no further than the looming Cold War, that next titanic ideological struggle, which had started taking shape well before the previous war had ended. Now that the Cold War was becoming an undeniable reality,  the United States and its allies needed the new West Germany to join their cause wholeheartedly. There was no time for retribution.

A pernicious myth took hold at this juncture, one which has yet to be entirely vanquished in some circles. It lived then, as it still does to some extent today, because it served the purposes of the people who chose to believe in it. The historian Harold Marcuse names “ignorance, resistance, and victimization” as the myth’s core components. It claims that the crimes of the Holocaust were entirely the work of an evil inner cabal that was close to Hitler personally, that the vast majority of Germans — the so-called “good Germans” — never even realized any of it was happening, and that most of those who did stumble across the truth were appropriately horrified and outraged. But in the end, as the reasoning goes, they were Hitler’s victims as well, unable to do much of anything about it if they didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the people already in the concentration camps.

There were grains of truth to the argument; certainly the Gestapo was a much-feared presence in daily German life. But the fact remains that German resistance to Hitler was never as widespread as the apologists would like it to have been; every metric we have at our disposal would seem to indicate that the Nazi regime enjoyed broad popular support at least until the final disastrous year or two of the war.

The claim of widespread public ignorance of Hitler’s crimes, meanwhile, was patently absurd on the face of it. The Holocaust wasn’t a plot hatched in secret by shadowy conspirators; it was a massive bureaucratic effort which marshaled the resources of the entire state, from the secretaries who requisitioned the stocks of Zyklon B poison gas to the thousands of guards who tortured and killed the prisoners in the camps. Could the “good Germans” really not have seen the trains lumbering through their villages with their emaciated human cargoes? Could they really not have smelled the stench of death which rose over the concentration camps day after day? In order not to know, one would have had to willfully closed one’s eyes, nose, and ears if not one’s heart — which may very well have been the case for some, but is hardly a compelling defense.

Nevertheless, the myth of the ignorant, resistant, and victimized “good” Germans was widely accepted by the beginning of the 1950s. The Germans who had actually lived through the war had every motivation to minimize their complicity in the abominations of Nazism, while the political establishment of the West had no desire to rock the boat by asking difficult questions of their new allies against communism. The Holocaust was treated as vaguely gauche — a disreputable topic, inappropriate for discussion in polite company. To confront people with it was regarded as an act of irresponsible political agitation. In 1956, for example, when the French director Alain Resnais announced Night and Fog, a chilling 32-minute film which juxtaposed images of the concentration camps as they looked in that year with archival footage from the war years, the West German government lodged an immediate complaint with the French government, which in turned pressured the Cannes Film Festival into rejecting the movie as anti-German agitprop. The attitudes inculcated during this period begin to explain the existence of Panzer General so many years later, casting you cheerfully and with no expressed reservations whatsoever in the role of a German general of the Second World War.

The ugly truth behind Panzer General’s glorification of Nazi aggression: a group of Polish prisoners are lined up against a wall and shot in the fall of 1939. Images like this one run through my mind constantly whenever I attempt to play the game.

But they aren’t a complete explanation, given that it would seem to be even harder to believe in the guiltlessness of German soldiers than civilians. The former were, after all, the ones who actually pointed the guns and pulled the trigger; their crimes would seem to be active ones, as opposed to the passive acquiescence of the latter. Even if they wished to claim that they personally had only pointed their rifles at enemy combatants, they couldn’t possibly plead ignorance of the horrifying crimes against noncombatants that were committed right under their noses by those all around them, right from the first weeks of the war. But, remarkably, a defense was mounted on their behalf, one that was similar in the broad strokes at least to that of the “good” German civilians.

The myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” held that the vast majority of German officers and soldiers were in fact no more guilty than the soldiers of the Allied armies. Most or all of the German war crimes, so the reasoning went, were the work of the dreaded SS Einsatzgruppen who traveled just behind the regular army units, maiming, torturing, raping, and massacring civilians in staggering numbers. Anecdotes abounded — some of them probably even true — telling how the ordinary German soldiers and their “professional” leadership had regarded their SS comrades with disgust, had considered them no better than butchers — cowards who preferred enemies that couldn’t fight back — and had shunned their company completely.

To be sure, the Einsatzgruppen were real, and did fill precisely the grisly role ascribed to them. But they were hardly the only German soldiers who murdered in cold blood. And, even if they had been, the fact that the ordinary soldiers found them unappealing doesn’t absolve them of blame for facilitating their activities. Note that the “ignorance” part of the “ignorance, resistance, victimization” defense has fallen away uncontested in the case of the German soldiers — as has, for that matter, the claim of resistance. All that’s left to shield them from blame is the claim of victimhood. Their country ordered them to carry out ethnic cleansing, we are told, and so they had no choice but to do so.

For all its patent weaknesses as an argument, the clean Wehrmacht would become a bedrock of a new strand of historical writing as well as a culture of wargaming that would be tightly coupled to it — the same culture that would eventually yield Panzer General. We can perhaps best understand the myth and its ramifications through the career of its archetypal exemplar, not coincidentally a wargaming perennial: Field Marshall Erwin Rommel.

Erwin Rommel in 1942, during his heyday as the “Desert Fox.”

Like Hitler, Rommel fought in the trenches during World War I, albeit as a junior officer rather than an enlisted man. He remained in the army between the wars, although his progress through the ranks wasn’t meteoric by any means; by 1937, when he published an influential book on infantry tactics, he had risen no higher than colonel. Having expressed no strong political beliefs prior to the ascension of Hitler, he became by all indications a great admirer of the dictator and his ideology thereafter. Although he never formally joined the Nazi party, he became close friends with Joseph Goebbels, its propaganda minister. “Yesterday the Führer spoke,” he wrote in a letter to his wife in 1938. “Today’s soldier must be political because he must always be ready to take action for the new politics. The German military is the sword of the new German worldview.”

That year Rommel was assigned personal responsibility for Hitler’s security. The Fūhrer, who had read his book and felt the kinship of their front-line service in the previous war, took as much of a shine to Rommel as Rommel did to him. On March 15, 1939, in the final act of German aggression prior to the one which would spark a world war, Rommel entered what was left of an independent Czechoslovakia at Hitler’s side; he would later take proud credit for having urged Hitler to push aggressively forward and occupy Prague Castle with a minimum of delay. He was promoted to major general shortly thereafter.

Rommel played a part in the invasions of Poland and then France and the Low Countries in the early years of World War II, winning the Knight’s Cross for his bold leadership of an armored division in the latter campaign. Then, on February 12, 1941, the newly promoted lieutenant general was sent to command the German forces in North Africa. It was here that his legend would be made.

Over the course of the next twenty months, Rommel led his outnumbered army through a series of improbably successful actions, punctuated by only occasional, generally more modest setbacks. Hitler promoted him to field marshal after one of his more dramatic victories, his capture of Tobruk, Libya, in June of 1942.

The North African front was a clean one by the standards of almost any other theater of World War II; it was largely a war of army against army, with civilians pushed to the sidelines. Thus it would go down in legend as “the war without hate,” a term coined by Rommel himself. This was war as wargamers would later wish it could always be: mobile armies duking it out in unobstructed desert terrain, a situation with room for all kinds of tactical give-and-take and noble derring-do, far removed from all that messiness of the Holocaust and the savagery of the Eastern Front. North Africa was never more than a secondary theater, the merest sideshow in comparison to the existential struggle going on in the Soviet Union — but it was precisely this fact that gave it its unique qualities.

Rommel’s men came to love him. They loved his flair for the unexpected, his concern for their well-being, and the way he stood right there with them on the front line when they engaged the enemy. More surprisingly, the soldiers he fought against came to respect him just as much. By early 1942, they had given him his eternal nickname: “The Desert Fox.” They respected him the way an athlete might respect a worthy and honorable player for the opposing team, respected not just his real or alleged tactical genius but the fact that he waged war with a scrupulous adherence to the rules that seemed a relic of a long-gone age of gentlemen soldiers.

The growing weight of Allied manpower and equipment following the entry of the United States into the war finally brought Rommel up short at the Second Battle of El Alamein in northern Egypt in October and November of 1942, forcing him to make a months-long retreat all the way to Tunisia. (Winston Churchill famously wrote about this battle that “before Alamein, we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.”) Rommel was recalled to Germany in March of 1943, by which time North Africa had become a lost cause despite all of his efforts. The last German forces left there would surrender two months later.

In November of 1943, Rommel was placed in charge of the armies defending the coastline of France against the Allied counter-invasion that must inevitably come. By now, he was apparently beginning to entertain some doubts about the Führer. He flirted with a cabal of officers who were considering, as they put it, “extra-military solutions” to bring an end to a war which they now believed to be hopeless. Some of these officers’ discussions evolved into an attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944. The attempt failed; the bomb which Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted within the Führer’s headquarters caused much chaos and killed three men, but only slightly injured its real target.

There has been heated debate ever since about Rommel’s precise role in the conspiracy and assassination attempt. We know that he wasn’t present at the scene, but surprisingly little beyond that. Did he give the plan his tacit or explicit blessing? Was he an active co-conspirator, possibly even the man slated to take the reins of the German state after Hitler’s death? Or did he have nothing whatsoever to do with it? The temptations here are obvious for those who wish to see Rommel as an exemplar of moral virtue in uniform. And yet, as we’ll shortly see, not even his most unabashed admirers are in agreement about his involvement — or lack thereof — in the plot. There’s enough evidence to pick and choose from to support almost any point of view.

At any rate, Rommel had much else to occupy him at that time; the D-Day invasion had come on June 6, 1944. Three days before the assassination attempt, while he was out doing what he could to rally his overstretched, outnumbered army of defenders, his staff car was strafed by Allied fighters, and he was seriously wounded. Thus he was lying in hospital on the fateful day. Although he was not suspected of having been one of the conspirators for quite some time thereafter, Hitler had been none too pleased with his decision to fall back from the beaches of Normandy, ignoring express orders to fight to the death there. For this reason, Rommel would never return to his command.

Three months after these events, after having conducted dozens of interrogations, the Gestapo had come to suspect if not know that Rommel had been involved in the assassination plot at one level or another — and such a suspicion was, of course, more than enough to get a person condemned in Nazi Germany. Two officers visited him in his home and offered him a choice. He could commit suicide using the cyanide tablets they had helpfully brought along, whereupon his death would be announced as having come as a result of his recent battle injuries and he would be buried with full military honors. Or he could be dragged before the People’s Court on charges of treason, which would not only mean certain death for him but quite probably death or imprisonment for his wife and two children as well. Rommel chose suicide, thus putting the crowning touch on his legend: the noble warrior who makes the supreme sacrifice with wide-open eyes in order to spare his family — a fate not out of keeping with, say, a hero of the Iliad.

The book which, more than any other, is responsible for cementing the vision of an heroic, noble Rommel in the popular imagination.

For all that Rommel’s story perhaps always had some of the stuff of myth about it, his canonization as the face of the clean Wehrmacht was by no means always assured. It is true that, during his period of greatest success in North Africa, a mystique had begun to attach itself to him among Allied journalists as well as Allied soldiers. After his defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, however, the mystique faded. Few to none among the Allied brass were losing sleep over Rommel before the D-Day landings, and The New York Times mentioned his eventual death only in passing, referring to him only as a “Hitler favorite,” making no use of his “Desert Fox” sobriquet. At war’s end, he was far from the best known of the German generals.

The man responsible more than any other for elevating Rommel to belated stardom was a Briton named Desmond Young, a journalist by trade who saw combat in both world wars and somehow still managed to retain the notion that war can be a stirring adventure for sporting gentlemen. In June of 1942, while serving as a brigadier in charge of public relations for the Indian divisions fighting for the Allies in North Africa, he was captured by the Germans, and had a passing encounter with Rommel himself that left an indelible stamp on him. Ordered by his captors to drive over with them and negotiate the surrender of another Allied encampment which was continuing the fight, he refused, and the situation began to grow tense. Then Rommel appeared on the scene. Young:

At this moment a Volkswagen drove up. Out of it jumped a short, stocky but wiry figure, correctly dressed, unlike the rest of us, in jacket and breeches. I noticed that he had a bright blue eye, a firm jaw, and an air of command. One did not need to understand German to realize that he was asking, “What goes on here?” They talked together for a few seconds. Then the officer who spoke English turned to me. “The general rules,” he said sourly, “that if you do not choose to obey the order I have just given you, you cannot be compelled to do so.” I looked at the general and saw, as I thought, the ghost of a smile. At any rate, his intervention seemed to be worth a salute. I cut him one before I stepped back into the ranks to be driven into captivity.

From that one brief, real or imagined glance of shared understanding and respect stemmed the posthumous legend of Erwin Rommel. For in 1950, Young published a book entitled simply Rommel, a fawningly uncritical biography of its subject in 250 breezy pages. Even as he emphasized Rommel’s chivalry, courage, and tactical genius at every turn, Young bent over backward to justify his willingness to serve the epitome of twentieth-century evil. One passage is particularly amusing for the way it anachronistically places Rommel’s avowed support for Hitler into a Cold War, anti-communist context, revealing in the process perhaps more than its author intended.

Like ninety percent of Germans who had no direct contact with Hitler or his movement, he [Rommel] regarded him as an idealist, a patriot with some sound ideas who might pull Germany together and save her from Communism. This may have seemed a naïve estimate; it was no more naïve than that of many people in England who saw him as a ridiculous little man with a silly mustache. Both views were founded in wishful thinking. But the Germans, having had a bellyful of defeat and a good taste of Communism, at least had some excuse for believing what they wished to believe.

Only one component of the full legend of Rommel as it is known today is missing from Young’s hagiography: Rommel, said Young, “had never been a party to the [attempted] killing of Hitler, nor would he have agreed to it.” He had rather been the loyal soldier to the end, right down to his swallowing of the final poison pill.

Rommel became a success out of all keeping with any normal military biography upon its publication in Britain, then an equally big bestseller in the United States upon its publication there one year later. Some historians and thoughtful reviewers pointed out the problematic aspects of Desmond Young’s unabashed hero worship, but their voices were drowned out in the general acclaim for what truly was an entertaining, well-written, even oddly endearing little book. In the end, it sold at least 1 million copies.

Its initial success in Britain was such that Hollywood rushed a movie into production before the book had even made it across the Atlantic. Wanting to get the film out quickly, before the Rommel craze had run its course, 20th Century Fox didn’t have time to stage much in the way of battle scenes; the filmmakers would later admit that a closing battlefield montage of old newsreel footage was inserted in the hope that viewers would leave the theater thinking that “they have seen a lot more action and battle stuff than they actually have.” Rommel was played by stolid leading man James Mason; he and all of the other German characters spoke American English with the flat Midwestern enunciation so typical of the Hollywood of that period.

Although it hewed closely to Desmond Young’s book for the most part, the movie did make one critical alteration: it postulated that Rommel had turned definitively against Hitler late in the war and, after a long internal struggle over whether it was honorable to do so, had joined the assassination plot. This change was made not least because, even in this period of reconciliation and letting bygones be bygones, studio executives were nervous to release a film that made a hero out of a man who had died an unrepentant Nazi. But on the other hand, a repentant Nazi who saw the light, took action against evil, and died for having done so was, as the film’s screenwriter put it, a downright “Shakespearean” protagonist. From now on, then, this generous interpretation too became an integral part of Rommel’s legend.

Desmond Young, who served as an advisor for the film, didn’t seem overly bothered by its departures from what he believed to be the real circumstances surrounding the death of Rommel. In fact, to capitalize on what future generations would have called the marketing synergy between his book and the film, later editions of the former picked up a new subtitle: The Desert Fox.

The film proved a big hit, on much the same terms as the book: widespread popular acclaim, accompanied by the merest undercurrent of concern that a Nazi general might be less than entirely worthy of such full-throated approbation. Among the most strident of the critical voices was the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council:

We regard this film as a cruel distortion of history, an affront to the memory of the brave soldiers of all allied nations, a gratuitous insult to the free peoples who spent their strength and their substance to save a world from engulfment by Nazism. There is only one major villain in this picture: Hitler. The audience is asked to believe that only he was both a buffoon and an evil man; that the soldier Rommel — and other German generals — were military men, without “political” aims or motivations, carrying out orders. The world knows that totalitarianism infects the whole body politic of a nation, that neither fascism nor communism can be sustained except with the active collaboration in its depravity of politicians, diplomats, and generals — especially generals. To depict Rommel as less than such an active collaborator in Nazism is to twist history beyond recognition.

In 1953, the final building block of the legendary Rommel fell into place when the British historian and military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart published a book called The Rommel Papers. Hart was himself a complicated, vaguely pathetic character. At the end of the Second World War, he had been in nearly complete disgrace, having been one of the primary architects of the Allies’ disastrous would-be defense of France against the German invasion of 1940, a classic example of trying to fight the last war — in this case, imagining a repeat of the static trench battles of the First World War — rather than reckoning with the realities of the current one. But in the years that followed, he rehabilitated his reputation by latching onto some of his old writings from the 1920s, when he had been at least occasionally an advocate for a more mobile approach to warfare. Hart befriended many of the surviving German generals — often by visiting them in their prison cells — and bolstered his case via a tacit quid pro quo that would have gone something like this if anyone had dared to speak it aloud: “Say that you developed Blitzkrieg warfare by reading my old texts, and I’ll use my influence to promote the position that you were only a soldier following orders and don’t deserve to die in prison.” Being friendly with Desmond Young, Hart convinced the latter to include another assertion of his influence in his biography of Rommel: Rommel, wrote Young, had before the war “studied the writings of Captain Liddell Hart with more attention than they received from most British senior officers.” This was completely untrue; Rommel probably never even heard of Hart during his lifetime.

Be that as it may, Hart definitely did ingratiate himself with the general’s widow Lucia and his son Manfred after the war was over, and enlisted their aid for his own book about Rommel. The Rommel Papers proved a shaggy, unwieldy beast, combining together the following, presented here in order of historical worthiness: 1) what existed of a memoir which Rommel had been writing during the months of limbo that preceded the demand that he commit suicide; 2) a selection of Rommel’s wartime letters to Lucia; 3) Manfred Rommel’s recollections of the circumstances of his father’s death; and 4) Hart’s own oft-extended footnotes, “clarifying” and embellishing the other texts. Hart wrote of Rommel that “he was a military genius — more so than any other soldier who succeeded in rising to high command in the war.” He then went on to make the cheeky claim — writing of himself in the third person, no less! — that Rommel “could in many respects be termed Liddell Hart’s pupil” in the science of mobile, mechanized warfare. Meanwhile Manfred Rommel, who would go on to a long and fruitful political career, was almost as transparently self-serving in writing that his father had definitively “broken” with Nazism by 1943 and “brought himself, from his knowledge of the Führer’s crimes, to act against him.”

The Rommel Papers was another big success, its sales figures more than sufficient to drown out anyone who voiced concern about its editor’s patent lack of objectivity. The man who had for a time been Hitler’s favorite general was now firmly ensconced as an odd sort of folk hero in the postwar democratic West.

Brave warrior or foolish prima donna? Rommel leads the charge from his half-track.

We’ll return to our examination of how this romantic figure paved the way for the likes of Panzer General momentarily. Before we do that, though, it might be worthwhile to examine the sustainability of this version of Rommel’s life story. We can boil our skepticism down to two questions. Was Rommel really all that as a general? And what is his true moral culpability for the role he played in the Second World War?

The first question is, if not exactly straightforward to answer, at least somewhat less fraught than the second. Rommel’s primary asset, many students of military strategy now agree, was his sheer boldness rather than any genius for the intricate details of war. Throughout his career, he had the reputation of a maverick, born of a willingness to disobey orders when it suited him. And as often as not, his seemingly reckless gambits caught his enemies off-guard and wound up succeeding.

But Rommel certainly had his weaknesses as a battlefield tactician, as even many of his biggest fans will reluctantly acknowledge. The greatest of them was probably his complete disinterest in the logistics of war. Rommel made a regular habit of outrunning his supply chains in North Africa. “The desert,” he said, “is a tactician’s paradise and a quartermaster’s hell” — but he did nothing to make his quartermaster’s job easier. When his army ran out of fuel or bullets, he started by blaming his subordinates, then moved on to blaming the Italian navy, which was in fact delivering more supplies than his army actually required most days, only to watch them pile up on the wharves of the Middle East’s port cities for want of a way to transport them inland to an army that had burrowed too deeply too quickly into the enemy’s territory.

Rommel’s men may have loved him, but his peers in the hierarchy of the Wehrmacht had little use for him for the most part, considering him a glory hound whose high-profile commands were mostly down to his friendship with Joseph Goebbels. They pointed out that his much-vaunted habit of standing with his men on the front lines during battles, pistol in hand like a latter-day Napoleon, made it impossible for him to observe the bigger tactical picture. There was a reason that most other generals of the war stayed in their headquarters tents well back from the front, right next to a junction box of telephone cables — and this reason had nothing to do with personal cowardice, as some Rommel boosters would have you believe.

Len Deighton, a well-known author of military fiction and nonfiction, writes bluntly in Blood, Tears and Folly, his recent revisionist history of World War II, that “Rommel was not one of the war’s great generals,” calling him “more adept at self-publicity than skillful in the conduct of warfare.” He credits much of Rommel’s success in North Africa to the German signals-intelligence service, which tapped into most of the principal Allied communication networks. (To be fair, Rommel’s opponents would be given an even more complete picture of his own plans and movements before the North African war was over, once the Enigma code breakers fully came into their own.)

In the end, then, we can say that Rommel possessed a remarkable ability to inspire his men combined with no small measure of battlefield audacity, but that these strengths were offset by a congenital unwillingness to sweat the details of war and an inability to play well with others as part of a joint military operation. The degree to which his strengths outweighed his weaknesses, or vice versa, must inevitably be in the eye of the beholder. We can say with certainty only that the North African theater, which gave his audacity such a sprawling blank canvas to paint upon and which allowed him nearly absolute authority to do whatever he liked, was the perfect place to make a legend out of him. Fair enough. What of the other, still thornier question of Rommel’s moral culpability?

The linchpin of the absolution which Desmond Young, Liddell Hart, and so many others since them have given Rommel is that he was simply a professional soldier obeying orders as he had sworn to do, all while remaining studiously apolitical. As we’ve already seen, this doesn’t quite jibe with the facts of the case: prior to 1943 at least, Rommel was a personal friend of Goebbels and an enthusiastic follower of Hitler, and plainly stated before the war that he considered it a good soldier’s duty to be political. But let’s accept the premise on its own terms for the moment at least, and see what else we can make of it.

On a strictly legal basis, “I was just following orders” is far from a cut-and-dried defense. Most codes of military justice state explicitly that a soldier is obligated not to follow an order which violates international laws to which his country is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention. When Rommel led an armored division into France in 1940, the Einsatzgruppen traveled behind it. The fact that Rommel may have been made personally uncomfortable by their actions, may have made a conscious or unconscious decision not to witness them, may even have managed to avoid having similar units attached to his army in North Africa, doesn’t absolve him of guilt any more than it does any other German soldier who was a knowing accomplice to atrocity.

But then, legalistic arguments are inadequate if we really want to get to the heart of the matter. Rommel’s actions in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in France, and elsewhere in Europe led directly to the murder of millions of Jews. And had the “war without hate” in North Africa ended in German victory, the ethnic hatred of his Nazi masters would have made its presence felt there too soon enough. I believe that a human being has a higher moral duty that transcends jurisprudence and the military chain of command alike. Surely it ought to be eminently noncontroversial to say that being a party to genocide is categorically wrong. I don’t pretend to know what I would have done in Rommel’s situation, but I do know what would have been the right thing to do. Leading genocidal armies of conquest with the excuse that such is one’s “duty” as a soldier strikes me as moral cowardice rather than its opposite. I hope that we can someday live in a world free of the sort of didactic thinking that is still used far too often to excuse Rommel for doing so.

But you are of course free to make your own judgments on these questions; these are merely my opinions, which I present by way of explaining why I don’t wish to deify Erwin Rommel and why Panzer General’s glorification of his ilk makes me feel so queasy.

The History Channel — also sometimes known as the “all World War II, all the time” channel.

“It is well that war is so terrible,” said Robert E. Lee, famously if apocryphally. “Otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” New Yorker profile writer Larissa MacFarquhar struck a similar note from the opposite direction in a recent interview:

People who are pacifists always talk about how terrible war is because it is so bloody and violent and wasteful. What they’re not getting is that people who like war — or don’t dislike war — admit all that; they know all that. It’s very obvious, but for them it’s worth it because of the stimulation, as they see it, to human greatness.

I cannot hope to solve the puzzle of humanity’s eternal attraction to war despite the suffering and death it brings. I can note, however, that one way to enjoy the good aspects of war without all that pesky suffering and dying is to wage it in the imagination rather than in physical reality. Once the political questions which wars decide have been settled and the casualties have been tallied and mourned, we can fight the conflicts of yore all over again in our imaginations, milking them for all of the drama, heroism, and adventure that may have been obscured in the moment by their other horrifying realities. Desmond Young, Liddell Hart, and their fellow travelers embraced this idea enthusiastically during the middle of the twentieth century, and in doing so founded what amounted to a whole new genre of books: the popular military history.

Many more broad-minded historians came to hate this new class of writers for their willingness to wave away the truly important aspects of history. Military historians, they complained, insisted on viewing war as a sport (American football and cricket were common metaphors) or a game (chess tended to be the point of comparison here), all whilst ignoring their causes and effects on the broader scale of human civilization — not to mention the many pivotal changes in the course of human history that have had nothing to do with wars and battles. Some went so far as to claim that the military historians weren’t writing proper histories at all, but merely escapist entertainments, the equivalent of romance novels for the middle-aged men who consumed them.

Personally, I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly, any more than I generally rush to criticize anyone for his choice of reading materials. It seems to me that military history can be educational and, yes, enjoyable, but one does have to be aware of its limitations. It provides a window into only a single, very specific area of human experience. Its obsessive interest in how wars were fought at a granular level leaves unanswered more important questions about why they were fought and how the world changed in their aftermath.

Nevertheless, military history has been the dominant face of popular history in the West ever since Desmond Young and Liddell Hart wrote about Erwin Rommel. By the 1990s, the “Military History” shelf of the typical bookstore was twice as large as all the rest of its history section put together. Authors like Stephen Ambrose sold millions of books with their vivid depictions of combat on land, in the air, and at sea, even as cable-television stations like The History Channel reran the greatest battles of World War II on an endless loop. Needless to say, the legend of the noble warrior Erwin Rommel featured prominently in all of this. One particularly overwrought television documentary, for example, labeled him “the last knight,” and concluded with these words: “Erwin Rommel, soldier, was laid to rest in the village cemetery of Herrlingen. It planted back into the soil of a disgraced Germany at least one seed of honor and decency for a new flower.” (Perhaps the romance-novel charge does have some merit…)

The first release of Afrika Korps. It’s telling that the game is named after Rommel’s army in North Africa, not the Allied one.

In the same year that The Rommel Papers were published, a correspondent for The Irish Times attended an odd museum exhibition in London that was devoted to Rommel’s exploits. He wrote the following afterward:

One fact was impressed upon me: that there is a strategy of warfare which, for the devotees, has little to do with blood and horror and death. The maps were being scrutinized like precious works. There was the impression that war was an enthralling game, like cricket. Viewing Rommel in this sense, I concluded that I had as much right to make a judgment as a professional footballer at a modern-art exhibition.

If military history approached war as a metaphorical game, then why not turn it into a literal game? After all, what could be better for a military-history buff than to live out the conflicts that had heretofore existed only within the pages of his books and try out alternate strategies? In 1954, Charles S. Roberts published a board game called Tactics through his new Avalon Hill Game Company. The canonical first commercial wargame ever, it depicted warfare in a somewhat abstracted, non-historical context. But six years later, Roberts and his company surfaced again with Gettysburg, the first wargame to engage with an historical conflict. Going forward, not all readers of military history would be wargamers, but all wargamers would be readers of military history.

Avalon Hill released a steady trickle of games over the next few years, most of them depictions of other battles of the American Civil War, the only conflict that even approached the popularity of the Second World War among American military-history readers. But by 1964 sales figures were trending in the wrong direction. Seeking to reverse the slide, Roberts shifted his focus to World War II, designing what would prove to be one of his company’s biggest and most iconic games of all.

As the name would imply, Afrika Korps dealt with the North African theater of the war, giving armchair generals a chance to step into the smartly shined boots of Erwin Rommel: “Now the legend of the Desert Fox is recreated!” trumpeted the box text. The game established several precedents. First, it made the North African front into a perennial favorite with wargamers for the same reasons that it was so popular with military-history authors and their readers: its wide-open terrain and the resulting room for tactical maneuvering, and its supposedly sporting, gentlemanly nature. Second, it taught many who played it that the Germans were simply cooler: they had better technology, better esprit de corps, even better uniforms than the stodgy Allies to offset their generally inferior numbers. And finally, it introduced the wargame cliché of the “Rommel unit”: a unit whose commander is such a superhero that he can break the rules that usually govern the game by sheer force of will. As a whole, notes Joseph Allen Campo in his recent PhD thesis on cultural perceptions of Rommel, “the focus on Rommel and more generally the German side (many wargames feature prominent German military motifs and use German military nomenclature) cater to a genre that customarily finds more interest in playing the underdog, relying on [the player’s] brains rather than overwhelming force, and accepting the challenge of reversing the historical result.”

Coincidentally or not, tabletop wargaming grew in popularity by leaps and bounds after the release of Afrika Korps. At its peak in 1980, the industry sold 2.2 million games.

I hope that the chain of causation and influence which brought us Panzer General thirty years after Afrika Korps is becoming clear by now. I won’t belabor it unduly, given that I’ve already told most of the story in other articles. Suffice to say that in 1979 an avid young tabletop wargamer named Joel Billings decided to found a company to bring his hobby to the personal computers that were just entering the marketplace at that time. That company, which Billings called Strategic Simulations, Incorporated, specialized in digital wargames for much of its existence, and was the very same one which brought Panzer General to store shelves in 1994.

The gallant panzer general gets his orders. (How can you argue with cool uniforms like these?) The game studiously avoids swastikas. In popular culture, the swastika has come to stand for the Gestapo, SS, and other “bad” Nazis, while the older iconography of the Iron Cross or eagle wings stands in for the “clean” Wehrmacht. But the real distinction is, as we’ve seen, less clear-cut than many would like it to be.

Erwin Rommel is never mentioned by name in Panzer General, but his larger-than-life persona of legend is stamped all over it. He is, after all, the personification of the Wehrmacht as wargamers know it — not as barbaric invaders and espousers of a loathsome racist creed which they are all too eager to use to justify genocide, but as clever, audacious, courageous warriors with great fashion sense and all the best kit. Afrika Korps: “You can re-create Field Marshall Rommel’s daring exploits at Bengasi, Tobruk, El Alamein, and points in between!” Panzer General:

Imagine that you are the Panzer General. You are the brightest and best of the new Axis generals in the Second World War. Go from triumph to triumph, invading and seizing the capitals of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and ultimately the United States of America on your way to conquering the whole world!

In terms of the broader culture — the one that doesn’t tend to read a lot of military history or play a lot of wargames — Panzer General was already an anachronism in 1994. In 1960, the American journalist William L. Shirer had published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which over the course of its 1200-plus pages documented in meticulous detail exactly what the Nazi regime had done and how it had done it. Close on that book’s heels, the capture and trial of Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli court consumed the world’s attention much as the Nuremberg trials had a decade and a half previously — only now television brought the proceedings, and the atrocities they documented, to a much more visceral sort of light. In West Germany, the student activism of the hippie era, accompanied by the election of a social-democratic chancellor who was less beholden to the tradition of forgetfulness, finally pushed the country toward a proper reckoning with its past. A spate of unsparing books, films, and even museums about the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi regime appeared in West Germany and elsewhere in the years that followed, fully acknowledging for the first time the complicity of those Germans who weren’t in Hitler’s inner circle. A new understanding became palpable among Germans: that they couldn’t escape from their past by denying guilt and wishing atrocities away; that the only way to ensure that something like the Third Reich never took root again was to examine how they themselves or their parents, living in a nation as civilized as any other in Europe, could have been tempted down such a sickening path.

These developments were as welcome as they were necessary, both for Germans and for all of the other citizens of the world. Yet Panzer General and the cultural milieu that had spawned it remained caught in that strange interregnum of the 1950s, as do most of the wargames of today.

So, having now a reasonable idea of how we got to this place where patriotic Americans bought a game in which they played the role of genocidal foreign conquerors of their country’s capital, it’s up to each of us to decide how we feel about it. What sorts of subject matter are appropriate for a game? Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die. If, as I dearly hope, you would prefer not to play such a game, ask yourself what the difference between Panzer General and that other game really are. For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best.

Or am I hopelessly overthinking it? Is Panzer General just a piece of harmless entertainment that happens to play with a subset of the stuff of history?

It’s a judgment call that’s personal to each of us. For my part, I can play the German side in a conventional wargame easily enough if I need to, although I would prefer to take the Allied side. But Panzer General, with its eagerness to embed me in the role of a German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer, is a bridge too far for me. I would feel more comfortable with it if it made some effort to acknowledge — even via a footnote in the manual! — the horrors of the ideology which it depicts as all stirring music and proudly waving banners.

Before I attempt to say more than that, I’d like to look at another game released the same year as Panzer General, designed by a veteran of the same wargaming culture that spawned SSI. It takes place in a very different historical milieu, but leaves us with some of the same broad questions about the ethical obligations — or lack thereof — that come attached to a game that purports to depict real historical events.

(Sources: the books Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past by Norbert Frei, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys by Jeffrey Herf, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany by Robert G. Moeller, Rommel: The Desert Fox by Desmond Young, The Rommel Papers by B.H. Liddell Hart, In Hitler’s Shadow by Richard J. Evans, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 by Harold Marcuse, Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II by Len Deighton, War Without Hate: The Desert Campaign of 1940-43 by John Bierman and Colin Smith, The Real War (1914-1918) by B.H. Liddell Hart,  Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog by Ewout van der Knaap, and The Complete Wargames Handbook by James F. Dunnigan. But my spirit guide and crib sheet through much of this article was Joseph Campo’s superb 2019 PhD thesis for UC Santa Barbara, “Desert Fox or Hitler Favorite? Myths and Memories of Erwin Rommel: 1941-1970.”)

Comments
95 Responses

- Alberto

November 20, 2020 at 7:02 pm

A very interesting article! Your reflections resonate with me as I found myself unable to play “Codename: Panzers” because the idea of destroying Polish and Soviet cities was too disturbing.

Somehow, however, I do not get the same feelings with Panzer General. Maybe because I played it since I was a very young kid almost unaware of history, maybe because the game is more abstract and one can delude theirselves in thinking to play, like another reader said, a sort of Napoleonic army with XX century technology. The human psyche is complicated.

I do not know if you plan to cover them, but the games by Paradox Interactive might deserve a mention in this topic. Even now there is a discussion on Reddit about why the developers chose to leave the Holocaust and the strategic bombing out of their game “Hearts of Iron”, but included other crimes like Stalin’s Great Purge inside the game mechanics.

- Avian Overlord

November 22, 2020 at 7:00 pm

At least for Paradox, one factor there is that depicting the Nazi regime’s symbolism or atrocities in a game is illegal in a lot of places. The irony of course being that laws meant to avoid the glorification of horrors lead to those same horrors being whitewashed out of the record. But then, that’s pretty much always what censorship results in.

- Gnoman

November 23, 2020 at 5:14 am

Strategic bombing is not left out of the Hearts Of Iron games. It is a mission type that can be assigned to any air unit with sufficient bombing capability. It doesn’t get much highlight not least because the nations with enough industry to do it well can usually steamroller any other nation.

- Avian Overlord

November 24, 2020 at 4:28 am

Terror bombing is however absent. I suspect that’s more because it didn’t work though.

- Alberto

November 24, 2020 at 2:58 pm

Yes, my memory was imprecise: specifically anti-civilian bombing is what Paradox did not implement. The developers prohibit even to mention it in their forums, alongside other war atrocities: s. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/read-this-first-terror-bombing-concentration-camps-swastikas.266180/ (the same notice is repeated for the newer releases of HoI).

- Avian Overlord

November 27, 2020 at 6:17 pm

As for mentioning Paradox, we’re still four years away from EU1. Still, they’ve become enough of a presence recently that I’d expect them to show up on the blog once we hit 2000.

- Jason Dyer

November 20, 2020 at 7:33 pm

I tend to think back to actual wargames (as in, ones done by the military) in such situations. There was a group that figured out best tactics for taking out Nazi U-Boats, and of course, someone had to play as the Nazis. Does that mean the person in that role is actively taking on the morality and goals of the Nazis? No, the opposite: they are helping actively search for ways to defeat them.

If there’s sufficient abstraction, that’s the mode I feel like I’m playing the game in.

Have you played the follow-up, Allied General? It’s basically the same game but with Allied campaigns.

Having said all that, I general prefer just playing Starcraft and neatly evading all the historical stuff altogether.

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 8:23 pm

I have tried Allied General, but didn’t find it super-compelling. I understand from the fans of the series that it’s not that highly regarded. Perhaps the Germans really just *are* more fun to play — if you can construct the appropriate moral vacuum, of course.

Your preference for playing wargames set in worlds of space opera or fantasy does resonate with me. I generally like games that engage with the real world in some way, but I don’t really like to do so in terms of battles and wars and violence. Master of Orion and Master of Magic are just fine for that purpose.

- Anonymous

November 20, 2020 at 9:04 pm

Inspired by your Master of Magic article, I found myself playing the game as a Chaos/Death wizard and found myself thinking along the same lines while the computer was playing its turns. Is it so important to be the Master of all Magic that you have to turn the world into a volcanic wasteland to get there? It seems like the Nature/Life combo has at least some moral authority. Sure, they are mercilessly slaughtering their enemies, but at least the world is a green paradise in the aftermath.

I always felt at least a little bit guilty about playing the later entries in the Civilization series because you can explicitly choose Slavery as a way to run your empire (if only temporarily) and it’s often more effective that trying to rush towards republic or democracy technologies. It’s also a little weird to play Russia as Stalin or China as Mao. I suppose that being able to play Germany as Hitler would have been too much for Sid Meier’s sensibilities?

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 9:51 pm

The portrayals of each nationality in Civilization are hilariously cliched and all too American in their view of the world. At the same time, though, they also have much to do with marketing concerns. At the time of Civilization I’s release, Germany was a big market for computer games, but Russia and China were not (yet). A game which you could play as Hitler would get banned in Germany immediately.

- Alex Smith

November 20, 2020 at 11:25 pm

In fact, according his autobiography, Sid wrestled with the Hitler issue with the first Civ and was torn between using Hitler, using a different leader, or even just dodging the issue by not including the Germans at all. While he says that it was a combination of the strange moral position it would put the player in and the German legal situation, reading between the lines it seems to me that he would have used Hitler if not for the legal issues.

- Matt Wigdahl

November 20, 2020 at 9:07 pm

I suspect one of the reasons the Axis and the Confederacy are more popular “sides” to play in wargames as opposed to the Allies and the Union, respectively, is because they were historically the losers.

It’s far more compelling and satisfying to convert a nation-crushing historical loss to a win than it is to move up the date of your enemy’s historical defeat from May to March. The former flatters you that you’re a better strategist than one of the most infamous figures in history. The latter just means you got the inevitable grind over with a bit more quickly.

- John

November 21, 2020 at 2:05 am

I tend to agree. I know that when I play Crusader Kings, for example, one of my favorite things to do is to conquer all of the British isles as the Scots, the Irish, or especially as the Welsh. Anyone but the English. Still, it’s only one of the reasons a game about Nazis or Confederates might be popular.
It’s worth considering the others too, especially when they’re so troubling.

- Keith Palmer

November 21, 2020 at 3:02 am

So far as “losers to winners” goes, the coverage of this particular wargame had me wondering all of a sudden if there’s any halfway plausible way to game out “the French and British defeat Germany in 1939-40, or at least avert the fall of France” (even leaving aside the tut-tutting about earlier appeasement and letting the Nazi-Soviet Pact be established). That the thought came to me all of a sudden seems to mean it’s not a popular subject for “alternative history” speculation, anyway.

- Avian Overlord

November 22, 2020 at 7:03 pm

There’s a lot of WW2 wargames that let that happen. But it tends not to be focused on for practical reasons. If the French win, then the Soviets and Americans don’t have anything to do, which is a bit boring if you wanted to play as them. So France tends to made weaker than it was historically in order to ensure you get to all the fun stuff like the Battle of Britain, Barbarossa, and D-day.

- Niccolò

November 20, 2020 at 7:56 pm

Panzer General was already an anchromism in 1994

I guess that it should read “anachronism”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 8:17 pm

Thanks!

- Folke

November 20, 2020 at 8:02 pm

I don’t think there’s a moral value in playing or not playing Afrika Korps or a hypothetical Holocaust Tycoon – the virtual Jews don’t exist. There may be reason to suspect the sanity or moral integrity of a person who had access to *only* that, but that’s a different question. Many highly popular games involve spurious crimes and murder for no higher motivation – take GTA, for instance. How immoral can a thing be if it doesn’t seem to hurt the moral sensibilities of the majority of people, and who is to be the judge of that *before* the moral climate has changed?

That said, one would do well to remember that its terribly easy for us to condemn Nazis, having been taught all our lives how evil they are and being surrounded by like-minded people. A German grunt in WWII has no access to Internet to connect to competing values and humanitarians. He has grown up in a world of Nazi indoctrination and has been told that “lesser races” present an existential threat to the German people. Thoughts and actions we would consider virtuous would not be judged so by his peers, but cowardly and traitorous instead. They would get him ostracized at best and killed at worst. Few have the faculties to rise above that, as history shows.

On that vein, I think it would be interesting to have a game that incentivized immoral behaviour. The game would allow moral choices, but would not reward the player for taking them, but punish him instead. It’s easy to be virtuous when there’s no benefit in not doing so.

The scariest thing about Nazis is the “banality of evil” – Nazis were not monsters but humans. Germans had no special qualities that made them special in that regard, no genocide genes or a remarkably xenophobic culture pre-WWI. So the wise thing to do is not to recreate the conditions that have promoted genocides in the past, and not rely on alleged moral superiority as an impervious moral shield against that. Most if not all of history’s genocidal leaders have firmly believed that *they* hold the moral high ground.

- Nate

November 20, 2020 at 8:50 pm

Interesting moral questions. Thanks fir raising them. A bit of a crossover to the Analog Antiquarian side.

Doubled word:
more supplies than than his army

Suggest a comma between:
too deeply too quickly

Suggest word order “fully came”:
code breakers came fully into their own

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 9:44 pm

Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

November 20, 2020 at 9:35 pm

I think actual military historians would grimace at the characterization you paint of it here… although that sort of military history certainly does exist. Bret Devereaux discusses this in this recent blog post (have you seen his blog, by the way? It’s quite interesting :) ); apparently real military historians refer to this sort of thing as “drums and trumpets” history. But, y’know, there is such a thing as military history beyond that…

Also, I have to point out that your hypothetical version of Transport Tycoon sort of exists: Brenda Romero’s Train. Of course, there the whole point of the thing is as something of a social experiment, seeing whether players will keep on trying to win according to the rules once they’ve figured out just what it is they’re doing, rather than as an ordinary fun game where of course the designer intends for you to try to win as normal!

(Also, in homophone spotting: “annunciation” should be “enunciation”)

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 10:00 pm

Thanks!

I did use “popular military history” when I first introduced the idea, but that’s a bit of a mouthful to state over and over. ;) (“Military history” is bad enough.) Certainly a *form* of military history dates all the way back to Thucydides. But that’s not really what I mean here.

- Markus

November 20, 2020 at 9:48 pm

The question of “how much is too much, how far is too far” of course is one of eternal presence in computer gaming in particular, and of course doesn’t end at the Strategy genre. Is it morally or ethically justifiable for a civilized human being to play a FPS where you pull a virtual trigger to blow a virtual avatar’s virtual head off? How would that question be answered for Simulation games? In Aces of the Deep (Sierra/Dynamix) you take the role of a German U-Boat captain, a field of (real) war that too is historically ripe with questions and various answers of soldiers’ knight-like honor vs. Nazi-fueled moral corruptness. The game makes no mention of enemy casualties, the score there is called “tonnage” and not lives lost even when you sink a large troop carrier with thousands of souls. Is that okay? How about a flight simulator that would put you in the pilot’s seat of the Enola Gay delivering a nuclear bomb to Japan? In B-17 Flying Fortress (Microprose) I take virtual command of an allied bomber and its crew. Me being German, this may lead to missions in the game that have me taking off in England to make a run against my actual real life birthplace and home town, where I live, knowing fully well and in great detail the utter devastation and pure carnage, the eradication of lives and livelihood of the civilian population this town (like so many others) suffered during WW2 at the hands of allied bombers. I can see the scars to this day around here, yet I do play such a game. Is that okay? I’m not going to pretend to have a definitive answer to that problem, but I totally agree that this can cause a rather uneasy feeling during gameplay.

In 1983, there was a German game on the C64 called “Imperator”, a simple management simulation type of game set in ancient Rome, the goal of which was to act as an efficient roman emperor. It didn’t take long until someone hacked this into a Nazi-era game titled “Hitler Diktator”, with the gameplay now involving elements such as efficient deportation and killing of Jews. (Not surprisingly, this hack was and still is very much illegal in Germany.) As kids back then, we probably all knew this stuff was not good at all, still the game saw significant underground circulation. And no doubt some of us did in fact play it, if only for its shock value and it being “crass” that way. And of course because it was verboten.

That said, I cannot let your idea of “the conspirators were not objecting to the Holocaust that was going on all around them” stand without comment, this is patently false. It is true that general resistance to Naziism came from various directions with various motivations, not all of which might look agreeable in retrospect. (History can be funny that way…) Just likewise, it is impossible to look into everyone’s head to know what was truly on their mind. But the fact that pretty much most of the conspirators particularly of the July 20th 1944 assassination plot (which is the context that lead to Rommel’s death), just like other resistance networks before and after, were in fact very much objecting and reacting to the inhumanity of the regime, the murders, the deportations, etc., and took this as one major if not the major motivation for their actions, is historically clear and well documented, through surviving witnesses, through their written communcation with each other, through their documented testimony after being arrested. Yes of course they did see the danger of Germany’s destruction in losing the war and tried to prevent that from happening, but this was not their primary reason for attempting to overthrow the regime by killing Hitler, and especially not their sole reason. To state these people were all cool with the Holocaust is, I’m sorry to say, quite frankly, ridiculously revisionist hogwash.

It is indeed still not known how exactly Rommel was involved in that plot, even though the view of him has significantly shifted away from the post-war glorification by further research and analysis during the more recent years and decades, in Germany no less. Most historians seem to agree that the likeliest scenario is he knew of the plot in some way or another. He had close contact to many of the conspirators, and certainly may have been approached by them in search of support since the Nazi propaganda had made him to be the widely known and iconic “hero of El-Alamein”. Ultimately though, he then obviously chose not to participate, but also chose not to reveal or hinder the plan.

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 10:06 pm

It seems you know more about the assassination plot than I do. I defer to your expertise. I’ve excised the paragraph in question; the article can stand perfectly well without it. Thanks!

- Markus

November 21, 2020 at 11:49 am

I don’t know if it’s safe to say I’d know more about it, this isn’t my field of expertise. Though I’ve certainly been subjected to modern German education on the matter as well as to a barrage of German documentaries, which may be somewhat more detailed and diverse than the non-german simplifications that tend to run on the likes of Histery Channel et al. Just as much as there’s a difference in, say, German movies about it versus the general Hollywood fare, which is also something that’s easily lost on people especially when they don’t speak the language (understandably). Beyond the understanding that the Nazis were evil, history in general and WW2 history in particular has the nasty habit of becoming rather complex underneath the surface the more and the longer you look at it.

It’s easy to paint an overly simplified picture of anyone within the resistance, like I said their backgrounds and motivations did differ significantly. This was evident to them as well – even when different networks knew of each other and cooperated, there were points when beyond their mutual agreement that a revolt or assassination was necessary they couldn’t necessarily agree on where to go from there in case they’d succeed. With members of the resistance from within the armed forces, it’s important to keep in mind that as officers they usually came from a very conservative, old aristocracy (remember, nobility has been officially abolished in Germany since 1919, much unlike other parts of the world), predominantly nationalistic walks of life, educated in the interwar political climate after losing WW1 or being WW1 veterans themselves, many of them originally being early Nazi supporters who initially didn’t really see anything wrong with Hitler and his ideas, instead supporting how he was “making Germany great again” so to speak (…cough…). Even granting them the benefit of not knowing history as it has unfolded to us up to now, that’s an issue. They weren’t the knights in shining armor leading a virtuous and rightous life from birth to death that they’re sometimes made out to be. They had a tendency to feel bound to their oath to Hitler with a quite Prussian sense of duty and honor (which of course was the reason why Hitler had this pledge of allegiance made to and about him personally, instead of “country” or “peoples” or “constitution” or whatever), and many of them initially were complicit in carrying out Nazi policy during the war. Even someone as glorified as Stauffenberg was known to express ideas that aren’t pleasant to consider nowadays, such as his belief that there’d be a natural order or inequality for humans, a caste system, a hierarchy (like I said, old nobility); an idea which of course the Nazis embraced in their classification of “subhumans”. But they also usually were brought up as devout Christians, and for many this was something they couldn’t disregard in light of the inhumane Nazi ideology and what that meant in practice. What we now refer to as “crimes against humanity”, which wasn’t quite a term yet back then, usually was the one unifying factor that made most of them realize that it’s necessary to stand up and oppose this evil. And quite a few of them, such as e.g. Henning von Tresckow, were known to express their belief that even if they should fail (and often they did consider their chances of success to be slim), they would still have to make this big statement of opposition to Hitler and to what the Nazis did and stood for, as a mark in history and as a message to the world. And they knew going in they’d possibly be sacrificing their lives in the process.

Back to a game like Panzer General, one aspect to consider is that its year of release is a time when there still were remnants abound of the prevailing myth of a partly “clean war” and a general lack of complicity of regular army (Wehrmacht) as opposed to the ruthless inhumanity of SS or Einsatzgruppen, thanks in no small part due to some old veterans and their tendency to deny guilt and claiming ignorance and “only following orders”, trying to whitewash their legacy in the process (while many others of course did admit guilt and fully came clean about what they saw or participated in). The decades since 1994 have mostly seen this myth getting wiped away (certainly in Germany), partly due to those old veterans slowly but surely dying out, partly due to continuous historical research still uncovering details and secrets previously condidered lost in time. Nowadays it is clear that there was widespread and coordinated cooperation and participation between Wehrmacht/SS/Police/Einsatzgruppen. While Wehrmacht units certainly were primarily tasked with “classic” warfare, advancing and defending the frontline, they were not detached from the big picture genocidal implications and actions against the civilian population and elite/politicians/officials in the hinterland, frequently being hands-on complicit in murders and deportations. The average “grunt in the trenches” may have for some time managed to remain ignorant to all that, but you could not serve as an officer on the Eastern Front without knowing what’s going on and playing your part in it. That was the reason why you were there after all. The war especially in the east was driven first and foremost by Nazi ideology of supremacy and genocide. And yeah, you’re right, it’s probably worthwhile to keep this in mind when playing a Strategy game like this, or any game in such a context.

- Buck

November 20, 2020 at 11:01 pm

Aces of the Deep has a note after installation (because noone reads manuals I guess) that mentions the crimes of the Nazis, which I found notable because I haven’t seen that in any other war game so far in which you could play as Nazi Germany, including Aces over Europe. Also, the sound of sinking ships while you’re under water is very eerie…

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2020 at 8:57 am

That’s great. As I mentioned, a note of that sort somewhere in the Panzer General manual — at least acknowledging the Holocaust amidst all the drums and trumpets — would have gone a long way to make me feel better about the game.

I think back to the first Lord of the Rings game by Interplay. There was a thoughtful footnote in that manual, saying that the traditional depiction of wolves as evil killers was not grounded in reality, and explaining more generally that the world has progressed since Tolkien wrote his novels and that his attitudes toward many subjects should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve often wondered who at Interplay was responsible for inserting that; we don’t tend to see a lot of this sort of nuance in the games of 1980s and 1990s.

- Klaus

November 20, 2020 at 10:02 pm

“Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die.”

Are you aware of Brenda Romero’s boardgame, Train?

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2020 at 10:07 pm

Yes. Was just being a bit cagey. ;)

- Kai

November 20, 2020 at 10:52 pm

Great article. Personally I’m torn about the subject. I guess there are moral lines somewhere that games should not cross, but I would not think Panzer General anywhere near those.

OTOH I am generally baffled by how many games make war or violence their primary focus. As if anything short of digital mass murder is way too boring. One of my favorite genres, the RPG, is hardly an exception to that. And it’s not that I am feeling remorse after slaughtering NPCs for dubious claims of wrongdoing — they are a bunch of pixels after all — but it gets me thinking how these games are often more geared towards destruction than creation, and how they are lacking in nuance and all too quickly resorts to terminal measures in order to resolve conflict.

But even more abstract games give me pause at times, like using nuclear weapons in a match of Civilization. If you really think about the implications, then this should simply be a no go. But from a purely tactical consideration within the game, it may be absolutely the right thing to do.

Where I usually draw the line is when it comes to assuming the role of malevolent or criminal characters. While this can mean a sizable disadvantage in plenty of RPGs, stealing or being nasty for being nasty’s sake is something I would not stoop to in real life, and neither will I within a game.

But lobbing nukes at enemies or mowing down scores of faceless people seems so far fetched from reality that it somehow becomes an acceptable (if perhaps questionable) behavior. So why shouldn’t somebody enjoy a game of Panzer General, too? If it gets them thinking about real world history, I’d consider that a bonus.

- Peter Olausson

November 20, 2020 at 11:10 pm

Thanks for a good article. Looking forward to the next.

One thing though … You write that after the Nuremberg Trials (which coincindentally began on this day 75 years ago), “the Western political establishment seemed to believe the matter was settled”. That is not to say that they believed 24 men were solely responsible. First, the major trial was one of 13, involving well over 100 defendants. Second, denazification took place all over the former Reich, where people were removed from powers and positions they had got as Nazis, Nazi organizations were abolished, and so on. One can ask whether it all was too big to succeed, how well it was run etc, but it certainly was a thing. At least until the Cold War got more important than the old war.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2020 at 9:13 am

This is, to state the obvious, a super complicated subject. It’s true that there was a reasonably concerted program of de-Nazification for at least a few years, but also true that it didn’t look too far below the surface. This article originally delved deeper into these topics, addressing especially the composition of the first West German government under Konrad Adenauer. I’ll paste into this comment a couple of extracts that I cut, just in case this article of almost 9000 words wasn’t enough for anyone. ;)

First, a quote from John Le Carré’s 1991 introduction to his 1968 spy novel A Small Town in Germany. It did almost as much as Panzer General to send me down this rabbit hole.

The West Germany of Konrad Adenauer was not all lovely by any means: old players from the Hitler time were two-a-penny, whether they were such men as Adenauer’s own éminence grise, Herr Globke, who had had a hand in drafting Hitler’s Nuremberg laws discriminating against the Jews, or such luminaries of the Free Democratic Party as Herr Achenbach, who helped organise the deportation of the French Jews from Paris, or the ebullient Herr Zogelmann, who only eighteen years before had been a high-ranking figure in the Hitler Youth. In the West German police, the judiciary, the intelligence fraternity, and the armed services, in industry and science and the teaching professions and, most particularly, in the bureaucracy, old Nazis abounded.

And my own original opening to the article:

The Marshall Plan which the United States implemented after the end of World War II was one of the most noble, far-seeing initiatives in the history of international diplomacy. Comprehensively rejecting the emphasis on petty retribution which had marked the Treaty of Versailles at the close of the previous world war, the United States dedicated itself to turning every one of the devastated countries of Western Europe, regardless of which side it had fought on, into a free, prosperous, autonomous democracy. It dedicated a staggering $12 billion — $130 billion in modern currency — to that end, constituting the largest single foreign-aid program in the history of the world, before or since.

But, like so many noble efforts, the Marshall Plan wasn’t grounded entirely in altruism.

To fill its new role as a bulwark against communism, West Germany would need leaders of authority and gravitas. But here came the rub: men of that description who were also untainted with Nazism were in preciously short supply. Anyone who had spoken out against the Nazi regime whilst remaining in Germany had long since been executed by the Gestapo. Those who had fled, meanwhile, were largely intellectuals and artists, unsuited to step into the shoes of politicians — and many of them were Jewish to boot, no more ready to return to the country that had committed genocide against their people than said country was ready to accept them just months after the ovens of Buchenwald had stopped smoking.

The candidate for supreme leader of the new West Germany which the Americans and their European allies finally pushed forward was no one’s Platonic ideal of an heroic resistance fighter, but he was the best they could do under the circumstances. Konrad Adenauer had been the long-serving liberal mayor of Cologne when Hitler came to power in 1933, whereupon he’d promptly lost his job and gone on to spend the following twelve years in a delicate state of limbo. He’d never joined the Nazi party, but neither had he spoken out loudly against it or attempted to flee his homeland; he’d leveraged a degree of personal respect which Hitler seemed to have for his abilities and previous accomplishments in Cologne to live in quiet seclusion after one or two uncomfortable early stays in prison cells. Similarly, while he had never actively joined the German war effort, neither had he made any effort to aid the Allied cause.

Still, Adenauer was about the least tainted figure on offer. As John Le Carré alluded above, the government which he formed in the new West German capital of Bonn on September 15, 1949, was stocked to the gills with figures whose backgrounds and associations were far more questionable than his own. The fact was, nobody in West Germany, Europe, or the United States evinced much desire to examine these men too closely, in light of the new Soviet enemy.

Finally, it’s worth noting again that the beginning of a real, unflinching examination of the Nazi era by the Germans themselves coincided, not coincidentally I think, with the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor in 1969. Brandt was an example of a genuine resistance figure; he fled to Sweden and wrote about the evils of the regime as a dissident journalist during the war.

- Peter Olausson

November 21, 2020 at 3:36 pm

Thanks! Great bonus content.

- morg

November 21, 2020 at 8:06 pm

Let us also not forget about Operation Paperclip! Plenty of unreconstructed Nazis were snaffled up by the States in the name of developing a technological lead in the Cold War.

- ZUrlocker

December 8, 2020 at 4:00 pm

Operation Paperclip is a fascinating sidebar to this whole discussion. The US actively recruited as many of the prominent German rocket scientists as they could, to strengthen the US weapons programs and to keep them out of Russian hands. For those who want more information, I recommend the book “Operation Paperclip” by Annie Jacobsen reviewed here:
https://www.z-machine-matter.com/2019/04/operation-paperclip.html

- Lexington

November 24, 2020 at 9:51 am

With all due respect Jimmy your whole take on this subject seems to proceed from the (unacknowledged) acceptance of the legitimacy of the concept of collective guilt.

If the standard for avoiding being tarred with the Nazi brush is that you either had to publicly denounce the Nazis –and accept the inevitable and dire consequences- or flee the country that’s setting the bar exceptionally high and holding Germans in the 1930s to a standard the vast majority of people would fail in any given time or place.

I also think that most people in liberal democracies fail to appreciate how constrained the private sphere is under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany for example all public servants, right down to school teachers, were required to be party members. That made the pool of potential talent untainted by association with the Nazis that could be drawn on to rebuild the country after the war extraordinarily shallow. Furthermore the party’s self appointed role as the central “coordinator” of German society meant it intruded to a greater or lesser extent into almost all forms of private association. You couldn’t organize an amateur sports league, a drama society or an auto enthusiasts’ club without being subject to the authority and directives of the relevant party organization (note that much like modern China “party” and “government” are largely two sides of the same coin).

The result is that by 1945 it wasn’t very difficult to tease some sort of association with the Nazi party out of the backgrounds of the vast majority of the population, even if sometimes it was at one or two removes. From there it is a very short logical leap to the conclusion that “German” and “Nazi” are synonymous. Even a relatively cursory review of the historiography of the period that was published in the 1950s and 1960s will make it apparent that this attitude was far more prevalent than the “good German” trope to which you refer in the post. It wasn’t until a generation of historians came of age in the 1980s with no personal recollection of the period (and hence without the baggage that entails) that you begin to see new interpretations start to come to the fore. It was for example in this period some historians began to broach –not without some controversy- the previously verboten topic of the moral implications of the Combined Bomber Offensive.

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2020 at 10:37 am

I’m afraid you’re misreading my intentions — which, yes, may very well be my fault as the writer rather than yours as the reader. I’m not waving a finger and saying, “These people were guilty and deserved to be punished!” I’m rather pointing out the tension between the desire to denazify Germany and the real or perceived need to set West Germany on its feet again quickly to serve as a bulwark against communism. I take your point about totalitarianism, and make no claim that I would have done any better in the moral crucible of the Nazi era than the average German. Pointing out that Konrad Adenauer’s bona fides as an opponent of Nazism weren’t quite as impressive as advertised is orthogonal to making a moral judgment on what he actually did. I would never presume to do the latter. (I am willing to make more direct moral judgments on the actions of Erwin Rommel, but, since he actively sought to enable crimes against humanity by lobbying for the command of Nazi armies in the field, I feel that’s warranted.)

I’m not entirely convinced of your claim that “a relatively cursory review of the historiography of the period that was published in the 1950s and 1960s will make it apparent that this attitude was far more prevalent than the ‘good German’ trope to which you refer in the post.” I’d need to know what sources you’re “reviewing” to make a statement on that. I haven’t explored the serious and/or academic histories that were written during the period in question.

But even if true, serious historiography is not popular culture and politics, which is what I’m dealing with here in an effort to explain how these attitudes got inculcated into the wargame culture which sprang up in the 1950s. I’ve included at the bottom of the article the sources I used to conclude that the “good German” and “clean Wehrmacht” myths — not my terms but established ones in media studies and reception histories — were *quite* pervasive in popular culture and politics during the 1950s, then started to be gradually eroded in the 1960s following Shirer’s book and the publicity over the Adolf Eichmann trial. If you have sources that say otherwise, I’m always willing to reconsider. ;)

- Andrew Pam

November 21, 2020 at 2:06 am

“I’ve told already most of the story in other articles” – slightly odd grammar.

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2020 at 9:36 am

Thanks!

- EG

November 21, 2020 at 3:14 am

Thanks. I agree, it sounded like a game I would not like to play, even if well-made. We have a lot of documentation that German military operations in Eastern Europe were part of the Holocaust mass murders of Jews and other groups of people. It would be a deceptive omission in any tactical-level war game, but unacceptable to include as entertainment. You may want to include it if the purpose is to train a group of U.N. peacekeepers who may encounter similar situations, but not for fun. War games of course being the origin of this whole hobby.

You’re right to be cagey about Romero’s “Train” because the point of the Transport Tycoon thought experiment is to have fun, whereas Romero’s piece is conceptual in line with her concept game about the Irish famine of the mid-1800s. The Romeros now live in the region worst affected by the famine; I take these projects as being motivated by sincere curiosity and not shock value. A possible problem with “Train” being the revelation of the content to the player-character only during the game and not before it, which may be historically questionable.

Now does it become OK if millions of people in a game instead die in a purely fictional situation of your making? Crawford’s reputation probably hinges a lot on that one screen in “Balance of Power”, for identifying that fictional mass death is fun, so we try to do it a lot in games. Introversion’s “Defcon” chooses a more camp or retro approach to remind the player that millions are dying in a nuclear war in the type of 50s language that inspired “Dr Strangelove”, ultimately making no effective moral point I thought. In “Master of Orion” we bomb planets out of existence. There are also strategic historical games like “Hearts of Iron” where the Second World War happens at a level abstracted from individual tactical unit movements. The paradox being that to exclude crimes against humanity at strategic level is close to denial; to include invites people to use your game to recreate the world’s worst crimes, as well as causing you legal problems in a lot of Europe.

- Kevin McHugh

December 5, 2020 at 4:15 pm

“Train” is built around the reveal but it foreshadows it really heavily. The game is played on a piece of broken glass, the rules held in an SS typewriter. It’s all black and white, except for the yellow meeples players have to load into train cars. I’ve read of players knowing immediately exactly what the game was, and I think it’s likely many people opted not to play just looking at it. Players of Train are looking past a whole lot of obvious signs, until the reveal makes it unavoidable.

Re: Defcon, it’s essentially just the film Wargames. Every time I’ve played it, the winner is the player who resists being dragged into the fray. The game doesn’t reward players for killing, but for keeping their populace alive.

- zth

November 21, 2020 at 3:21 am

I think it is simply that many people who care about war, even in the military, do not care about ideology. They are interested in war, because despites all its disgusting qualities it is many other qualities that are fascinating (organisational, technological, societal)

Clausewitz touches on this in On War that war is a continuation of politics, but all his book details the art of war withot involving any moral or political agenda. I mean sure, Clausewitch could have written a 100 page forward on why war is a bad thing but that was not his point.

Similarly wargames are war games, not political, ideological or moral games (I feel there must some distinction made between these 3).Surely some war games are, but most do not care about it. I mean, going back to books, if I put next to each other On War, Anabasis, History of the Pelenoponesian War and Silmarils, morality will be the highest in the last two and especially in Silmarils which is considered a very dry fantasy book.

Some people say it is outstanding that most games are about war and agression. I would not consider that true. Most games are stupid mobile games. More people played with Angry Birds or threes than any of the wargames. Probably the total sales of FIFA and Sims and Mario would cover years of “agressive game” sales even with some hits like GTAV or Skyrim.

Another thing, understanding what happened back then: I don’t find that hard. We had similar things happening after the 2008 crisis, just like it happened after the 1929 crisis and something similar happened to Athen’s during the Peloponnesian War. My country (Hungary) in many ways is a disgusting nightmare, but most people (including myself) vote, don’t start revolutions.

Regarding Rommel’s role, it is easy to look at from hindsight that he was on the wrong side, and though we should not ideolize him, but weigh him in his context and compare him to his peers not to our post war morality. Of course, I don’t know much about Rommel the person, but Rommel the general because like I wrote, I am interested in war, not in ideology.

- Jacen aka Jaina

November 21, 2020 at 3:50 am

Desert Fox of Hitler Favorite? Myths and Memories of Erwin Rommel: 1941-1970.”)

Or. Hey, I read the bibliography for once!

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2020 at 9:37 am

Thanks!

- Laertes

November 21, 2020 at 6:58 am

Great article once again Jimmy! What I find more disturbing, rather than playing a game as a german general in WWII, is the fact that everybody seems to asume assassination as a valid tool in the case of Hitler (or Bin Laden for that matter). Shouldn’t be killing in cold blood and without due process considered a crime too, no matter what abhorrent crimes the assasinated has comitted?

- Jimmy Maher

November 21, 2020 at 9:47 am

I think you can make a strong argument that, when a regime has stamped out all semblance of Enlightenment ethics, extra-legal means such as assassination become the only recourse.

The situation with Osama bin Laden is more complicated. Personally, I think the “War on Terror” that was begun after the September 11 attacks has been disastrous for the United States and for the world. It should have been treated as a law-enforcement matter; Bin Laden and his cronies should never have been dignified with enemy-combatant status. But, once that ship sailed, the only way to deal with Bin Laden was the one that was employed. It was a very difficult situation, what with Bin Laden being sheltered by the alleged American ally Pakistan.

I do think, however, that the show trial and brutal execution of Saddam Hussein was appalling. Not that he wasn’t deserving of his fate, but the last thing Iraq needed at the time was such a kangaroo court. It just reinforced the ethic of might makes right, the winner kills the loser, undermining all of the Americans’ claims that they were different from other conquerors.

- Brent

November 22, 2020 at 3:40 pm

Well said, Jimmy.

- Pingback: » Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Panzer General The Digital Antiquarian | @trenthead

- Larry Farr

November 21, 2020 at 3:41 pm

A great article – thanks. I liked the way the game looked, but I don’t think I could have played it. The first time we took Poland, I’d have had to shut it off. I loved Colonization! I stopped playing it though because wiping out the Indians just did not feel like fun. I love Civ and have no trouble at all taking out all of my opponents. However, I admit, I always play the Americans. I can’t bring myself to wipe them out. I also play MOO2 as customized Humans. Just can’t wipe them out either.
I don’t think it is overthinking it or being too sensitive. If you can play, and it honestly doesn’t bother because it’s a game – then more power to you. Games are meant to be fun – and challenging. I’d rather not struggle with moral issues and get to the fighting! If it means being the Americans or Humans in a game all the time, okay then. (In case anyone wonders, I don’t wipe out worlds in MOO2 – genocide just is not my thing. Plus, I’d rather bring them into my galactice empire as willing and better off subjects – laugh)
Whenever I begin negotiations with other Civs in Civilization, I compliment them on the empire they’ve built, and point out that I’d run it better. Then, I always declare war with the goal of helping them become better off in my empire than they were in theirs. Yes, it is a conceit, but one I can live with. (laugh)

- Adam Sampson

November 21, 2020 at 4:27 pm

Thank you for this article. I first encountered Panzer General on a school language exchange to Germany in the late 90s, so the students I played with had a more thorough understanding of German history (courtesy of the reunification-era school system) than most of its audience – and some had grandparents who’d fought in the war. I don’t think the game was intended as an educational tool but it certainly lead to some interesting conversations at the time…

You’ve mentioned a couple of times that the game studiously avoids Nazi symbology. Since it wouldn’t have been possible to sell it in the German market otherwise, I suppose this might also have been motivated by not wanting to incur the cost of making a special German version of the graphics and videos (as many other games had to in the 90s).

- Mayhaym

November 21, 2020 at 7:56 pm

I remember reading about a PD or shareware game for the Atari ST but IFIRQ it was mentioned in the context of being made by and for the skinhead/neonazi “movement” in the ’90s – never saw the actual game though.

- Lisa H.

November 21, 2020 at 10:03 pm

By the 1980s, the “Military History” shelf of the typical bookstore was twice as large as all the rest of its history section put together. … even as cable-television stations like The History Channel reran the greatest battles of World War II on an endless loop.

Not arguing about the basic content of The History Channel, but it was founded in 1995.

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2020 at 6:41 am

Thanks!

- Not Fenimore

November 22, 2020 at 2:48 am

I think I’m with you on the importance of choice here. Every new edition of Hearts of Iron, my first game is as Germany: partly because it’s a good tutorial country – strong economy, strong (and easily focused) military, simple diplomacy, no naval component to speak of, etc. But those characteristics also make it, well, fun.

But if HOI didnt let you play as the USSR, or US, or France, it would make the entire game feel very different. I’m honestly not sure I’d buy it, in that case. Panzer General definitely seems, at the very least, distasteful (and I cant imagine it being made with the same concept today.)

- Mike Duncan

November 22, 2020 at 4:06 am

I like HOI4, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to play as Germany yet – “evil” roleplay.is not my cup of tea.

The “Waking the Tiger” DLC adds an extensive “Oppose Hitler” set of decisions that leads to all sorts of alternative paths sans Hitler. Given a 1936 start date and a successful coup, one might assume that allows the player to sidestep some of the Holocaust.

But this was added in DLC, and the decision tree does not mention any such nuances. It smells to me the developers wanted to stay a thousand miles away from it.

- Colin

November 22, 2020 at 5:03 am

>Rommel led armies into Poland and then France in the early years of World War II, neither overly distinguishing himself nor embarrassing himself.

Rommel did not lead armies in Poland or France. In Poland, he was in charge of Hitler’s bodyguard unit.

In the French campaign, he commanded the 7th Armored division, which he led with his habitual aggressiveness (His habit of leading from the front goes back to the First World War). The division may or may not have committed atrocities (the sources are contradictory).

This of course, does not negate the fact that he fought for one the most stridently evil regimes in history and really shouldn’t be lionized.

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2020 at 6:49 am

Thanks!

- Kate Lynch

November 22, 2020 at 5:12 am

A fascinating examination of the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth in video gaming. I’ve recently been working my way through Jon Peterson’s “Playing at the World”, a history of the roots of D&D, and he spends a lot of times talking about how the relish with which the wargamers of the 1960s played Nazis, as well as the scorn with which the hippie movement viewed them. One article Peterson cites criticizes wargamers as the “elite of the warmongers”. Peterson disagrees with this sentiment, opining that these wargamers who were happily identifying with Nazis weren’t serious about it. His book was published in 2012. I don’t know, in 2020 I have a different perspective on it. Particularly knowing how many of these same wargamers are on record as fantasy gaming for not being “realistic” enough.

Gygax’s relation to the wargaming community, incidentally, is really interesting. His critique of war is not the hippie critique, but came from his Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. The excerpt of the early ’70s missive he wrote defending himself for recommending a journal critical of the Vietnam War, quoted by Peterson, is an utterly fascinating read.

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2020 at 6:54 am

That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Gygax was critical of the Vietnam War. In the few places where I’ve seen him mention his political beliefs, he states that he’s extremely conservative, a big fan of Ronald Reagan, etc. (I find it, by the way, eternally amusing that Gary Gygax and Prince were both Jehovah’s Witnesses. Whatever else you can say for them, they cast a wide net…)

- Kate Lynch

November 22, 2020 at 2:36 pm

Well, it’s worth quoting from Gygax’s letter to Graustark (published in issue 184) containing his explanation:

“You know, the bible Book of Revelation describes the dual Anglo-American world power as an animal that resembles a two-horned lamb with the mouth of a dragon and calls it a false prophet… the US cloaks its actions in lamb-like motives (that is what are declared to be altruistic reasons for aggressive wars) but you’d better believe that it speaks like a dragon! … Now it’s tha “False Prophet” because it is misleading the nations (like backing the U.N., the “Image of the Wild Beast” and they all derive their power from Satan.)” (Peterson, section 2.2, “War and Its Opponents”)

I don’t think this explanation is, uh, incongruous with his later support of Reagan…

- Brent

November 22, 2020 at 3:48 pm

Holy crap – that man was a lunatic!

Makes me want to see what Dave Arneson’s political views were like…

- Larry Deaton

November 22, 2020 at 12:52 pm

Jimmy,

I played Panzer General many times and thought about this issue you have raised. I applaud you for looking at it deeply and surrounding it with great historical detail.

Here’s another thought that is related to the results of battles and wars. When we play war-games, we tend to think our ourselves as the generals and not as the lieutenants or privates. As the general in a computer wargame, most of us are not overly careful with the lives of the low ranking members of our army. This really hit me when I was playing Civil War General about 25 years ago and the battles would go on and on until casualty rates had become unrealistic.

Currently, if you play Ultimate General Civil War and choose the Gettysburg scenario, you have a Union army that is roughly 100,000 men. ( I am playing this game of an don now.) At the end of the battle, if you were randomly assigned to one of those individuals–either Gen. Meade or just some private–and told whether you had lived or died, it might be one interesting way of thinking about how you handled your army … and how careful you were with their lives through the course of a battle.

- Jake Wildstrom

November 22, 2020 at 4:24 pm

I find myself making interesting comparisons in my mind to the only SSI computerized “classic” (read: grognardy) wargame I’d ever played, Knights of the Desert, which focused on the Africa campaign, and in certain valorizing terms (hell, just the name of the game…). Despite the name and supporting materials, however, KotD presented a pretty impersonalized view of the war itself, as wargames of the time tended to do: each unit was basically a collection of numbers, and you were unlikely to forge an emotional connection to, say, “SAVONA IT INF DIV 210 4 NMOBILE”, or to visualize any particular sort of reprisals against the locals when that unit moved into Benghazi. Panzer General seemed to encourage a much greater sense of identification both with individual participants in the war, and in the historical significance of campaigns, so it does seem like it brings in a greater need for ethical reflection than the more abstract, earlier entries into historical wargaming did.

(Incidentally, KotD was nigh-unplayable unless you were really into military strategy. I never, ever quite figured out how resupply really worked. I got that you needed a line of depots up to each of your front-line units or you suffered terrible consequences, but you were supposed to allocate resupply and reinforcement points among different units and I never figured out how to do that in a way that made sense.)

- Adam

November 22, 2020 at 5:43 pm

It is quite possible to be interested in military history and tactics, and want to have a go at finding the answer to “what if” scenarios, without being sympathetic to the Nazi cause or having no compassion for the many victims of WW2. Why should WW2 games be singled out for this attention? What about games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. You can happily while away the hours in these games slaughtering and ethnically cleansing your way across the globe. No one thinks much of that because the momentous cruelty of earlier times have receded further into history. We do not have the recent cultural memory of those events. I do not mean any disrespect raising these points. I am just trying to say that all of human history has been relentlessly cruel and violent in many ways, and so almost any historical simulation requires a certain degree of moral detachment.

- EG

November 26, 2020 at 9:26 pm

I feel that is Jimmy’s point exactly, that moral detachment is a problem when playing out genocides that happened in living memory, as opposed to say the great migration period or far-future alien races.

- Adam

November 28, 2020 at 6:58 am

I agree, and I would just elaborate on my original comment by saying that in WW2 games it does not appear (to my knowledge) that anyone could get a game published in any country if the subject matter was simulating in any way the actual ethnic-cleaning or genocide element of WW2. Paradox are very clear on this policy in their disclaimers regarding the Hearts of Iron series. It is all based on military and economic simulation, with the rest left up to the imagination. If anyone plays those games and fantasizes about such elements then that would be truly disturbing, but I do not think any publisher out there, past or present, would encourage or condone that. Lastly, it does go back to my point about historical events in the more distant past, because you certainty can “cleanse” provinces of your unwanted religions and ethnic groups in other Paradox games. In fact, committing what amounts to religious and ethnic genocide in those games is positively rewarded by in-game bonuses. Admittedly, you could argue that just reflects the reality of ancient and medieval times, but it shows that we are more willing to overlook these aspects of games set in the more distant past. I read forums for Paradox games and saw references to such things as “ridding the world of the [insert derogatory word for Turks]” or on the other side “wiping out the infidel” etc.). I guess it’s better to live out such fantasies in a harmless game, but in my view these games are arguably more morally ambiguous than most of the WW2 games out there.

- Avian Overlord

November 22, 2020 at 7:24 pm

On the topic of denazification in post WW2 Germany, I actually did a research paper that included the topic in college. One note that particularly struck me was that in German textbooks produced shortly after the war used the word “vernichtung” (roughly “annihilation” in English) to describe both the death camps of the Holocaust and the allied bombing campaign against Germany. I’ve also seen on multiple occasions people using the idea that Germany owned up to everything it did and completely de-nazified to attack Japan’s supposed revanchism only to have a bunch of actual Germans show up and tell them “Yeah, no.”

On the other hand… it worked, didn’t it? Germany hasn’t relapsed into genocidal violence and gets along with the countries it once tried to conquer. Contrast with 2003 Iraq, where we tried to do a much more through purge of the Baathists and the sheer mess that created.

- Gnoman

November 23, 2020 at 5:40 am

There’s a factor in the popularity of WWII Germany being so popular in wargaming circles that isn’t mentioned, but is pretty big.

There is a widespread belief that the Nazi regime had super-advanced (for the time) technology and almost unstoppable superweapons – popular myth has it that the invincible panzer divisions were only stopped by overwhelming numbers (one common thing you’ll see if you dig into these circles is “One German tank was as good as four American ones, which is why the Americans always sent 5”) and incredible sacrifice. The recent film Fury is a good example of this.

The fact that Nazi gear wasn’t actually that good – the Allies could match almost every war machine the Germans built and had better logistics – is less well known, largely because the things the German stuff was good at tend to reflect well in games and the stuff the Allies were good at isn’t. Meanwhile, the “firsts” that the Reich achieved – jet aircraft, long range rockets, guided weapons, etc- were mostly things that were being experimented on by most of the major powers at the time. The primary reason that Germany got them first was that they were losing badly and got desperate, while everyone else had placed a lower priority.

There’s also a belief that the Nazis were inhumanly efficient and ran their empire with machine-like precision. The Star Trek TOS episode “Patterns of Force” shows this idea quite clearly. We know now (and had every opportunity to know earlier) that the government of the Third Reich was quite possibly the least efficient society in human history, and just put a good face to the world via their incredible secrecy.

Finally, the Nazis were very big on appearance and spectacle. They took this to the point that their uniforms looked extremely good on parade, but were absolutely horrid in the field.

Much of this is believed for a very reasonable reason – WWII is played up in our minds as The One Good War, and the notion of the armies of the world coming together to stand as one against an invincible enemy and just barely defeat it resonates strongly. Meanwhile, the image (much closer to truth) that it was closer to putting down a rabid dog that took a lot of people with it is less satisfying.

However, this also has the disturbing factor that the guys with the best weapons and shiniest uniforms look really, really cool. Meanwhile, anybody that gets a thrill out of playing the Bad Guy will absolutely love the thrill that comes from playing the Biggest Baddest Guy Ever.

- Ross

November 24, 2020 at 3:07 am

Yeah, while people are quick to reject Nazi propaganda about, y’know, fascism and genocide and racism being good, they’re oddly slow to notice that all that stuff about them being hyper-efficient and scientifically advanced was ALSO PROPAGANDA.

In reality, their industry and science suffered pretty badly from the whole “If you didn’t want to get yourself shot, you had to let politics trump observable reality” thing.

A big problem with Nazi science is that if you were immoral enough to do unethical experiments for the empowerment of an evil regime, you were probably also immoral enough to cook the books and falsify experimental data.

- Avian Overlord

November 24, 2020 at 4:35 am

That Nazi Germany ever had this reputation when you look at what the other side’s superweapon was deeply amuses me.

- Dango

November 26, 2020 at 1:05 am

The truth makes for kind of a depressing narrative.

How did this one, relatively small country (with help from a few other, smaller countries) take over most of Europe in such a short amount of time?

Did they have some super-advanced military equipment that made their armies invincible? No, like you said, fascism does not produce good technology, not even for warfare.

Did they use brutal efficiency to squeeze every drop out of their economy, for war? No, they wasted a lot of resources, and had constant supply problems.

Did they have brilliant generals with incredible strategies? That’s the narrative pushed by games like Panzer General, and a lot of pop fiction. But no. Some of their generals were good, some were bad, but overall they were… human.

The truth is more that the allies were *incompetent*, at least at the start of the war. France put all its resources into a single, static line of defense which didn’t even cover the whole border. The USSR executed most of its experienced officers for political reasons. The US and UK barely had an army at all, instead focusing on strategic bombing which mostly didn’t work, and was arguably a war crime in itself.

It makes for a much better story if you just tell people that our soldiers were heroes who overcame the mightiest army of all time, and don’t dwell too much on the details.

- Gnoman

November 26, 2020 at 4:07 am

All of that “allied incompetence” is based on myth.

France didn’t spend all its resources on the Maginot Line, and the Maginot Line wasn’t nearly the boondoggle people like to claim it is. France had a large and advanced army, and the primary weakness of the Line was not lack of coverage – it encompassed the entire Franco-German border. The weakness was that it didn’t cover the Franco-Belgian border, because the Belgians were an Allied power with massively powerful fortifications of their own.

What gave the Germans the chance to outflank the French Army in the first place was the sudden and unexpected fall of the Belgian forts – which was made possible by an airborne assault that landed troops behind the forts and attacked from the rear. This assault was probably one of the most recklessly stupid operations in history – a single fighter would have wreaked a slaughter unmatched in the annals of warfare, but the Germans got lucky.

The French did poorly after the Germans broke through in an unexpected place, but this is hardly uncommon for a flanked foe. More importantly, the experience of WWI made French leadership extremely wary of taking heavy casualties.

The UK had a fairly good army in 1940, most of which was involved heavily in the fighting in France. Most of the men were able to evacuate at Dunkirk (while the valiant French forces held the line in a mostly forgotten last stand), but had to leave most of their equipment behind. This, coupled with a severe fear of invasion, meant that they had to spend months rearming, which is also the reason they kept so many obsolete weapons in service for so long – they were already tooled up to make them in quantity, while the replacements needed a production shutdown for retooling. Once they had security at home, the African theater was top priority, and required an enormous expenditure of resources.

The US didn’t even enter the war properly until 1942 (most of December 1941 was dealing with the “WE ARE NOW AT WAR” readjustment, and did not take long to build up – not least because Lend Lease had already been running for six months providing all manner of munitions, vehicles, supplies, weapons, and all the essentials of war. They had merely to raise the men and send them over to. Strategic bombing was not a “instead of” proposition, it was a “throw everything but the kitchen sink at the enemy” one, and they believed it to be a very effective method of war. The “mostly didn’t work” notion is a significantly postwar one, and is not universally accepted.

The purge of officers in the USSR happened, but it was for incompetence as often as pure politics. The bigger problem on 22 June 1941 is that the Soviets were in the process of wholesale reorganization of their army – which would have crushed BARBAROSSA had it been completed.

- EG

November 26, 2020 at 9:51 pm

Germany was a large country that then included both Austria and East Prussia. The other powers in Central Europe were USSR and Italy, who actively supported Germany’s invasions and themselves followed to partition the region among themselves. It’s not clear how anyone else could have stopped that. Belgium and France are explained above. The other Western European invasions were of neutral states. Overall, it is not hard to see how these invasions were conducted successfully given the large manpower and military budget of Germany.

- David Thielen

November 23, 2020 at 3:56 pm

I also like playing Panzer General. But I could never bring myself to play the Germans in it, for the same reasons you listed. So I got joy in playing to defeat the evil side.

- Tommy M. McGuire

November 23, 2020 at 6:04 pm

“Could the “good Germans” really not have seen the trains lumbering through their villages with their emaciated human cargoes? Could they really not have smelled the stench of death which rose over the concentration camps day after day?”

A story: Once upon a time I took an (unrelated) philosophy course from a professor named Norman Martin. At one point, he told us that he had been with the US military units that liberated one of the concentration camps (This was a course on the philosophy of mind and I don’t remember where he was going with the story. Also, he was an army clerk or something.) and spoke with people from the nearby town. His first question was, “Isn’t the smell getting to you?” to which the locals replied, “What smell?” They had gone nose-blind to it.

Now, certainly, there is a whole heapin’ helpin’ of wilfulness to the ignorance, but I suspect that people, like lobsters, will cook before they notice the water is getting hot.

On the other hand, I recently saw a documentary on the treatment of “mental defectives” by the Nazis—they killed them, of course, but they did so semi-secretly, in hospitals where they were allegedly being treated, because the victims had relationships with people outside the targeted group, and those people would have raised a fuss. As well, according to the documentary, the people around the hospitals knew what was going on and pointed investigators to them after the destruction of the Nazi government.

Anyway, thank you for considering the question; that is important even if no satisfactory general answer can be found that satisfies more than one individual. (And even if exactly no group of people has any especially clean history.) But here is another question, regarding science fiction and fantasy games: Does the *lack* of a moral context for your virtual rain of flaming destruction there raise any ethical issues?

- Dango

November 25, 2020 at 5:22 am

I think you’ve missed an earlier, more important source of WW2 myths, especially regarding Panzer General. Most of the battles in that game aren’t in the North African front where Rommel fought, they’re in the eastern front. The main German general there was Erich Von Manstein, a man who has been turned into a legend just as much, if not more so, than Rommel. And the main source of those legends was… Manstein himself.

He was sentenced for war crimes, and could have easily spent the rest of his life in prison. Instead, he spent only 4 years in prison before getting a plumb assignment as a military advisor, and wrote a very famous book where he basically blamed everything bad about the war (both the atrocities, and the military defeat) on Hitler personally. A lie, but a very convenient lie, at least for the new western leaders.

He was able to convince both the new West German government and the US that he was a military genius who had the super-strategies that had almost defeated the USSR, and that he could do so again in the new cold war if they would just let him out of prison and make him a general again. There wasn’t anyone who could contradict him- other German officers had the same motivation, and the USSR wasn’t exactly sharing intel with the US at that time. The US was also highly motivated to make West Germany a military ally, so his story was very convenient for them. And frankly, the combat of WW2, especially the eastern front, was just so vast and complex that it’s hard for any non-professional to understand what actually happened there (I certainly can’t). There’s also the language barrier, for most Americans.

I think it’s only in the post-USSR era that regular people can start to get a proper understanding of what happened there. We finally have a second side to get primary sources from- the Soviets. We’re no longer facing an immediate crisis, so we can get some proper perspective, and we’ve had 70 years for historians and generals to pour over the maps and crunch the numbers. I think most would agree that the Germans never really had a chance to win, they just had a head start in modernizing their military, but it was over once the Allies built up their own armies. But that doesn’t make for a fun game. Panzer General actually does it reasonably well, it’s still at least slightly grounded in reality, and the whole thing is so abstract with hexes and numbers that it’s about as tasteful as any WW2 strategy game can be.

- Gideon Marcus

November 25, 2020 at 6:36 pm

What an excellent article! As a Jew, I have the same problems playing the Germans, though I still do it because the games are fun. The tragedy of Panzer General is that it is by far the best in the series, ergonomically. So while I would prefer, thematically, to play Allied General, I can’t because it’s not a good enough game.

- David Hughes

November 26, 2020 at 6:51 am

Are you aware of ‘The Myth of the Eastern Front’ by Smelser and Davies? It sets out a quite convincing explanation of the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht in American culture, with a particular focus on gaming. Your article stands as a useful deep dive companion piece, while also staring into the moral issues which the professors broadly ignore. Thanks, it is an enjoyable and thought proving read.

- Jimmy Maher

November 26, 2020 at 7:22 am

I haven’t seen it, no, but will check it out.

- Michael Arrighi

November 26, 2020 at 6:05 pm

Enjoyed your post that is thoughtful and informative. I’ve been playing wargames since my father purchased a copy of Avalon Hill’s Luftwaffe; he was in the Army Air Force, by the way. While I have played and continue to play many board and computer European Theatre WW2 strategic games, another aspect to consider is the German objectives. To prompt the Germans to attack, Poland, France, the Soviet Union, among others, is to capture the territory for production points. A mechanic built into the games to prompt the Germans to attack. The production points are beyond what was historically obtained or even possible. Te real reason is ignored and would be an issue to incorporate into a game.

Perhaps, the majority all board game titles based in the European theater of WW2, at least into the early to mid-80s. Avalon Hill’s Up Front was first published in the early 1980s and features a German SS troop on the box cover and the graphic artist, Roger MacGown has written about how this cover came about when he was trying to depict a cover with an Allied perspective.

- Christina Kahrl

November 26, 2020 at 7:51 pm

A fine essay on a provocative but unavoidable topic in relation to the Second World War. I would merely note in response to some of the comments here a reminder that the majority of German adults were thoroughly acquainted with a world before Nazism, that a majority had voted for parties other than the Nazis, and that they had access to news from sources outside the party before 1933, just 6.5 years before the invasion of Poland.

Those facts do not lend themselves to the identification of any or forgiveness of “good Germans,” as their assent despite those experiences, to the regime and its crimes at every point, made even more horrors possible. As early as 1939, the criminal massacres in Poland perpetrated by the Wehrmacht, well covered in the recent book “First to Fight: Poland 1939” by Roger Moorhouse, reignited in some few in uniform a sense that resistance was the only choice — but far too few to rehabilitate the Wehrmacht in particular. The massacres continued in France and the Low Countries in 1940 — of civilians, of African soldiers fighting for France and their officers, and more besides.

Anyway, again, an excellent essay, Mr. Maher, thank you for writing it.

- Dunno

November 27, 2020 at 7:34 pm

One fact that rarely gets mentioned is that anti semitism was not limited to Germany in the 30s, even the collaborationist regime of Petain deported Jews (and France also had the Dreyfus case earlier). Jews did try to emigrate from Germany, but no one would have them. And the first plan of the Nazis was actually to deport the Jews to Madagascar, the holocaust was the “final” solution.

Regarding Nazi competence I recall them being pioneers in combined arms warfare, first conceptualized by Liddell Hart but not actually implemented by the British if I recall correctly. Given their underdog status they may have been more open to new ideas than the allies. This game does capture that aspect well in my view (although I haven’t played it through), whereas in my opinion Allied General should have had more WW1 like mechanics to be a more realistic simulation (as for example the Soviets in the winter war).

It also seems interesting that Japanese games are generally more linear like the inspiration for this game, I seem to recall the Warsong series being an inspiration for Fantasy General too.

- Gnoman

November 29, 2020 at 5:03 pm

One of the biggest reasons that Germany had so many Jews in the first place was that Germany was a major destination for Jews fleeing persecution in other countries. This is because Germany was considered the least anti-semetic country in the world in the early part of the 20th Century (US and Britain were in the #2 and #3 slots) and thus a good place to go.

Historians continue to debate (and probably will continue to debate) how much of the Nazi hatred for Jews was deliberate and how much was carefully manufactured because Germany’s Jewish population was the perfect size (large enough to be easily visible, too small to resist) and composition (plenty stuck to their own cultural ways instead of assimilating, so they stood out) to provide a spectacularly good scapegoat.

In a tactical sense, the Germans being “pioneers in combined arms” has some merit, but it is greatly overplayed. Functionally, the tactics that sent the panzer divisions racing across Europe were a development of French tactics (then called “infiltration”) from the last war, as well as the German Sturmtruppen from the same period.

Where Germany did have some edge is that they were directly involved (via the Kondor Legion) in the Spanish Civil War, where most of the Western countries stayed largely neutral. This gave them a superb tactical laboratory to see what worked and what didn’t. The Soviets used the Winter War in the same way – they put some SCW lessons to the test and then refined them.

The conquest of Poland showcased the German methods to the world, helped by an extremely weak opponent (albeit one that put up a very solid fight – the “lancers charging panzers” thing is a myth), and everyone immediately began applying the lessons. Some countries took significantly wrong lessons. The United States, for example, came away with the notion that armor was completely unstoppable and could punch through the lines at will, so they spent enormous amounts of resources on fast lightly-armored vehicles that could bring AT weaponry to counter and contain the inevitable breakthroughs. In practice, armor proved much more stoppable than they thought.

- Dunno

December 3, 2020 at 12:13 pm

With combined arms I meant not ony tank-infantry but also paratroopers (used successfully for example in Norway and Crete) and Stuka bombers. Given that they had inferior number of tanks they may have felt the need to innovate. Ironically the Luftwaffe can trace its origin to the secret military co-operation between Germany and the USSR in the 1920s.

Hitler was not German but Austrian, and spent his formative years in multicultural Vienna. But I agree that the Nazi government takeover was probably largely engineered through violence against communists.

I still maintain Japanese games are more linear in general, as far as I know only Koei makes grand strategy kind of games (however still mostly with strong rpg elements).

- Olof Kindgren

November 27, 2020 at 8:53 pm

As a kid I was very into WW2, reading books, building airplane models and so on. As was my father and he had tons of WW2 comics from the 60s. After a while I noticed a pattern. All the Axis powers were evil, but the Germans had a sense of pride (like, your father spared my father’s life. I will honor him by letting you go). The Italians were always portrayed as cowards who fled when their friends were in danger. And the Japanese were merciless killer robots.

This has always disturbed me. Assuming these were written primarily for an American and/or a western European audience I think it’s a prime example on how uncomfortable it was to speak badly of a nation that was so close to us but how easy it was to show someone living further away as a ruthless savage.

With Japan increasingly entering the western popular culture since the 80s I think it would be impossible to do the same thing today and something more alien to us will have to serve as the evil ones instead.

Tje older I get, the harder I find it to play any kind of war game. I would still kill to fly a Spitfire some day though :)

- Leo Vellés

December 23, 2020 at 9:10 pm

That’s why the evil ones now are the muslims

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- zardoz

December 3, 2020 at 12:02 am

> One passage is particularly amusing for the way it anachronistically places Rommel’s avowed support for Hitler into a Cold War, anti-communist context, revealing in the process perhaps more than its author intended.

That passage isn’t an anachronism. Hitler came to power partly because people feared communism, and people felt that the Weimar government was too weak to resist it. Of course, being Hitler, he considered Communism to be a Jewish conspiracy and tied it into the overall Nazi narrative.

That’s one reason why people were so shocked by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was an alliance of two states whose totalitarian governments spent a lot of time publicly talking about how much they hated each other.

With regard to de-Nazification: as another commenter said, the Nazi party extended its tentacles into every part of society. It would have been basically impossible to create a new government with only people who had never interacted with the party.

We also know that such an approach would probably not have worked, since we tried it in Iraq in the early 2000s. The Bush-era decision to exclude absolutely everyone who had been a member of the Baathist party from the government of Iraq was a big mistake and one of the factors that led to the current chaos there.

- Dan

December 4, 2020 at 9:09 pm

Personally, I don’t understand this “moral” approach to gaming anymore than I’d understand a “moral” approach to comedy. It’s either entertaining or it isn’t. I doubt there’s a single gamer who hasn’t murdered the representation of a human on screen at some stage and there’s no soul-searching or collapse of civilisation ensues. I’m pretty sure there’s an ancient resource management game where you maintain a concentration camp, but is it any more questionable to play such a game to “win” than, for example, to starve your Little Computer Person or kill the avatar of an actual real person in LAN Quake?
I’d always have to defer to the simple fact that these are pixels, not reality. To ascribe morality to any interaction with a game is like prosecuting a thought crime.

- Kevin Butler

December 9, 2020 at 6:17 pm

“vision of an heroic” on the caption of the Desert Fox book should be “vision of a heroic”

- Jimmy Maher

December 9, 2020 at 7:22 pm

A lot of those “H” words can actually go either way in English. In speech, I tend to say “an heroic” rather “a heroic,” so that’s the way I write it. But either is acceptable.

- Kevin Butler

December 15, 2020 at 7:22 pm

Let’s leave the European Theater of Operations (ETO) and head to the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO). The PTO also featured many no-holds barred battles that were on par with the Eastern Front. I’ll go with one game that I did play a lot and that was Sid Meier’s Silent Service 2 (Silent Service was OK but 2 was much better). The goal was simple, you played an American submarine commander during WWII and your goal was to sink as much tonnage as possible to get the highest score. Again, an abstract concept that only focuses on unrestricted submarine warfare though not forbidden by the Geneva Convention but by the London Naval Treaty of 1930. It also only applied to unarmed merchantmen which most countries did not use…per se. Within hours of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, the order was sent down for unrestricted submarine warfare against all Japanese shipping. Overall, the U.S. (and to a lesser extent its allies) sank almost 2800 vessels (of which over 2100 were Japanese merchant vessels amounting to almost eight million tons). Estimated death tolls to are thought to be around 100 thousand Japanese due to many of these sinkings occurring to troopships fully loaded.

Now, we have a WW II submarine simulator where we can adjust from historically accurate (lousy torpedoes, minimal damage, fog of war, aggressive enemy) to what I would call “god-mode” where everything works out great and you have less than aggressive enemies. The goal, of course, is to get the most tonnage during a war career. They even motivate you by presenting you with the historical hall of fame with the likes of Richard “Dick” O’Kane, Dudley “Mush” Morton, Richard and Sam Dealey with “legendary” submarines like the Tang, Wahoo, and Harder and their total tonnage sunk. To even further motivate you, if you score a certain amount of ships and/or tonnage during a patrol, you can get awards ranging from Letters of Commendation all the way to the Navy Cross. The goal, of course, is always to sink ships.

To tie this into the theme of this article, it seems a lot of emphasis has been placed on wargames that deal with the ETO as to morality, who did what or who didn’t do what, and the historic population as a whole. This doesn’t, though, seem to be the case (or from what I can really see) for the PTO. Is this because of the fact it was more of a naval war versus a land war. It can be argued that the Japanese genocide of the Chinese was on equal footing of anything that the Germans (and also the Soviets) were doing. You also factor in the fact the Japanese didn’t sign the Geneva Convention and their use of Samurai code made it a total disgrace to surrender and that meant you were subhuman (whether you were Japanese or not) and therefore the rules of humanity didn’t apply to you.

Silent Service 2 was given high marks for its realism and also for its graphics and sound. The praises were being sung of how Microprose had truly created a game that got the look and feel of an American submarine during WWII. Yet it seems, from what I have read, there was no controversy or ill-will to this game’s premise. Is this because we reduced things down to an abstract “sink the ship” and not have to deal with the consequences of said sinking (people in the water needing help, POW’s caught in an unmarked ship, e.g.). This article really makes on wonder whether they really want to go down the rabbit hole or not. It seems to also create a lot more questions than answers depending on your viewpoint and what you ultimate intent is.

- Leo Vellés

December 19, 2020 at 3:48 pm

Wow, not only a superb article, but a thought provoking one. I love when you take an alternante path to write about a game, and the real history based ones are my favourites. Kudos to you, Jimmy

- Jeff Nyman

January 10, 2021 at 6:30 pm

So, on the one hand, I really like this article. It tackles an interesting subject. On the other hand, I find myself a little turned off by some aspects. And I only bring that up because I feel like you risk losing an audience you would most want to convince with an article like this if you don’t moderate how you present your views.

But maybe I’m entirely wrong here. Let me give my take to go along with some of the excellent comments others have made.

“…a game in which they played the role of genocidal foreign conquerors of their country’s capital, it’s up to each of us to decide how we feel about it.”

I think that perhaps this article misses one of the core points of exploration of these kinds of games: the alternative what-if scenario. It’s long been a staple of the legacy of the second world war to wonder — what if Germany won? What if the situation had gone differently? Could it have differently? If so, how?

Now, I’m not saying the creators of “Panzer General” were framing it that way. But people, like myself, could very much have been playing it that way. And this does not necessarily require painting us as “people whose tolerance for moral ambiguity allows them to enjoy Panzer General.” That smacks of an elitist stance and certainly not one that I believe a historian should necessarily use.

So the article asks us: “What sorts of subject matter are appropriate for a game?”

It’s a good question. But I think you have to separate “playing a game to be a Nazi who takes over the world” from “playing a game to see if it was possible for Nazis to take over the world.”

There is a huge spectrum of difference in mindset between those two aspects. This article, although it tries to balance both sides, I feel a bit too clearly wears its heart on its sleeve, and thus loses the objectivity that it pretends like it’s maintaining. Then again, perhaps I’m perceiving it wrong.

The article then asks us to consider something: “Ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die.”

That’s a great question. Now, before people rush to answer that, ask how many people enjoy games where you routinely kill lots of innocent people, like “Grand Theft Auto.” In one of the games, you literally play a psychopath who enjoys killing people. So: how do people feel about that? Or maybe we should consider “Prototype”, where you quite literally have to kill innocent people in order to heal. In “Tropico” you basically have to kill the people who oppose El Presidente, essentially asking you to prop up a dictator who wants to establish a totalitarian regime. While it’s fictional in nature, it certainly has parallels in our own history.

Or ask how many people like the game “Plague Inc” which is described as such: “The player creates and evolves a pathogen in an effort to annihilate the human population with a deadly plague.”

Should we put our moral stance high-ground on display and suggest anyone who plays this game clearly has “tolerance moral ambiguity” for pandemics? Or a tolerance for dictators if they enjoy “Tropico”? Or should we recognize that as a somewhat unviable stance and try to look at little deeper?

So to answer: “Or am I hopelessly overthinking it?”

I don’t think so, no, and you do raise many good points, but most of them have to do with history and how it becomes retrofitted. The intersection of that with games is a bit lacking in this article, I believe, because you link that argument with “moral ambiguity” but that would require a much broader analysis of violence in games in general.

On the specific topic, this is a good and interesting point:

“if [Panzer General] made some effort to acknowledge — even via a footnote in the manual! — the horrors of the ideology which it depicts as all stirring music and proudly waving banners.”

This is a valid thing to talk about, I believe. For example, the need for this in a game like “Panzer General” is perhaps more than that for “Grand Theft Auto” given that the former is obviously situated in an historical context. But, then again, if someone playing the game of Panzer General truly has to be told that the ideology of Nazism is bad — well, either they won’t believe it because they don’t believe Nazism is bad or they are staggeringly uninformed individual.

So in this case are we perhaps saying the game should have included information about Rommel? Or at least indicated that there are conflicting and diverging views about him? But is that onus on the game makers? Is it only an onus on them if they are dealing with Germany from World War II? So what you say about “the ethical obligations — or lack thereof — that come attached to a game that purports to depict real historical events” is, I think, an interesting point.

I think it’s an interesting point that has to be made without seeming to come to conclusions before you get to asking that question, however. And it’s one we then have to ask when it comes to other media, such as movies and books. Or is the assumption that gamers somehow need this warning more than people consuming non-games?

In any event, thank you for writing this. It is thought-provoking and made me engage with the content. Looking forward to reading the second article on this topic.

- PepaDrobny

March 23, 2021 at 7:08 pm

Panzer General is game which was not overcame up to nowadays.

Among a lot of things that I did in making new stuuf and mods for this game was Allied General interface (AGPG). Panzer General engine remained, but now it is playable also as Allied side including Allied campaigns.

Biggest project is Pacific Panzer General – Panzer General with campaigns from Pacific for both Axis and Allied side:
http://hartmann.valka.cz/panzergeneral/pacpg/

Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 2: Colonization
December 4, 2020

Just what do you do next after you’ve created an epic, career-defining masterpiece? That was the question facing Sid Meier after the release of Civilization in the waning days of 1991, after the gushing reviews and the impressive sales figures had begun pouring in to his employer MicroProse. How could he go back to making games that were merely about something when he had already made the game of everything? “Civilization was such a big game that it’s hard to find a topic that doesn’t feel as if you were going backwards,” he admitted in an interview in the summer of 1992. Anything he did next seemed destined to be an anticlimax.

Meier’s first decision about his future was an eminently sensible one: he would take a break. Asked what he was currently working on during that same interview, his reply was blunt: “Absolutely nothing! I’m going to take it easy for a while.” And truly, if anyone in the games industry deserved a timeout, it was him. Meier had maintained an insane pace for the last decade, acting as both lead designer and lead programmer on no less than 21 commercially released games, three of them — Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and of course Civilization — universally lauded icons whose influence has remained pervasive to this day. Indeed, those three games alone, released within five years of one another, constitute as extraordinary a creative outpouring as the field of gaming has ever known. But now, Meier was finally feeling burnt out, even as his marriage was ending — at least partially the result, no doubt, of all those years spent burning the candle at both ends. He desperately needed to catch his breath.

The Sid Meier who returned to the job months later had a new attitude toward his work. He wouldn’t try to somehow top Civilization in terms of scale and scope, but would rather use the fame and money it had brought him to work on whatever most interested him personally at any given time, whilst maintaining a much more sustainable work-life balance. Sometimes these projects would strike others — not least among them MicroProse’s management team — as almost perversely esoteric.

Never was this more the case than with his very first post-Civilization endeavor, as dramatic a departure from the expected as any game designer has ever dared to make. In fact, C.P.U. Bach wasn’t actually a game at all.

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach had long been enormously important to Meier, as he wrote in his recent memoir:

The sense I get when I listen to his work is that he’s not telling me his story, but humanity’s story. He’s sharing the joys and sorrows of his life in a more universal sense, a language that doesn’t require me to understand the specifics of his situation. I can read a book from eighteenth-century Germany, and find some amount of empathy with the historical figures inside, but there will always be a forced translation of culture, society, and a thousand other details that I can never truly understand. Bach isn’t bogged down in those things — he’s cutting straight to the heart of what we already have in common. He can reach across those three hundred years and make me, a man who manipulates electromagnetic circuits with my fingertips on a keyboard, feel just as profoundly as he made an impoverished farmer feel during a traditional rural celebration. He includes me in his story, just as I wanted to include my players in my games; we make the story together. Bach’s music is a perfect illustration of the idea that it’s not the artist that matters, but the connection between us.

Often described as the greatest single musical genius in the history of the world, Bach is as close to a universally beloved composer as one can find, as respected by jazz and rock musicians as he is in the classical concert halls. And mathematicians tend to find him almost equally alluring: the intricate patterns of his fugues illustrate the mathematical concepts that underlie all music, even as they take on a fragile beauty in their own right, outside the sound that they produce. The interior of Bach’s music is a virtual reality as compelling as any videogame, coming complete with an odd interactive quality. Meier:

He routinely used something called invertible counterpoint, in which the notes are designed to be reversible for an entirely new, but still enjoyable, sound. He also had a fondness for puzzle canons, in which he would write alternating lines of music and leave the others blank for his students — often his own children — to figure out what most logically belonged in between.

Bach even went so far as to hide codes in many of his works. Substituting place values for letters creates a numeric total of 14 for his last name, and this number is repeatedly embedded in the patterns of his pieces, as is its reverse 41, which happens to be the value of his last name plus his first two initials. His magnum opus, The Art of the Fugue, plays the letters of his name in the notes themselves (in German notation, the letter B refers to the note we call B-flat, and H is used for B-natural). At the top of one famous piece, The Well-Tempered Clavier, he drew a strange, looping flourish that scholars now believe is a coded set of instructions for how to tune the piano to play in every possible key, opening up new possibilities for variation and modulation.

With C.P.U. Bach, Meier attempted to make a computer write and play “new” Bach compositions, working off of the known techniques of the master, taking advantage of the way that his musical patterns were, as Meier puts it, “both predictable and stunning.” Meier insists that he created the program with no intent to diminish his favorite composer, only to celebrate him. “Creating a computer [program] that creates art counts as a form of artistic expression itself,” he says.

To aid him in the endeavor, he enlisted one Jeff Briggs, a soundtrack composer at MicroProse. Together the two labored away for more than a year on the most defiantly artsy, uncommercial product of MicroProse or Sid Meier’s history. They decided to publish it exclusively on the new 3DO multimedia console, another first for the company and the designer, because they couldn’t bear to hear their creation through the often low-fidelity computer sound cards of the time; by targeting the 3DO, they guaranteed that their program’s compositions would be heard by everyone in CD-quality fidelity.

Still, the end result is a bit underwhelming, managing only to provide an ironic proof of the uniquely human genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. C.P.U. Bach generates music that is pleasantly Bach-like, but it cannot recreate the ineffable transcendence of the master’s great works.

Pick a Baroque musical form, and C.P.U. Bach will compose a brand new example of same for you.

An esoteric product for a console that would itself prove a failure, C.P.U. Bach sold horribly upon its release in 1994. But Meier doesn’t apologize for having made this least likely of all possible follow-ups to Civilization: “My only regret is that [it] is essentially unplayable today, now that the physical console has become a lost relic.” Sometimes you just have to follow your muse, in game design as in music — or, in this case, in a bit of both.

While Sid Meier was first taking a breather and then pursuing his passion project, the public image of MicroProse was being transformed by Civilization. Having made their name in the 1980s as a publisher of vehicular military simulations, they suddenly became the premiere publisher of strategy games in the eyes of many, taking over that crown from SSI, who had largely abandoned those roots to plunge deep into licensed Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs. MicroProse was soon inundated with submissions from outsiders who had played Civilization and wanted their strategy game to go out with the same label on the box as that one, thank you very much. By no means were all of the strategy games MicroProse came to publish as a result equally worthy, but the cream of the crop — titles like Master of Orion, Master of Magic, X-COM, and Transport Tycoon — were as creatively and commercially successful as the genre got during the first half of the 1990s.

The great irony about the MicroProse of this period is that these kinds of games, the ones with which the company was now most identified in the minds of gamers, were almost all sourced from outsiders while the company’s internal developers marched in a multitude of other directions. Much effort was still poured into making yet more hardcore flight simulators like the ones of old, a case of diminishing returns as the tension of the Cold War and the euphoria of the First Gulf War faded into the past. Other internal teams plunged into standup-arcade machines, casual “office games,” complicated CRPGs, and a line of multimedia-heavy adventure games that were meant to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Sierra and LucasArts.

These ventures ranged from modest successes to utter disasters in the marketplace, trending more toward the latter as time went on. The income from the outside-developed strategy games wasn’t enough to offset the losses; by 1993, the company was facing serious financial problems. In June of that year, Spectrum Holobyte, a company with a smaller product catalog but a large amount of venture capital, acquired MicroProse.

Many projects were cancelled in the wake of the acquisition, leaving many employees in limbo, waiting to find out whether their future held a new work assignment or a pink slip. One of this group was Brian Reynolds, a programmer and dedicated tabletop wargamer who had come to MicroProse to escape from his Berkeley graduate program in philosophy and been assigned to the now-cancelled adventure line. With nothing else to do, he started to tinker with a strategy game dealing with what he found to be one of the most fascinating subjects in all of human history: the colonization of the New World. Having never designed a grand-strategy game before, he used Civilization, his favorite example of the genre, as something of a crutch: he adapted most of its core systems to function within his more focused, time-limited scenario. (Although said scenario brings to mind immediately Dani Bunten Berry’s Seven Cities of Gold — a game which was ironically a huge influence on Meier’s Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civilization — Reynolds claims not to have had it much in mind when he started working on his own game. “I didn’t personally like it as a game,” he says. “It all felt like empty forests.”) Reynolds had little expectation that his efforts would amount to much of anything in the end. “I was just doing this until they laid me off,” he says. Although he was working in the same building as Meier, it never even occurred to him to ask for the Civilization source code. Instead he reverse-engineered it in the same way that any other hacker would have been forced to do.

Nevertheless, word of the prototype slowly spread around the office, finally reaching Meier. “Can you come talk to Sid about this?” Reynold’s manager asked him one day. From that day forward, Colonization was an official MicroProse project.

The powers that were at the company would undoubtedly have preferred to give the reins of the project to Meier, placing Reynolds in some sort of junior design and/or programming role. But Meier was, as we’ve already seen, up to his eyebrows in Johann Sebastian Bach at the time, and was notoriously hard to corral under any circumstances. Further, his sense of fair play was finely developed. “This is your idea,” he said to Reynolds. “You deserve to have ownership of it.” He negotiated an arrangement with MicroProse’s management whereby he would serve as a design advisor, but the project as a whole would very much remain Brian Reynold’s.

Having secured our charter…

… we set off for the New World.

The early game of exploration and settlement is in some ways the most satisfying, being free from the micromanagement that crops up later.

The map can get crowded indeed as time goes on.

Like so much in the game, the city-management screen draws heavily from Civilization, but the row of trade goods along the bottom of the screen reflects the more complex economic model.

We declare independence! Hopefully our armies are up for the war that will follow.

The finished Colonization lets you play as the British, the Spanish, the Dutch, or the French. You begin the game in that pivotal year of 1492, ready to explore and found your first colony in the Americas. In keeping with the historical theme, trade is extremely important — much more so than in the highly abstracted economic model employed by Civilization. Sugar, cotton, and tobacco — grown, processed, and shipped back to the Old World — are the key to your colonies’ prosperity. (Brian Reynolds has said only semi-facetiously that his intention with Colonization was to “combine together all the best things from Civilization and Railroad Tycoon — because that would make the game even better!”) Naturally, you have to deal with the Native Americans who already inhabit the lands into which you want to expand, as you do the other European powers who are jockeying for dominance. Your ultimate goal is to build a federation of colonies self-sufficient enough to declare independence from its mother country, an event which is always followed by a war. If you win said war, you’ve won the game. If, on the other hand, you lose the war, or fail to force an outcome to it by 1850, or fail to trigger it at all by 1800, you lose the game.

Even if we set aside for the moment some of the uncomfortable questions raised by its historical theme and the aspects thereof which it chooses to include and exclude, Colonization reveals itself to be a competent game but far from a great one. Sid Meier himself has confessed to some serious misgivings about the rigid path — independence by an arbitrary date or bust — down which Brian Reynolds elected to force its player:

It was a grandiose, win-or-lose proposition with the potential to invalidate hours of successful gameplay. Generally speaking, I would never risk alienating the player to that degree. It was historically accurate, however, and Brian saw it as a satisfying boss battle rather than a last-minute bait and switch, so I deferred to him. Good games don’t get made by committee.

Not only is the choice problematic from a purely gameplay perspective, but it carries unfortunate overtones of all-too-typically-American historical chauvinism in forcing the Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies to clone the experience of the British colonies that turned into the United States in order to win the game — the implication being that those colonies’ very different real histories mark them as having somehow done things wrong in contrast to the can-do Yankees.

But Colonization has plenty of other, more practical flaws. Micromanagement, that ever-present bane of so many grand-strategy games, is a serious issue here, thanks not least to the nitty-gritty complexities of the economic model; by the time you’re getting close to the point of considering independence, you’ll be so bogged down with the busywork of handing out granular work assignments to your colonists and overseeing every freight shipment back home that you’ll be in danger of losing all sense of any bigger picture. In contrast to the seamless wholeness of Civilization, Colonization remains always a game of disparate parts that don’t quite mesh. For example, the military units you can raise always seem bizarrely expensive in proportion to their potency. It takes an eternity of micro-managing tedium to build even a halfway decent military, and even when you finally get to send it out into the field you still have to spend the vast majority of your time worrying about more, shall we say, down-to-earth matters than fighting battles — like, say, whether you’ve trained enough carpenters in your cities and whether their tools are in good repair. The funnest parts of Colonization are the parts you spend the least amount of time doing.

In the end, then, Colonization never manages to answer the question of just why you ought to be playing this game instead of the more generous, open-ended, historically expansive Civilization. Computer Gaming World magazine, the industry’s journal of record at the time of the game’s release in late 1994, published a sharply negative review, saying that there was “more tedium and less care” in Colonization than in Civilization.

One might expect such a review from such an influential publication to be a game’s death knell. Surprisingly, though, Colonization did quite well for itself in the marketplace. Brian Reynolds estimates today that it sold around 300,000 copies. Although that figure strikes me as perhaps a little on the high side, there’s no question that the game was a solid success. For proof, one need only look to what Reynolds got to do next: he was given the coveted role of lead designer on Civilization II after Sid Meier, ever the iconoclast, refused it.

But here’s the odd thing: Meier’s name would appear in bold letters on the box of Civilization II, as it had on the box of Colonization before it, while that of Brian Reynolds was nowhere to be found on either. MicroProse’s marketing department had first hit upon the idea of using Meier’s name prominently back in 1987, when they’d pondered how to sell Pirates!, a game that was not only radically different from anything MicroProse had released before but was impossible to comfortably classify into any existing gaming genre. It seemed to work; Sid Meier’s Pirates! became a big hit. Since then, the official titles of most of Meier’s games had come with the same prefix. Sid Meier’s Colonization, however, was something new, marking the first time that MicroProse’s marketers assigned Meier ownership of a game he hadn’t truly designed at all. “Yes, I made suggestions along the way,” he says today, “but it had been up to Brian whether to accept them. Colonization was not Sid Meier’s game.”

And yet the name emblazoned at the top of the box stated just the opposite. Meier rationalizes this fact by claiming that “‘Sid Meier’s’ now meant ‘Sid Meier mentored and approved’ instead of ‘Sid Meier personally coded.'” But even this statement is hard to reconcile with the text on the back of the box, which speaks of “Colonization, the newest strategy game from Sid Meier [that] continues the great tradition of Civilization.” Clearly MicroProse’s marketing department, if not Meier himself, was completely eager to make the public believe that Sid Meier had designed Colonization, full stop — and, indeed, the game was received on exactly these terms by the press and public. Brian Reynolds, for his part, was happy to give his mentor all of the public credit for his work, as long as it helped the game to sell better and gave him a chance to design more games in the future. The soft-spoken, thoughtful Sid Meier, already the most unlikely of celebrities, had now achieved the ultimate in celebrity status: he had become a brand unto himself. I trust that I don’t need to dwell on the irony of this in light of his statement that “it’s not the artist that matters.”

But MicroProse’s decision to publicly credit Colonization to someone other than the person who had actually designed it is hardly the most fraught of the ethical dilemmas raised by the game. As I’ve already noted, the narrative about the colonization of the New World which it forces its player to enact is in fact the semi-mythical origin story of the United States. It’s a story that’s deeply rooted in the minds of white Americans like myself, having been planted there by the grade-school history lessons we all remember: Pilgrims eating their Thanksgiving dinner with the Indians, Bostonians dumping British tea into the ocean to protest taxation without representation, Paul Revere making his midnight ride, George Washington leading the new country to victory in war and then showing it how it ought to conduct itself in peace.

In presenting all this grade-school history as, if not quite inevitable, at least the one satisfactory course of events — it is, after all, a matter of recreating the American founding myth or losing the game — Colonization happily jettisons any and all moral complexity. One obvious example is its handling of the Native American peoples who were already living in the New World when Europeans decided to claim those lands for themselves. In the game, the Native Americans you encounter early on are an amiable if primitive and slightly dim bunch who are happy enough to acknowledge your hegemony and work for you as long as you give them cigars to smoke and stylish winter coats to wear. Later on, when they start to get uppity, they’re easy enough to put back in line using the stick instead of the carrot.

And then there’s the game’s handling of slavery — or rather its lack of same. It’s no exaggeration to say that all of the modern-day countries of North and South America were built by the sweat of slaves’ brows. Certainly the extent to which the United States in particular was shaped by what John C. Calhoun dubbed The Peculiar Institution can hardly be overstated; the country’s original sin still remains with us today in the form of an Electoral College and Senate that embody the peculiarly undemocratic practice of valuing the votes of some citizens more than those of others, not to mention the fault lines of racial animus that still fracture American politics and society. Yet the game of Colonization neatly sidesteps all of this; in its world, slavery simply doesn’t exist. Is this okay, or is it dangerous to so blithely dismiss the sins and suffering of our ancestors in a game that otherwise purports to faithfully recreate history?

Johnny L. Wilson, the editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, stood virtually alone among his peers in expressing concern about the thin slice of life’s rich pageant that games of the 1990s were willing and able to encompass. He alone spoke of “the preponderance of violent solutions as opposed to creative exploration and experimentation, the increasingly narrow scope of subject matter perceived as marketable, the limited nature of non-player characters and our assumptions about game players.” Unsurprisingly, then, he was the first and as it turned out the only gaming journalist of his era to address Colonization not just as a good, bad, or indifferent game in the abstract, but as a rhetorical statement about the era which it attempted to recreate, whether it wished to be such a thing or not. (As the school of Deconstructionism constantly reminds us, it’s often the works that aren’t actually trying to say anything at all about a subject which end up having the most to tell us about their makers’ attitudes toward it…) Wilson raised his concerns before Colonization was even released, when it existed only in a beta version sent to magazines like his.

Two upcoming games on the colonial era will excise slavery from the reality they are simulating: Sid Meier’s Colonization from MicroProse and Impressions’ High Seas Trader. Both design teams find the idea of slavery, much less the institution of slavery, to be repugnant, and both teams resist the idea of “rewarding” the gamer for behavior which is and was abominable.

This reminds me of the film at Mount Vernon where the narration explains that Washington abhorred slavery, so he left wording in his will so that, upon his and Martha’s deaths, his slaves would be freed. To me, that’s tantamount to saying, “I’ll correct this immoral practice as soon as it doesn’t cost me anything anymore!”

It is obvious that George didn’t find it economically viable to be moral in that circumstance. So, if slavery was such an important facet of the colonial economy that even the “father of our country” couldn’t figure out how to build a successful business without it, how do we expect to understand the period in which he lived without having the same simulated tools at our disposal? Maybe we would have some belated appreciation for those early slaves if we didn’t try to ignore the fact of their existence.

Of course, we know what the answer is going to be. The game designers will say that they “only put in the cool parts” of history. We hear that. Yet, while there is nothing wrong with emphasizing the most entertaining parts of a historical situation, there is a danger in misrepresenting that historical situation. Maybe it doesn’t add credibility to the revisionist argument that Auschwitz never happened when we remove the Waffen SS from a computer game, but what happens when someone removes Auschwitz from the map? What happens when it is removed from the history books?

Removing the horrors of history from computer games may not be a grand conspiracy to whitewash history, but it may well be a dangerous first step.

Wilson’s editorial prompted an exchange in the reader-letters section of a subsequent issue. I’d like to reprint it in an only slightly edited form here because the points raised still pop up regularly today in similar discussions. We begin with a letter from one Ken Fishkin, who takes exception with Wilson’s position.

Johnny Wilson seems to have forgotten that the primary purpose of a game is to entertain. Computer games routinely engage in drastic alterations, simplifications, and omissions of history. Railroad Tycoon omitted Chinese labor and union strife. In SimCity, the mayor is an absolute dictator who can blithely bulldoze residential neighborhoods and churches with a mere click of the mouse, and build the Golden Gate Bridge in weeks instead of decades. In Sid Meier’s Civilization, Abraham Lincoln is immortal, phalanxes can sink battleships, and religious strife, arguably the single most important factor in the history of international relations, is totally omitted. And yet Computer Gaming World gave these games its highest praise, placing all of them in its Hall of Fame!

It is hypocritical of Computer Gaming World to criticize Sid Meier’s Colonization in the same issue in which it effusively praises Sid Meier’s Civilization. Computer Gaming World used to know that computer games shouldn’t be held to the same standards of historical accuracy as a textbook.

The magazine’s editorial staff — or really, one has to suspect, Wilson himself — replied thusly:

Is it hypocritical? The same Johnny Wilson that wrote the column had an entire chapter in The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook which talked about the realities that were not simulated (along with some elaborate workarounds that would enable gamers to see how much had been abstracted) and he also questioned certain historical abstractions in [his Civilization strategy guide] Rome on 640K a Day. Do these citations seem hypocritical? Different games have different levels of perspective and different levels of abstraction. Their success or failure will always depend on the merit of their gameplay, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider their historical/factual underpinning as well.

Even if certain historical/real aspects have to be abstracted for the sake of gameplay, the designers have a responsibility to acknowledge, tip their hat to, or clarify those conditions which they have abstracted. When it comes to orders of battle and dominant practices, they should be addressed in some way and not ignored because they are inconvenient. We agree that a game should be balanced enough to play well, but the lessons of history should not be totally glossed over. We fear that there is a tendency of late to do just that.

Finally, we have a letter from Gilbert L. Brahms, writing in support of Wilson’s position.

Your theses are very well-taken. Computer games become nothing [more] than schlock entertainment if they strip realism from historical recreations. There is no point in presenting any [game] referring to World War II Germany without presenting Nazism in all its symbology, nay, without including the imagery which ensorcelled those desperate and gullible Germans of the time into surrendering themselves “mit ganzen Willen” to Hitler’s blandishments.

The sins of the past are not eradicated by repression; in fact, they become all the more fascinating for having become forbidden fruit. Only critical confrontation can clarify such atrocities as occurred in the 1940s and can tutor us to resist such temptations again, in ourselves as well as in others.

If, therefore, a computer game should truly aspire to become a work of art, it must fulfill both the recreative and the didactive functions inherent in all serious aesthetic productions: it must present horrible conflicts with all of their nasty details.

I’ll return to the arguments presented above in due course. Before I do that, though, I’d like to take a brief leap forward in time.

In 2008, Firaxis Games — a company founded by Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, and Jeff Briggs — announced a new version of Colonization, which once again chose to present Native Americans as dim-witted primitives and to completely ignore the historical reality of slavery. Even before its release, Ben Fritz, a gaming blogger for Variety, loudly attacked it for having committed the vaguely defined, all-purpose crime of being “offensive.” Fritz’s blog post is neither well-argued nor well-written — “I literally exclaimed ‘holy sh*t’ out loud when I was reading an email this morning,” goes its unpromising beginning — so I won’t bother to quote more from it here. But it was a harbinger of the controversy to come, which came to dominate the critical discussion around the new Colonization to the point that its qualities as a mere game were all but ignored. Firaxis published the following terse missive in a fruitless attempt to defuse the situation:

For seventeen years the Civilization series has given people the opportunity to create their own history of the world. Colonization deals with a specific time in global history, and treats the events of that time with respect and care. As with all previous versions of Civilization, the game does not endorse any particular position or strategy – players can and should make their own moral judgments. Firaxis keeps the player at the center of the game by providing them with interesting choices and decisions to make, which has proven to be a fun experience for millions of people around the world.

Whatever its merits or lack thereof, this argument was largely ignored. The cat was now well and truly out of the bag, and many academics in particular rushed to criticize the “gamefication of imperialism” that was supposedly at the core of even the original game of Civilization. In his recent memoir, Sid Meier describes their critiques with bemusement and more than a touch of condescension.

This philosophical analysis quickly spread to my older titles — or as one paper described them, my “Althusserian unconscious manifestations of cultural claims” with “hidden pedagogical aspirations.” Pirates! wasn’t about swashbuckling, it turned out, but rather “asymmetrical and illegal activities [that] seem to undermine the hierarchical status quo while ultimately underlining it.” Even C.P.U. Bach was accused of revealing “a darker side to the ideological sources at work behind ludic techniques.”

All I can say is that our motives were sincere, and maybe these guys have a little too much time on their hands.

For all that I’m usually happy to make fun of the impenetrable writing which too many academics use to disguise banal ideas, I won’t waste space shooting those fish in a barrel here. It’s more interesting to consider the differing cultural moments exemplified by the wildly divergent receptions of the two versions of Colonization — from a nearly complete silence on the subject of the potentially problematic aspects of its theme and implementation thereof to red-faced shouting matches all over the Internet on the same subjects. Through this lens, we can see how much more seriously people came to take games over a span of fourteen years, as well as how much more diverse the people playing and writing about them became. And we can also see, of course, how the broader dialog around history changed.

Those changes have only continued and, if anything, accelerated in the time since 2008; I write these words at the close of a year in which the debates surrounding our various historical legacies have become more charged than ever. One side accuses the other of ignoring all of the positive aspects of the past and trying to “cancel” any historical figure who doesn’t live up to its fashionable modern ideals of “wokeness.” Meanwhile the opposing side accuses its antagonists of being far too eager to all too literally whitewash the past and make excuses for the reprehensible conduct of its would-be heroes. Mostly, though, the two sides prefer just to call one another nasty names.

So, rather than wading further into that morass, let’s return to the arguments I reprinted without much commentary above, applying them now not only to Colonization but also to Panzer General, the subject of my first article in this two-part series. It strikes me that the best way to unpack a subtle and difficult subject might be to consider in turn each line of argument supporting the claim that Colonization — and by implication Panzer General — are fine just as they are. We’ll begin with the last of them: Firaxis’s corporate response to the controversy surrounding the second Colonization.

Said response can be summed up as the “it’s not the game, it’s the player!” argument. It’s long been trotted out in defense of a huge swath of games with objectionable or potentially objectionable content; Peter Molyneux was using it to defend the ultra-violence in Syndicate already in 1993, and there are doubtless examples that predate even that one. The core assertion here is that the game doesn’t force the player’s hand at all — that in a game like, say, Grand Theft Auto it’s the player who chooses to indulge in vehicular mayhem instead of driving politely from place to place like a law-abiding citizen.

Of course, this argument can’t be used as an equally efficacious escape hatch for all games. While Panzer General will allow you to command the Allied forces if you play a single scenario, the grand campaign which is the heart of that game’s appeal only allows you to play a Nazi general, and certainly gives you no option to turn against the Nazi cause at some point, as Erwin Rommel may or may not have done, beyond the obvious remedy of shutting off the computer. But Colonization does appear to do a little better on this front, at least at first glance. As many defenders of the game are at pains to point out, you can choose to treat the Native Americans you encounter relatively gently in comparison to the European colonizers of recorded history (admittedly, not really a high bar to clear). Still, the fact does remain that you will be forced to subjugate them to one degree or another in order to win the game, simply because you need the land and resources which they control if you hope to win the final war for independence.

Here, then, we come to the fatal flaw that undermines almost all applications of this argument. Its proponents would seemingly have you believe that the games of which they speak are rhetorically neutral sandboxes, exact mirror images of some tangible objective reality. But this they are not. Even if they purport to “simulate” real events to one degree or another, they can hope to capture only a tiny sliver of their lived experience, shot through with the conscious and subconscious interests and biases of the people who make them. These last are often most clearly revealed through a game’s victory conditions, as they are in the case of Colonization. To play Colonization the “right” way — to play it as the designers intended it to be played — requires you to exploit and subjugate the people who were already in the New World millennia before your country arrived to claim it. Again, then, we’re forced to confront the fact that every example of a creative expression is a statement about its creators’ worldview, whether those creators consciously wish it to be such a thing or not. Labeling it a simulation does nothing to change this.

The handling — or rather non-handling — of slavery by Colonization is an even more telling case in point. By excising slavery entirely, Colonization loses all claim to being a simulation of real history to any recognizable degree whatsoever, given how deeply intertwined the Peculiar Institution was with everything the game does deign to depict. Just as importantly, the absence of slavery invalidates at a stroke the claim that the game is merely a neutral sandbox of a bygone historical reality for the player’s id, ego, and superego to prance through. For this yawning absence is something over which the player has no control. She isn’t given the chance to take the moral high road by refusing to participate in the slave trade; the designers have made that choice for her, as they have so many others.

I require less space to dispense with Ken Fishkin’s equating of Railroad Tycoon’s decision not to include exploited Chinese laborers and SimCity’s casting you in the role of an autocratic mayor with the ethical perils represented by Colonization’s decision not to include slavery and Panzer General’s casting you in the role of a Nazi invader. Although Fishkin expresses the position about as well as can reasonably be expected, these sorts of pedantic, context-less gotcha arguments are seldom very convincing to anyone other than the overly rigid thinkers who trot them out. I freely acknowledge that all games which purport to depict the real world do indeed simplify it enormously and choose a very specific domain to focus upon. So, yes, Railroad Tycoon as well does whitewash the history it presents to some extent. Yet the exploitation of Chinese labor in the Old West, appalling though it was, cannot compare to the pervasive legacy of American slavery and the European Holocaust in today’s world. Debaters who claim otherwise quickly start to sound disingenuous. In any discussion of this nature, space has to be allowed for degree as well as kind.

And so we arrive at Fishkin’s other argument from principle, the very place where these sorts of discussions always tend to wind up sooner or later. “The primary purpose of a game is to entertain,” he tells us. Compare that statement with these assertions of Gilbert L. Brahms: “Computer games become nothing [more] than schlock entertainment if they strip realism from historical recreations. If a computer game should truly aspire to become a work of art, it must fulfill both the recreative and the didactive functions inherent in all serious aesthetic productions: it must present horrible conflicts with all of their nasty details.” Oh, my. It seems that we’ve landed smack dab in the middle of the “are games art?” debate. What on earth do we do with this?

Many of us have been conditioned since childhood to believe that games are supposed to be fun — no more, no less. Therefore when a game crosses our path that aspires to be more than just fun — or, even more strangely, doesn’t aspire to be “fun” in the typical sense of the word at all — we can find it deeply confusing. And, people being people, our first reaction is often outrage. Three years before the second version of Colonization was released, one Danny Ledonne made Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, an earnest if rather gawkily adolescent attempt to explore the backgrounds and motivations of the perpetrators of the high-school massacre in question. A book on the same theme would have been accepted and reviewed on its merits, but the game received widespread condemnation simply for existing. Since games by definition can aspire only to being fun, Ledonne must consider it fun to reenact the Columbine massacre, right? The “games as art” and “serious games” crews tried to explain that this edifice of reasoning was built upon a faulty set of assumptions, but the two sides mostly just talked past one another.

Although the “just a game” defense may seem a tempting get-out-of-jail-free card in the context of a Panzer General or a Colonization, one should think long and hard before one plays it. For to do so is to infantilize the entire medium — to place it into some other, fundamentally different category from books and movies and other forms of media that are allowed a place at the table where serious cultural dialog takes place.

The second version of Colonization found itself impaled on the horns of these two very different sets of assumptions about games. Its excision of slavery drew howls of protest calling it out for its shameful whitewashing of history. But just imagine the alternative! As Rebecca Mir and Trevor Owens pointed out in a journal article after the hubbub had died down, the controversy we got was nothing compared to the one we would have had if Colonization had given the naysayers what many of them claimed to want: had better captured historical reality by actually letting you own and trade slaves. The arguments against the one approach are predicated on the supposition that at least some types of games are more than idle entertainments, that a game which bills itself as a reasonably accurate reenactment of colonial history and yet excises slavery from its narrative deserves to be condemned in the same terms as a book or movie which does the same; the arguments against the other are rooted in the supposition that games are just fun, and how dare you propose that it’s fun to join the slave trade. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Perhaps the only practical solution to the dilemma is that of simply not making any more versions of Colonization. No, it’s not a terribly satisfying solution, placing limits as it does on what games are allowed to do and be. Nevertheless, it’s the one that Firaxis will almost certainly choose to employ in the future.

I do want to emphasize one more time here at the end of this pair of articles that neither Panzer General nor Colonization was created with any conscious bad intent. They stem from a time when computer gaming was much more culturally homogeneous than it has become, when computer gamers were to an almost overwhelming degree affluent, stereotypically “nerdy” white males between the ages of 10 and 35. People of privilege that they were, usually immersed in the hard sciences rather than the irritatingly amorphous but more empathetic humanities, they struggled to identify with those crosscurrents of society and history outside their own. Although the wargaming subculture that spawned Panzer General and Colonization still exists, and would still receive those exact games today in the same unquestioning way, it’s vastly smaller than it used to be in proportion to the overall mass of gamers. And, again, its blind spots then and now remain venal sins at worst in the grand scale of things.

That said, I for one am happy that the trajectory of gaming since 1994 has been ever outward, both in terms of the types of people who play games and the kinds of themes and experiences those games present. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that their very scope of possibility is half the reason we can so easily confuse one another when we try to talk about games. Certainly one person’s idea of a satisfying game can be markedly different from another’s, such that even as brilliant a mind as that of Sid Meier can have trouble containing it all. His famous categorical claim that a good game is a “series of interesting decisions” is true enough in the case of the games he prefers to play and make, but fails to reckon with the more experiential aspects of interactivity which many players find at least equally appealing. It’s thus no surprise that he offhandedly dismisses adventures games and other interactive experiences that are more tightly plotted and less zero-sum.

I’ve often wondered whether this label of “game” is really all that useful at all, whether there’s really any more taxonomical kinship between a Colonization and a Super Columbine RPG! than there is between, say, books and movies. Digital games are the ultimate form of bastard media, appropriating elements from all of the others and then slathering on top of it all the special sauce of interactivity. Perhaps someday we’ll figure out how to talk about this amorphous stew of possibility that just keeps bubbling up out of the pot we want to use to contain it; perhaps someday we’ll divide it up into a collection of separate categories of media, using those things we call “gaming genres” now as their basis. In the meantime, we’ll just have to hang on for the ride, and try not to rush to judgment too quickly when our expectations of the medium don’t align with those of others.

(Sources: the books Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan and the article “Modeling Indigenous Peoples: Unpacking Ideology in Sid Meier’s Colonization” by Rebecca Mir and Trevor Owens, from the book Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History; PC Review of August 1992; Computer Gaming World of April 1994, September 1994, November 1994, and December 1994; online sources include “How Historical Games Integrate or Ignore Slavery” by Amanda Kerry on Rock Paper Shotgun; “Colonialism is Fun? Sid Meier’s Civilization and the Gamefication of Imperialism” by CIGH Exeter on the Imperial and Global Forum; Soren Johnson’s interview with Brian Reynolds; IGN’s interview with Brian Reynolds; Ben Fritz’s blog on Variety.

Colonization is available for digital purchase on GOG.com. C.P.U. Bach, having been made only for a long-since-orphaned console, is sadly not.)

Comments
73 Responses

- Jacen aka Jaina

December 4, 2020 at 5:19 pm

These ventures ranged from modest successes to utter disastors

Thou I prefer your new spelling.

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2020 at 6:06 pm

:) Thanks!

- Georg

December 4, 2020 at 5:37 pm

Thank you for a great article. I’ll especially think long and hard about the contradiction between ‘only fun’ and ‘culture/art’ – though of course there are definitely games out there who are ONLY fun!

One less mentioned aspect: you talk mostly about depicting history here, but it’s also interesting which paths of thinking games lead us down that don’t involve history. From ‘gotta shoot those terrorists’ of counterstrike to ‘great empires are awesome’ of civilization…and let’s not even start on lemmings!

By the way, civilization 4 by firaxis DOES have slavery as a civic, and it’s very powerful with little drawbacks – almost required for winning at the highest level!

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2020 at 6:05 pm

Yes — and they got a lot of criticism for it. I believe that Firaxis said somewhere that one of the reasons they excised it from the second Colonization was because of that criticism — which just goes to show even more that you can’t win in some situations.

That said, I do think there’s an identifiable difference between Civilization IV’s use of slavery in a somewhat abstracted sense and the slavery that might have been in Colonization, with its more specific historical context that’s still such a festering wound in modern Western culture. I’m not sure Firaxis would have dared to go there even had they not been smarting over the earlier criticism.

- Anonymous

December 4, 2020 at 8:16 pm

Another early-game strategy in Civ IV which always bothered me was chopping down forests to gain quick resources. The penalty for that was more evident over time than slavery, because it was either difficult or impossible to replace forests (can’t remember which) but replacing your population lost to slavery usually only required a dozen turns or so. IIRC, slavery was not a good middle or late game strategy, so in that sense it is a form of government you grow out of in line with the overarching theme of progress that defines the Civilization series.

I’m not aware of contemporary criticism of much of the early Civ series, but I wonder if including Communism and Fundamentalism as playable governments was also criticized with as much vigor as including slavery?

IMHO I think that it is important to include the bad along with the good in grand strategy simulation games such as Civilization. If nothing else, it allows for computer opponents that are appropriately antagonistic. It can also give you a better feel for how civilizations develop; after all, very few (or perhaps none at all?) civilizations did not engage slavery at one time or another.

- Georg

December 4, 2020 at 9:09 pm

You are right about the trees – though chopping them down early was still the “right play”, since it is all about early-game advantage rather than late-game health. Trees regrow very slowly (unless there are none left, then they don’t regrow), but it’s not a “big thing” in Civilization.

The same goes for Slavery – you might switch to Caste System or even Democracy later, but by that time you will already have won the game on the back of a Slavery-powered rush.

Not quite unlike the role Slavery in the real world, dare we say…

- David Ainsworth

December 5, 2020 at 4:26 pm

I play Civ 4 (and its mods) much more than I ever did 5 or 6, and will still boot the game up from time to time. I refused (and continue to refuse) to use Slavery and “whip” construction (killing the population to hurry it). I don’t play “competitive” Civ 4, and the AI on the settings I prefer isn’t a genuine threat with or without the advantages of Slavery, so I choose not to use it.

And I am always a bit upset when encountering a Civ 4 strategy guide or LP, and witnessing the careful and elaborate way in which min-maxers have determined precisely how to get the maximum benefit of killing your own people to complete construction projects more quickly. Especially as the underlying assumptions-that slavery offered a competitive advantage in the actual world-seem to unreflectingly be taken as a given by some of those same people. Historians (and economists, if you believe them) continue to debate and contest that idea. No doubt slavery does grant advantages if you insist on ignoring its costs when computing your equations.

Does min-maxing the slavery civic in Civ 4 provide a subtle confirmation bias when assessing the advantages and costs of actual slavery? Maybe not. But it’s not hard for me to see how it could.

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2020 at 10:43 pm

Fundamentalism actually wasn’t in the first Civilization, which is the only one whose reception I’ve looked at in any depth so far. As far as communism… eh, it’s a system of government/economics that pretty clearly doesn’t work that well unless it’s reduced to little more than lip service, as in modern China. But I’m not sure it’s as obviously ethically compromised as the practice of slavery.

- Chris Rasmus

December 28, 2020 at 12:29 am

Jimmy Maher wrote:
But I’m not sure it’s as obviously ethically compromised as the practice of slavery.

Right…because the killing of MILLIONS of people is in no way ethically compromising….

- Jacen aka Jaina

December 4, 2020 at 7:43 pm

Yet the exploitation of Chinese labor in the Old West, profoundly regrettable though it doubtless was..”

I would probably, personally, add something like ‘tragic’ here as well. To me, regrettable is more akin to forgetting milk at the store, whereas many people unnecessarily lost their lives in that situation.

Great articles!

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2020 at 8:04 pm

Good point. Thanks!

- Martin

December 4, 2020 at 8:27 pm

Wouldn’t be simpler to define cherry picked software as games and all the ‘bad’ stuff included software a simulation. Put an 18+ designation on simulations if you must. Games can still be fun while simulations don’t claim to be.

- Jeff Scott

December 4, 2020 at 8:36 pm

Thanks for the interesting article.

I played Colonization many years ago when it was released, and from my memory it was possible to bring slaves and ‘indentured servants’ from the docks in Europe to work in your colonies. They were less productive than specialised workers, but over time could become free and gain their own trades.

This doesn’t detract from the main point you’re making, but I don’t think it’s correct to say that slavery was not present as a concept in the game.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2020 at 12:22 am

Indentured servants are present in the game, but aren’t quite slaves, at least as the game prefers to see them. The manual describes them thusly:

Indentured servants are people who desire to come to the New World but who cannot afford to pay their own way. They have, accordingly, put themselves in bondage and agreed to work off their passage in the New World. Because of their bonded state, their productivity is less than desired. They, like petty criminals, are useful workers in the fields and mines, but are less productive in manufacturing and processing jobs than free colonists.

Note the explicit statement that they’ve *put themselves* into bondage. (The historical reality was of course more complicated. The vast majority of real indentured servants were forced into bondage by their creditors, and thus were in fact little more than slaves…)

The words “slave” and “slavery” never appear in the game or the manual, except for some notes on the real historical background in the latter that do mention slavery in passing.

- Avian Overlord

December 7, 2020 at 7:04 pm

“The vast majority of real indentured servants were forced into bondage by their creditors, and thus were in fact little more than slaves…”

This points to an important historical nuance, actually. Slavery was the lowest rung on the social hierarchy in pre-revolution America, but the next rung up wasn’t much of a jump. Slavery only becomes “peculiar” after the revolution when the rungs above it have either been eliminated (like indentured servitude) or seen significant improvements in civil rights. That’s when the racial caste system as a justification for the continuation of slavery in a society that contradicts it really gets going.

- Ookina Chongusu

December 5, 2020 at 7:11 pm

> I played Colonization many years ago when it was released, and from my memory it was possible to bring slaves and ‘indentured servants’ from the docks in Europe to work in your colonies.

You’re right about the indentured servants, but you’re thinking of “petty criminals” for the other part.

- cobbpg

December 4, 2020 at 9:11 pm

As far as I remember, the Elite series had slave trading since the beginning. It was of course a completely abstract thing, being just a type of cargo, but I wonder if you are aware of any critique discussing its presence in the games.

- Dan

December 4, 2020 at 9:43 pm

Slaves, weapons and drugs were the illegal cargo that would get the Vipers on your tail. Perhaps I am likewise unsure of this memory, but slaves died (i.e. disappeared from manifest) if you flew close to a sun, which was something you needed to do to operate the fuel scoop.
From the player’s guide:
“Slaves” are measured by the tonne in galactic trading. This may seem a little strange, but it includes the cryogenic suspension system necessary to keep them alive during the space travel. The slave trade, once almost eliminated by the Galactic Government, is now returning, despite the efforts of the Galactic Police Force to suppress it.

- Kroc Camen

December 5, 2020 at 9:43 am

You might be thinking of the Trumbles from the C64 port, which could only be dispatched by burning them up in your hold! When your shields are completely depleted then cargo is randomly destroyed (see https://www.bbcelite.com/cassette/flight/subroutine_oops.html), but there’s nothing specific about slaves in that context.

- Dan

December 6, 2020 at 9:49 pm

I’ve just tried it in VICE emulation and you’re right, it was the Trumbles (which I do remember killing by this mechanism) not slave cargo that are destroyed close to the sun.
Apologies for the misinformation!

- Peter Olausson

December 4, 2020 at 9:49 pm

Ah yes, the Elite slaves! If you carried them, the police would hunt you down. They were illegal cargo, like narcotics or firearms, but cargo nevertheless. I read a lot about that game at the time, and would be surprised if there was any criticism.

(Minor typo: Meir)

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2020 at 10:24 pm

Thanks!

- Alfons

December 5, 2020 at 11:25 am

In keeping with the US-centrism of the western world, people mostly get upset about slaves when it pertains the U.S. Slavery was more or less commonplace in the world until the Age of Enlightenment, and it was legal in the Ottoman Empire even longer than the U.S. It never really went away either as long as it existed, though pressure from the British led to an official ban. As Marx also pointed out, the state of being of a factory worker was not neccessarily any better than that of a slave, but worse.

I think people don’t get as finicky about those cases (and fictional ones) is probably due to the fact that they have not been as heavily mythologized as American slavery, and also the fact that the U.S. has since been succesful, whereas say the Aztec Empire has not.

- Petter Sjölund

December 5, 2020 at 12:14 pm

The history of American slavery is central to a current debate and political struggle. Of course, there may well be similar political struggles of descendants of Ottoman slaves that I know nothing about due to the US centrism of the Western world.

- Dan

December 4, 2020 at 9:32 pm

Again with this article, I’m left asking what your alternative is? Once we’re on this road is there any game about any period of history (until perhaps parts of the 20th century and then even not the more abstracted you get) that don’t have some at least tangential association with colonisation or slavery? If a game was made about pre-Columbian North American tribes slaughtering each other and indeed being in turn slaughtered by successive waves of invasions across the Bering straits, would it be OK to play as any of tribes? What if you were resisting European invasion? Would that be an ethical game? What tactics would be OK? Why would these games not be OK but killing a known or unknown individual would be OK in another non-strategy game? And are you saying that if slavery was included as a mechanic, instead of being excised, these games would actually be better?
Since there is the distinct possibility of ejecting a crewmate who isn’t an imposter, should you never play Among Us?
These are, of course, I think you’ll agree, unanswerable questions because they all lay bare the logical fallacy of assuming games in and of themselves have a morality. No, we have morality. Objects we interact with, such as games on a computer, do not.

- Petter Sjölund

December 5, 2020 at 11:11 am

The difference from your other examples is that if you make a game about the colonization of the Americas, then you are making a game about a controversial political subject, whether you mean to or not. And if you exclude slavery, it may look as if you take the position that slavery is something that we should forget about or at least not worry too much about today.

- Dan

December 6, 2020 at 12:38 am

I’ve no idea what your points are here.
Is murdering people, which happens in a huge percentage of games, “controversial”? If slavery was included as a game feature for accuracy, would you prefer that?
Some people now claim the USA (among other countries) is a country founded on racism and slavery. So how can you play as a “good” American fighting against the Germans?

- Petter Sjölund

December 6, 2020 at 8:45 am

Murdering is not controversial exactly because there is a general agreement that it is bad. Among players of video games there also appears to be agreement that killing in games is pretty much acceptable, at least at this moment in time. There is also a general agreement that no matter what you think about the US, Nazi Germany was worse.

But there is a very much alive debate whether, as you write, the USA was founded on racism and slavery, or whether it was founded on freedom and democracy. A common opinion is that the history of slavery is a central reason for many of the problems America is currently facing. An equally common opinion is that blaming slavery is a bad excuse and a dishonest attempt to gain sympathy for unrelated political goals, and that slavery was not really that important historically.

It is impossible to make a game about the colonization of the Americas without picking a side in this debate. If you simply remove slavery from the game because you don’t want to pick a side, you seem to be implying that historical slavery was at least not too important to exclude entirely, and then you have planted yourself firmly towards one particular end of the political spectrum.

Personally, I would very much have preferred if slavery was included as a game feature for accuracy. If you want to make a historical game about colonization without including slavery, then you don’t really want to make a historical game at all.

- Jimmy Maher

December 6, 2020 at 11:52 am

I would add only that the positions that “the USA was founded on racism and slavery” and “founded on freedom and democracy” are not mutually exclusive. The writings of some of those who attended the Constitutional Conventions reveal them to have been well-aware that it was some of both. History is always more nuanced than the activists and politicians would like it to be.

- Dan

December 6, 2020 at 12:42 pm

“Murdering is not controversial exactly because there is a general agreement that it is bad. Among players of video games there also appears to be agreement that killing in games is pretty much acceptable, at least at this moment in time.”
The only way this would make sense would be for you to simultaneously claim there is no general agreement that slavery is unacceptable. Apart from perhaps Africa and the Middle East, this simply isn’t true. It is not more controversial then to say murdering in a game is OK than slavery in a game is OK. The vast vast majority believe both are morally wrong.

“There is also a general agreement that no matter what you think about the US, Nazi Germany was worse.”
There is no real relevance of this general agreement though. If we are to consider ourselves the moral equivalent of the protagonists in the games we play (which we should not), then we cannot really pick any side that we consider evil. Who would like to claim Stalin was morally superior to Hitler so it’d be OK to play as the Russians and not OK to play as the Germans? Mao killed more than either but I doubt anybody would claim to feel ashamed to play as the Chinese resisting Japanese invasion. As I have already said, North American tribes had been slaughtering each other for millennia prior to European arrival, they didn’t even consider themselves to be one people at all until they had a supposedly common enemy who also didn’t consider themselves to be of one nation. I just don’t really get why pre-Columbian Americans automatically get categorised to the good side when they lost at a game they themselves had been playing with gusto since colonising the Americas themselves.

“It is impossible to make a game about the colonization of the Americas without picking a side in this debate”
In any grand-scale game set in colonial era America, slavery should be included to some degree, IMO, for accuracy, as it certainly was a large part of the US economy then. I would argue it wasn’t particularly foundational though, not compared to the US constitution for example, but I wouldn’t say there’s no remnants of slavery observable today either. But as we already see from many comments, some people will refuse to play games with slavery or other (awful word) problematic themes.
So what happens then? What games are left? I can make a case for just about every game you can think being taboo using similar arguments

- mezentius

December 4, 2020 at 9:55 pm

You argue that the game “carries unfortunate overtones of all-too-typically-American historical chauvinism in forcing the Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies to clone the experience of the British colonies that turned into the United States in order to win the game.”

But didn’t the Spanish colonies attempt to clone the experience of the British colonies, historically speaking, in breaking away from the Bourbons? If anything, the “semi-mythical origin story of the United States” was even more influential to the cause of Latin American independence at the time than it is to today’s grade school students.

I don’t disagree that it would have been better to allow for more diverse success scenarios, but it’s not strictly true that (broadly speaking) independence-followed-by-war was exclusive to the North American experience.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2020 at 12:13 am

While it’s true that figures like Toussaint Louverture claimed to take inspiration from the American Revolution, especially when they were soliciting American aid for their cause, I struggle a bit with the notion that their countries’ experiences in any way duplicated the American experience. The American Revolution was a peculiarly cerebral affair, a war of white men against white men over fairly abstract issues, a war in which the majority of the American population at the time didn’t even take sides. There’s a whole body of historiography that claims that the American Revolution wasn’t really a revolution at all, as it involved none of the social upheaval inherent in that word. The experience of Latin and South America was very, very different. Tellingly, Colonization does at least try to model the (largely economic) causes of the American Revolution. But it’s completely out of its depth elsewhere, shirking the issues of race and slavery as it does.

- Avian Overlord

December 7, 2020 at 6:16 pm

“The American Revolution was a peculiarly cerebral affair, a war of white men against white men over fairly abstract issues, a war in which the majority of the American population at the time didn’t even take sides. There’s a whole body of historiography that claims that the American Revolution wasn’t really a revolution at all, as it involved none of the social upheaval inherent in that word.”

The ironic thing is that this idea is exactly as much a sanitized propaganda narrative as the things you’ve been decrying. The American Revolution had plenty of mob violence, brutal brother on brother wars, and runaway social radicalism. If do the math, the American Revolution actually produced more emigres per capita than the French Revolution! But then, a lot of the narrative of the American Revolution being a conservative revolution was largely an exercise in trying to distinguish ourselves from those crazy people in France. (Adams’s famous quote about how “One third supported the revolution, one third opposed it, and one third were neutral” is actually discussing American reactions to the French Revolution, not the American revolution, which enjoyed clear popular support.)

Other non-American Revolutions, including both the French and the other New World revolutions also included more elites and intellectuals than is often imagined. Mexico started it’s independence as a monarchy, are you going to tell me that’s more radical than the American model? Even Haiti’s elites and middle class freedmen got the ball rolling before the revolution marched in a radical direction.

- Martin

December 5, 2020 at 12:25 am

When you say lack of success scenarios, it seems arbitrary to define end points to something which doesn’t necessarily have an ending.

It could be argued that the current ‘real’ version that is being played out as we speak hasn’t reached an ending.

- M Tyson

December 5, 2020 at 12:20 am

To me, this game is leading up to Alpha Centauri, to this day the most fully-realized grand-strategy game of ideas. Each faction a whole philosophical viewpoint. The planet as a full character. Terraformable terrain. Psionics. Sweet.

Another great article, btw, interesting issues you raise. Hard to believe none of this occurred to me/us when these games came out.

- Josh Martin

December 5, 2020 at 2:43 am

I don’t have the physical issues at hand and I’m not willing at the moment to download a bunch of PDFs to try to find it, but I believe the debate on slavery’s depiction (or lack thereof) in such games eventually returned to Computer Gaming World‘s letter column following the release of Interplay’s Conquest of the New World, which similarly excised the institution (amongst other atrocities) from its representation of colonial history.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2020 at 8:36 am

I didn’t know that. I’ll have to have a look…

- Josh Martin

December 7, 2020 at 8:24 pm

Well, I looked through the issues from ’96 (when the original version was released) and ’97 (the year of the “deluxe” edition) and couldn’t find any discussion of the game whatsoever. I also looked through some of the late ’95 and early ’98 issues just in case. I’m positive I’m not confusing this with the earlier discussion of Colonization, since I wasn’t into PC gaming at that point. The other gaming magazines I read regularly were Next Generation and PC Gamer, but a search of the Next Generation library at archive.org only brings up a capsule review of the game with no mention of the slavery issue, and I can only find a tiny handful of PC Gamer issues from the period.

My memory clearly isn’t too reliable, so take this for what little it’s worth, but: as I recall, the debate/discussion was sparked by a comment from one of the developers addressing the exclusion of slavery and their reasoning behind it. A response (either from one of the magazine’s writers or a reader in the letters column) pointed to some marketing copy for the game that apparently promised something like “step into the world of the 15th century,” arguing that even if there were valid reasons to leave out slavery, Interplay shouldn’t in that case be promising any kind of authentic simulation of the era.

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2020 at 8:35 pm

Fair enough. Thanks for looking!

- Rowan Lipkovits

December 5, 2020 at 4:01 am

“To play Colonization the “right” way — to play it as the designers intended it to be played — requires you to exploit and subjugate the people who were already in the New World”

Colonization bears the dubious distinction of my all-time historically second-most-played game (after Civ II), and after being horrified at the gamification of genocide (the facilitation and bonus rewarding of which is explicitly the advantage of team Spain), I always played with voluntary conduct of non-interference in aboriginal affairs because the alternative was too upsetting to contemplate. Leave their villages, territory, cultural sites and roaming units alone, and always give when they come looking for a handout. Establish no missions, and only man the stockades in defense when necessary. It does lock away a lot of the gameplay options — improving your terrain, building up a dense nation (needed for the “fortified inland revolution” endgame), boosting your population, and shipping treasure back to Europe — but the game is still very playable. I see it as a play adaptation to salvage an unconscionable scenario.

All that said, the absence of slavery definitely does remain the conspicuous elephant in the room. We all knew that Master Cotton Planters and Master Tobacco Planters was code for something else.

- Mike Duncan

December 5, 2020 at 10:53 pm

This reminds me of Europa Universalis. The early start date (the last version of the game it was 1399, I think) allows the “cheat” of an aggressive early colonization of the Americas. For me, Scotland. This involved a initial push to grab all of the gold mines in Mexico and the Andes and then locking down the entire North American coast, leaving the rest of South America for Spain and Portugal to be picked off in the inevitable wars to follow.

The financial payoff after fifty years when all these conquered territories turned into cores was considerable. Naturally, this was done by the sword. Even “diplo-annexing” – conquering territory then making Native American vassals that would be persuaded to join the Scottish empire decades later – required a bloody military campaign. And it is not that the initial rushed butchering of the Aztecs was met with soul-searching in Edinburgh that led to a more “civilized” subjection of NA – rather, vassalization allowed me to grab other territories without hefty diplomatic penalties.

EUI did model slavery a little, but just as another abstract trade good and only at the source territories. Thus the cotton in South Carolina, say, had no direct link to slaves in West Africa.

- Gaunt_Man

December 5, 2020 at 6:03 am

I agree with your “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” conclusion, but I feel that if they had at least ACKNOWLEDGED slavery (especially in 2008) it wouldn’t have been received the way it was.

Pointing out that buying and selling goods like you do in Colonization, but with people, is what the slave trade was would have been a powerful point. Even more powerfulif they reminded the player that that’s what really happened.

- David Ainsworth

December 5, 2020 at 4:17 pm

I gave a lot of thought to your Panzer General post and this one creates some additional clarity. Because I happily played Panzer General without being much troubled by the implicit decoupling of its missions from the concentration camps, but Colonization (which I also played) bothered me a great deal. The omission of slavery, but even worse, the treatment of the natives. And that was before I had a more historical sense of just how much civilization existed in the “Americas” until smallpox wiped out most of the population.

No doubt part of the distinction was my ignorance of the attempts to cover over the massive complicity of the German army (and people) in the Holocaust. But I think there’s more going on here. Playing Panzer General, I was never confused about whether I was playing the “bad guys” or not: it was like playing the Empire in a Star Wars game. It’s fun to pretend to be evil so long as nobody really gets hurt, and at least in theory, doing so helps understand and combat actual evils in the world (doubtful in practice, I admit). The same was true playing Imperial Japan in Pacific General. Although playing the Soviets, or even the Allies, involved an implicit claim of heroism not matched by the historical facts, so there’s some strong propaganda here, I’m just not convinced it’s Nazi in nature.

I therefore had less trouble playing Spain and oppressing and looting the indigenous peoples, because that was clearly wrong. I didn’t enjoy it much, though; I often played as France because I was troubled with how Colonization handled the natives.

I think the other framework for my own reaction had to do with the immediacy and the past practice associated with the wrongs reflected in the two games. Panzer General opted to ignore the role of the German army in the Holocaust, but that was also the practice in Germany and the international community: Treblinka guards might be found and prosecuted, but the rank and file (and the German population generally) was not held legally culpable. Perhaps the matter wasn’t actually settled fairly, but it did not (at least in the 90s) seem current: neo-Nazis were a fringe group and the Nazis were so generally recognized as evil that gunning them down in games didn’t bother anyone. Like the Star Wars stormtroopers, killing them was morally good.

Conversely, in the 90s it was by no way clear that all the wrongs early America had been built upon had been addressed or worked through in any way. Slavery and its after-effects remained current; the surviving native peoples were still being wronged. The narratives reinforced by Colonization directly supported and aided in the perpetration of those wrongs, while (I’d argue) no Jew’s life was threatened by Panzer General. At the time, at least, I saw Colonization’s decisions as doing active ethical harm in a way that PG’s decisions didn’t.

And I think there’s still some grounds to support that position, at least for the United States. Neo-Nazis remain a fringe group. There are some Holocaust deniers in positions of political power. Panzer General might subtly help their causes, a little. But the majority of the leaders of at least one political party would be strongly supportive of the false narratives propped up by Colonization’s gameplay decisions. The revolution was one of the greatest acts of heroic bravery in history, founding a nation on freedom. The “Indians” were savages whose weakness “wasted” the many natural resources they’d been gifted, and the Europeans were right to take and keep their lands. And slavery? Well, not really a need to address it.

- Josh T

December 5, 2020 at 5:53 pm

guaranted -> guaranteed
“How Historical Games Integrate of Ignore Slavery” > “How Historical Games Integrate or Ignore Slavery”

Since you mentioned Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, have you watched the author’s movie, Playing Columbine (http://playingcolumbine.com/), about the public reaction to the game? It’s a really great time capsule of that era of gaming controversy and discussion, and included some tidbits I didn’t know about (like the game’s exclusion from Slamdance’s 2007 Guerrilla Games Competition.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2020 at 7:23 pm

Thanks!

I did see the film, although it’s been quite some years. I’m sure it would indeed play as a great time capsule today.

- John Elliott

December 5, 2020 at 9:18 pm

Civilization: Call To Power has a slavery mechanic too – I didn’t use it as a player, so my only experience of it was AI slavers stealing population from my cities.

- Jason Dyer

December 5, 2020 at 10:45 pm

I could never get into Colonization; I remember finding Conquest of the New World (1996) to be more fun. I always played as the Native Americans, though.

- John

December 5, 2020 at 11:13 pm

I didn’t discover Colonization until it arrived on GOG, but in the years since I’ve played quite a lot of it. Until you mentioned it, Jimmy, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that the game does not contain or address slavery at all. I’m not sure why, except that various forms of privilege probably have something to do with it. I feel like an idiot now. The game’s issues regarding Native Americans are of course obvious, as is the problem of treating the Dutch, French, and Spanish colonial projects as mostly identical to that of the English. Even the game’s depiction of the English colonial project deviates from actual history in what I think are several important respects.

And yet, for all that I’m a person who is sometimes quite fussy about the depiction of history, I think that Colonization is a very good game. It may look a lot like Civilization but it doesn’t quite play like Civilization, and I consider that a strength as well as a welcome novelty. Worker management is semi-incidental in Civilization but it’s at the heart of Colonization. Civilization, at least in the first few games in the series, is a game that rewards horizontal play. You want to spread your civilization as widely as possible as quickly as possible. Colonization rewards vertical play. Founding a lot of cities will only anger the Native Americans to no purpose. Moreover, smaller cities can’t produce the agricultural surpluses needed to support the statesmen, lumberjacks, carpenters, ore miners, and blacksmiths you will need to produce public support for independence and the cannons with which to fight for it. Finally, combat is very, very chancy in Colonization, even on the easier difficulty levels. Going out to fight the Native Americans is a risky, expensive business in the early game when men and muskets are scarce and a waste of time in the late game when there are more important things to worry about. In short, playing Colonization as if it were Civilization is usually a bad idea. Of course playing Civilization produces a superior Civilization-playing experience. Colonization may look like a 4X game–like THE 4X game, even–but I think it’s really a city-builder at heart.

To really enjoy Colonization, I have to sort of divorce it from history in my head. The game can still teach me things–just last month it inspired me to go read up on Jean de Brebeuf–but I am acutely conscious of (what I now recognize are only some of) its omissions, simplifications, and gameplay compromises as I play. Knowing that revolution is the endgame, I establish cities in ahistorical patterns. I perversely build my colonial empire with as few ports as I can reasonably manage, reducing the need to build robust fortifications. I leave profitable coastal tiles undeveloped, so as to benefit from ambush bonuses against royalist troops. I seldom bother to deal with Native Americans one way or the other unless forced or unless I’m exploiting certain semi-random bonuses that make otherwise non-useful petty convicts into effective missionaries.

So, can Colonization be saved? What would need to change to make it both a good game and good history? I don’t know. I’m not sure that it’s possible. I think that you could make a good, historically accurate game about the colonial period, but think that the game should probably not be either a 4X game or 4X-adjacent. It would probably be better to design a game where the player plays a character or series of characters in a colonial setting and explore the issues of the period in that way rather than have him play as an abstracted, godlike manager, who, after all, did not actually exist anyway.

- Veronica Maclean

December 6, 2020 at 5:46 pm

The problem with the “it’s just a game” argument is that it contains an unstated major premise: that the setting doesn’t matter. If that were true, could you take the exact same game mechanics and put them in a game about rape? Traumatize and abuse the most women and you win? What about torture? Your UI is a human body and you win by causing the most pain without killing the person. The person’s family is watching. Would these games with identical game mechanics be fun? There could be inventory management, tricky resource allocation trade offs, tech trees, and all the other “interesting decisions” that we like. No, those games would not be fun, of course, because the setting matters. The resource management decisions are fun in part because of the feeling that you are getting food to an army and building a new town hall.

Given that setting matters, why then does the torture game bother Player X but the slavery game doesn’t? Because Player X doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the horror that slavery was (and is, as the echos of it still reverberate). That is the essence of it. Anyone, in my opinion, who doesn’t abhor a game that glosses over slavery doesn’t understand slavery, really. It’s an abstract concept they can put out of their mind. That’s the real problem here, in my view.

Next is the argument that games are ethically neutral tools and thus only the player’s morality matters. Jimmy already dismantled this silly argument throughly, but I’ll add one more thing. Games have editorial decisions in them, just like any creative endeavor. Those editorial decisions carry moral implications and are the responsibility of the designer. You can’t simulate reality perfectly, so you choose which pieces to simulate. That is far, far from a morally neutral endeavor. This is another excuse for young white men to feel good about playing games that gloss over the worst crimes against humanity in history.

I think the balance struck by Civilization is reasonable- it’s such a high level simulation of so many things and they clearly acknowledge the horrors being left out and glossed over so that the game does not contribute to whitewashing history. As for Colonization? As Jimmy said, just don’t make that game. The world doesn’t need it. Apply those same fun mechanics to a different setting and you have the same amount of fun without making the world a slightly worse place,. Because setting matters.

- Dan

December 6, 2020 at 7:34 pm

“Because Player X doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the horror that slavery was (and is”
Well, no. Do you not appreciate the horror that murder was and is so you avoid any game where you might have to kill someone? Of course not. I don’t even think in any of the games discussed that slavery is even the objective in itself. In Elite, for example, making money and increasing your rating is the stated objective.
In fact, for accuracy, pre-Columbian Americans should also have slaves available as a game mechanic, as they most certainly did take and keep slaves, usually after slaughtering everybody else in a tribe they raided. Why then should we treat them as the “good” guys if slavery is the point of contention? There’s barely any setting anywhere on earth at any time until recently where slavery of some sort was not a factor. Nothing would be left after such an ill-defined and illogical cultural purge.

- GeoX

December 9, 2020 at 12:48 am

I’ve gotta say, when you apparently feel the need to pretend that your opponents are arguing in favor of a “cultural purge,” it’s a little hard to believe that you’re arguing in good faith.

- Dan

December 9, 2020 at 9:26 am

Theorising about my motives in the absence of anything approaching an attempt at rebuttal, or indeed any useful content at all, says much more about your arguing in good faith than mine. Advocating suppression of games or media based on fuzzy wording such as “problematic” or non-consensus personal feelings is indeed an attempt at a cultural purge. Like I said (and you haven’t even bothered to argue against) I can make a case to ban anything anywhere on these nebulous criteria.

- GeoX

December 9, 2020 at 4:04 pm

Yeah. You can claim until you’re blue in the face that cultural criticism is a “cultural purge,” but that doesn’t make it so. It’s a real mystery why nobody wants to engage with you. You could think about why that might be. Or, you could just get mad and defensive and become even more entrenched in your views and learn nothing whatsoever. I wonder which option you’ll choose!

- Dan

December 9, 2020 at 6:52 pm

“Yeah. You can claim until you’re blue in the face that cultural criticism is a “cultural purge,” but that doesn’t make it so.”
I have explained why it is so. You have asserted it is not, again with not even a whiff of a stab at refuting it in any meaningful way. I will assume you cannot.

“It’s a real mystery why nobody wants to engage with you.”
Several of my posts have been responded to. Again, it’s hard to be conclusive regarding whether you are not trying to or not capable of following this debate?

“You could think about why that might be.”
Likewise, you could stop and consider your rage,,presumably some deep frustration at being unable to form a cogent argument, that forces you to ignore the posts replying to me in order to fabricate some yarn about me being ignored.

“Or, you could just get mad and defensive and become even more entrenched in your views and learn nothing whatsoever. I wonder which option you’ll choose!”
Says the guy so mad and defensive he failed to notice how I have been responded to multiple times. You could admit you were wrong, likewise admit you have yet to produce anything even in orbit of an argument, or you could, you know, double down with the “you are a” and “your current emotion is” stuff.

Hope that helps. The next lesson isn’t free though.

- GeoX

December 9, 2020 at 7:12 pm

I mean, knew you’d choose the latter option. It was a rhetorical question. But, uh, thanks for the object lesson.

- Dan

December 9, 2020 at 7:26 pm

You have nothing of value to say.
Move on, both specifically and generally.

- Jimmy Maher

December 9, 2020 at 9:02 pm

This is the first time I’ve ever had to do this, but here goes…

I’m always happy to host opposing points of view, and I appreciate that you’re obviously very passionate on this subject. However, you aren’t saying anything new now that you’re eleven comments in, your tone is getting worse and worse, and I’m afraid you may be making it unpleasant for other people to share their points of view. So, your comments will go into a moderation queue from now on. If you have something substantively new to say, and can do so civilly, I’ll approve them. Otherwise, I think we’ve all had ample opportunity to consider your arguments.

(Now we just have to hope this moderation-queue thing works like I think it does…)

- Emily Bowman

December 6, 2020 at 10:29 pm

Good pair of essays. There’s a definite sliding scale of realism vs surrealism in games, and if they cross the uncanny valley and land on the realism side, they will be more harshly judged and taken to task for their real-world implications and omissions. That’s why nearly all games retain a bit of cartoony otherness to them, unless telling an ugly story warts and all is their main motivation.

I’m as guilty as anyone of sometimes just wanting to turn my brain off and solve some puzzles or command some mechanics to succeed at some arbitrary objective, but it’s important to remember when things hit too close to home, and try to be serious yet bowdlerized at the same time, to step back and take a broader look.

- CdrWilmot

December 6, 2020 at 11:05 pm

King of Dragon Pass features slavery, in it’s pseudo-iron age context.
It seems to handle it reasonably well, making it a (non-judgemental) choice but one you have to deal with if you go that route. I think Rome: Total War has enslavement too.
But those games and Elite (where not only could you trade slaves, you could actively capture them) manage enough setting-distance to seemingly make it acceptable to include.

Pharoah consciously omits slavery, even though ancient Egyptian slavery does not have the modern resonance or consequences of slavery in the North America.
I find it odd that Colonization was actually made in the US. You might expect it to have come from a developer outside the US context, who failed to understand the significance of slavery in North America, an issue with consequences that are still very much alive.

- Ross

December 8, 2020 at 2:17 am

Really, no one’s better at overlooking the significance of slavery in North America like white Americans.

No one’s got more to gain by ignoring it, really.

- Dan

December 8, 2020 at 4:59 pm

Really, no one’s better at overstating the significance of slavery in North America like black Americans.

No one’s got more to lose by ignoring it, really.

Just as true as what you said.

- Bogdanow

December 6, 2020 at 11:24 pm

I’ve never liked Colonization too much. But for my father, that was the game to play. He loved it. I think he enjoyed the actual limitations, which made it into a smaller game than Civilization.

- namaste

December 9, 2020 at 7:39 am

Well, I played this a lot when I was teenager and the three things that jumped to me since the first play were:
1. absence of slavery
2. all wrongs were charged against the spanish which was made the official “killing natives” faction
3. absence of portuguese

The simple model of natives – which made no difference between tribes and empires – I attributed back then to limitations of the engine.

The other things I attributed them to USA chauvinism and in fact the focus of this article is also very USA-centric and just reflects the current USA obsesions.

By the way, I expect another article like this one tackling KOEI’s “Gengis Khan”
By the way I am expecting

- Jake Wildstrom

December 20, 2020 at 10:16 pm

Two notable things jumping out at me, bothering to comment late:

The omission of slavery vs. the omission of other aspects from other games: I’m not sure I 100% agree that a game can’t be about the settlement of America without slavery as a major aspect, but definitely this game couldn’t have been honestly made without engaging with slavery: the overwhelming focus of the game is on the management of manpower and trade goods, on the granularity level of individual workers (or representative “parcels” of specific-trade workers) and of specific trade goods. There is no honest way to engage with industry on that level of specificity without, y’know, noting that some industries were incredibly dependent on slave labor. A game with a higher level of abstraction, or a different focus, could maybe dodge it and still be fundamentally honest, but it would be a very different game. For better or for worse, this is what differentiates it from, say, the Railroad Tycoon or Panzer General examples. Railroad Tycoon‘s construction model is a purely abstract notion of paying for things with money, and doesn’t engage with labor at any level: not limitations, not strikes, and not the humanitarian crises which were connected tot hem in real life. Likewise Panzer General doesn’t actually have an obvious place in the gameplay where the nightmarish crimes of the Nazis are relevant, so it’s hard to see how (if one chooses to make those particular games) the underlying ethical problems can be incorporated into play, whereas in Colonization they’re rather conspicuous in their absence (and in their presence, inasmuch as Colonization recognized, if poorly, the fact that there are major ethical issues in how European colonizers interacted with the natives).

The other thing is that Colonization‘s baked-in narrative is one which not only normalized a British-colonial story, but a specific, exceptional British colonial story. Most European colonies (especially in Africa, Asia, and Oceania) established a thin European administrative class exploiting a primarily native labor force (and native markets), and the revolutions, when they came, were fairly specifically clashes between extremely distinct cultures and ethnicities. In Central and South America the racial identities were more complex but not so very far from this. The few exceptional cases which were actively settled by Europeans (especially the British) usually didn’t break away violently; the independence of, e.g. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were pretty gradual affairs, and were more typical of how people who thought of themselves as transplanted Europeans negotiated an independent identity.

- Chris Rasmus

December 28, 2020 at 1:02 am

I’ve been reading your site for years and years, Jimmy, and bought your book on Pyramids. I grew up on an Apple II and so your articles have always interested me. I appreciate you very much, and I know I’m not speaking for myself.

But this review caught me by surprise, I must say. I had always assumed you were simply reporting on history using your particular brand of journalism and wit which I’ve always enjoyed in the past. But this review injected a lot of personal opinions, some that I find myself vehemently in opposition to, that I don’t feel were necessary for your reader.

Perhaps you’ve done the very same thing in the past, and I just failed to notice it. After all I’ll admit I haven’t read ALL of your articles.

Part of me just doesn’t understand why simply reporting the omission of slavery (for example) in Colonization wasn’t enough, and even perhaps going so far as to report that there were various groups who opposed the omission (with appropriate quotes from selected individuals within said organizations). To actually then add personal bias and make judgmental conclusions?

That puts you into a new category of author. An author that now I have to worry about reading things that are ideologically in opposition to my current world view. And don’t misunderstand, I’ve got authors that I read (on purpose) that are in that category. But Jimmy Maher?

You used to be an author I could just read for pleasure and enjoy the historical accuracy of the content.

And a final few (random) thoughts…did anybody ever grow up playing cowboys and indians? I’m sorry, I meant cowboys and native-american-indigenous. Dan has made some very salient points above, irregardless of his possible too-severe tone, using simple cold hard logic. Whatever happened to critical thinking? We used to be able to actually debate things in this country back when I was growing up, and people wouldn’t burst into tears and need to go recover in a “safe space” afterward.

TLDR: At the risk of alienating half the people who read this (or more!): It’s JUST A GAME! My goodness. Having a problem with the LACK OF SLAVERY in a computer game makes as little sense as wanting to ban Risk because it encourages world domination through war. I could completely get behind Jimmy Maher and this article if it was reviewing a “historical treatise” on the American Revolution, or some such.

But again…we’re talking a computer game.

- Mike Taylor

December 28, 2020 at 10:57 pm

I’m not understanding your objection at all, Chris. Jimmy does on the whole constrain his writing to historical accounts, with some limited personal opinion carefully ringfenced off so it can’t be confused with the historical facts. In a few clearly signposted articles, such as this one, he takes flight from objective reporting to go deeper into a side-issue that catches his interest. How that can be a problem? If you don’t enjoy such posts, just skip them.

“An author that now I have to worry about reading things that are ideologically in opposition to my current world view.” <– I don't see why that would be something to worry about.

- Lisa H.

December 29, 2020 at 11:07 pm

Being able to say about something that “it’s just a game!” demonstrates a position of privilege with regards to whatever the game depicts. This isn’t necessarily a value judgement about a given player; it may not even be possible to avoid. But it’s important to recognize that there are others for whom something may very much not be “just a game”.

“Cowboys and Indians” is a strange example to try to stand on.

- Leo Vellés

January 1, 2021 at 9:13 pm

“The funnest parts of Colonization are the parts you spend the least amount of time doing”.
Funnest was intended or should be funniest?
Also, although Sid Meir said that the game should be credited to be a Reynolds creation, the marketing department of Microprose thought otherwise, judging by the game’s cover

- Leo Vellés

January 2, 2021 at 2:04 am

Whoops, that’s what happens when you comment before finishing to read the article. Sorry about that!

- Lisa H.

January 2, 2021 at 2:27 am

“Funnest” was probably intended, but is not standard English, or at least not formal usage. More correct would be to say “the most fun parts”.

- Andreas

January 25, 2021 at 2:37 am

Colonization is a work of art.

However, ethical issues go far deeper than was discussed in this otherwise highly informative article – deeper still than even airbrushing out of (African) slaves. We should not forget that the very reason Europeans begun the transatlantic slave trade was because they kept running out of native slaves as they were working them to death.

The first impression of the Americas in the game is one of “pristine” forests, with bands of natives roaming around especially in North America, with all road-building and forest cutting done by European “pioneers” (and that Natives will complain about). This is unfortunately a whitewashed account that is several decades out of step with what we know of the history of ecology, economy, and demographics:

Current reconstructions place the population of the Americas at the end of the 15th century on the order of 200 million people. They had dense irrigated farmlands and road networks. Early European explorers reported that along the North American coastline farmland extended to the horizon.

It was the very genocide (through diseases but also through war, ecological destruction, and slavery) of the native populations that transformed the ecology to something closer to what is shown in the game. Plummeting populations led to re-forestation of the farmlands – a process on a scale so immense that is reflected in a reduction of CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

A second example: In the game, a single figure expert silver miner (representing anywhere from hundreds to a few thousand people according to the game manual) working a silver mine is enough to flood even the Dutch market and over time bring the price down.

Actually Potosi (in today’s Peru) the source of 60% of world silver production in the 16th century, had a larger population than any European city (including London) and worked enslaved indigenous people to death by the hundreds of thousands. The price did not collapse as the silver was mainly traded on to China, largely funding the rise of Europe.

None of this is particularly controversial, you can look it up in any recent mainline history book by now. Though I recommend “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as it directly deals with the implications. There you will also find interesting tidbits like the fact that the Spanish actually sent an expeditionary force to attack the British at Jamestown to deny the upstart colonial power a foothold; however, the Spanish force included black slaves who revolted and teamed up with the indigenous to rout the Spanish incursion.

- Pingback: h. Play» Blog Archive » On game creators responsibilities

- Anonymous

March 27, 2021 at 11:52 am

”
The core assertion here is that the game doesn’t force the player’s hand at all — that in a game like, say, Grand Theft Auto it’s the player who chooses to indulge in vehicular mayhem instead of driving politely from place to place like a law-abiding citizen.
”

This example is inaccurate. There is a series on Youtube called “Can You Complete GTA 5 Without Wasting Anyone?” which shows that completing the game requires you to kill tens of people, even if the player goes through extraordinary measures to avoid doing so. In addition, you have to torture someone and tattoo a penis on another person’s chest. There is no way to play any GTA game the “right” way without murdering virtual people.

”
Although the “just a game” defense may seem a tempting get-out-of-jail-free card in the context of a Panzer General or a Colonization, one should think long and hard before one plays it. For to do so is to infantilize the entire medium — to place it into some other, fundamentally different category from books and movies and other forms of media that are allowed a place at the table where serious cultural dialog takes place.
…
Perhaps the only practical solution to the dilemma is that of simply not making any more versions of Colonization. No, it’s not a terribly satisfying solution, placing limits as it does on what games are allowed to do and be.
”

This article seems to flirt very closely with the premise that one should not produce or consume artistic representations of evil things. Schindler’s List is right out, horror movies are too, as is every video game where someone shoots someone else and the entire genre of Gangsta Rap music. We must “think long and hard” before even playing Super Mario Brothers… as it depicts unnecessary cruelty to turtles and squid.

Perhaps I’m misreading your intention, but this piece seems pretty sympathetic to the perspective that “the only practical solution to the dilemma is that of simply not making [art with these themes].” Other people in these comments seem to also believe that you agree that the *correct* solution is “just don’t make that game. The world doesn’t need it.”

Another practical solution is to recognize that artistic depiction of evil is not itself evil, even if said depiction is interactive. The choice is not between “damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” but rather includes a third choice : not being damned in either case. Indeed, this seems to be the only practical solution which leaves us with a world that contains art able to reflect and comment on such behavior.

Lode Runner
December 18, 2020

It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented games, I passed over some worthy candidates because I considered them somewhat out of scope. And now, needless to say, I regret some of those omissions.

One of the games that’s been made most conspicuous by its absence here is Lode Runner, Doug Smith’s seminal action-puzzle platformer from 1983. “Iconic” is a painfully overused adjective today, but, if any game truly can be called an icon of its era, it’s this one. So, I decided to take the release of Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, a 1994 remake/re-imagining that does fit neatly into our current position in the historical chronology, as an opportunity to have a belated look back at the original.

Doug Smith

In late 1981, Doug Smith was studying architecture and numerical analysis at the University of Washington in Seattle. Meanwhile he had a part-time job in one of the university’s computer labs, where he met two other students named James Bratsanos and Tracy Steinbeck, who were tinkering with a game they called Kong, a not so-thinly-veiled reference to the arcade hit Donkey Kong. Bratsanos had first created Kong the previous year on one of his high school’s Commodore PET microcomputers, and the two were now in the process of porting it to one of the university’s DEC VAX-11/780 minicomputers. Smith soon joined the effort. When their fellow students started to show some interest in what they were doing, they made the game publicly available.

In Kong, you guided a little man through a single-screen labyrinth of tunnels linked by ladders, implemented entirely using monochrome textual characters; your man was a dollar sign, your enemies paragraph symbols. Armed only with a pick axe that was more tool than weapon, you must steal all of the gold that was lying around the place, whilst avoiding or delaying the guards who protected it, generally by digging pits into which they could fall. The group hid their game from the university’s administrators by embedding it into an otherwise broken graphing program. “‘Graph’ would prompt the user for a function,” remembers a fellow student named Rick LaMont, “then crap out unless the secret password was entered to play Kong.”

With its captive audience of playtesters in the form of the students who hung around the computer labs, the game grew organically as the weeks passed. Soon students were coming by only to play Kong; Lamont claims that “a ‘show process’ command would often report 80 percent of the users running ‘graph.'” Eager players began to queue up behind the university’s computer terminals, and Kong became a fixture of campus life, the University of Washington’s equivalent of what Zork had once been at MIT. Along the way, it gradually evolved from an arcade game into something that required as much thought as reflexes; the levels just kept getting more and more complex.

According to Smith, it was his eight-year-old nephew who convinced him to port the game to the Apple II; having visited the computer lab once or twice and seen it in action there, the little boy was decidedly eager for a version he could play at home. “After he bugged me enough,” said Smith in a 1999 interview, “one weekend I rewrote it for the Apple II, basically in three days.” This first microcomputer version was a copy of the DEC VAX version right down to its monochrome ASCII graphics. Smith made just one big change: he renamed the game Miner to avoid legal entanglements. After paying James Bratsanos $1500 for the rights to the game, he submitted it to Brøderbund Software, only to get a terse rejection letter back: “Thank you for submitting your game concept. Unfortunately, it does not fit with our product line.”

But, seeing how popular the game continued to be at the university, Smith decided to take another stab at it. He borrowed enough money to buy a color monitor and joystick for his Apple II, and programmed a second, much-improved version with color bitmap graphics and controls that took advantage of one of the Apple’s unique affordances: its joysticks had two buttons rather than the standard one, which in this case allowed the player’s avatar to drill to the left or right of himself without the player ever having to reach for the keyboard. In late 1982, Smith sent this new version to four different publishers, among them Brøderbund and Sierra. All of them knew as soon as they saw this latest version of the game that they wanted it for themselves. John Williams, the little brother of Sierra founder Ken Williams, and the company’s chief financial officer from the tender age of twenty, later claimed that he “almost lost his job” because he spent so much time playing the game Smith sent to them. But Smith wouldn’t end up publishing his game through Sierra. Instead he wound up entrusting it to Brøderbund after all.

Founded and run as a family business by a personable former lawyer and real-estate developer named Doug Carlston, Brøderbund would consistently demonstrate an uncanny talent for identifying exactly the software product that Middle America was looking for at any given moment, securing it for themselves, and then delivering it to their customers in the most appealing possible way. (At the risk of sounding unkind, I might note at this juncture that, whereas Ken Williams loved to talk about the mainstreaming of games and other software, the Carlston family talked less but proved more adept at the practical work of doing so.) In the years to come, this talent would result in a quantity of truly iconic Brøderbund titles out of all proportion to the relatively modest number of products which the company released in total: titles like Karateka, Carmen Sandiego, Bank Street Writer, The Print Shop, Prince of Persia, SimCity, Myst. But before any of them came Doug Smith’s game.

Brøderbund offered Smith a $10,000 advance and a very generous 23-percent royalty. And they also promised to get behind his game with the kind of concerted, professional marketing push that was still a rarity in the industry of that era. Showing a remarkable degree of restraint for his age as well as faith in his game’s potential, Smith signed with Brøderbund rather than accept another publisher’s offer of $100,000 outright, with no royalty to follow. He would be amply rewarded for his foresight.

For example, it was Brøderbund’s savvy marketers who gave Miner its final name. Well aware of the existence of another, superficially similar platform game called Miner 2049er, they proposed the alternate title of Lode Runner, as in “running after the mother lode.” Soon after choosing this new name that held fast the idea that the player was some sort or other of miner, they devised a more detailed fictional context for the whole affair that abandoned that notion entirely. It involved the evil Bungeling Empire, the antagonist of their 1982 hit Choplifter!:

You are a galactic commando deep in enemy territory. Power-hungry leaders of the repressive Bungeling Empire have stolen a fortune in gold from the people by means of excessive fast-food taxes. Your task? To infiltrate each of 150 different treasure rooms, evade the deadly Bungeling guards, and recover every chest of Bungeling booty.

In the spirit of this narrative, the hero’s pick axe became a laser drill.

Still, none of this background would be remembered by anyone who actually played the game. Instead the supposed Bungeling guards would become popularly known as “mad monks,” which their pudgy low-resolution shapes rather resembled. Doubtless plenty of imaginative young gamers made up new narratives of their own to fit the bizarre image of greedy monks chasing an intrepid adventurer up and down a maze of scaffolding dotted with gold.

Lode Runner on the Apple II.

Smith dropped out of university at the end of 1982, and worked closely with Brøderbund over the course of six months or so to polish his game in a concerted, methodical way, something that was seldom done at this early date. They helped him to tweak each of the 150 levels — some designed by Smith himself, some by the kids who lived around Smith’s family home, whom he paid out of his own pocket on a per-level basis — to a state of near-perfection, and arranged them all so that they steadily progressed in difficulty as you played through them one after another. And then Brøderbund encouraged Smith to polish up his level editor and include that as well.

Lode Runner got a rapturous reception upon its release in June of 1983, quickly becoming the best-selling product Brøderbund had ever released to that point; Smith was soon collecting more than $70,000 per month in royalties. If anything, its reputation among students of game design has become even more hallowed today. It stands out from its peers of 1983 like a young Glenn Gould in a beginner’s piano course.

That said, Lode Runner is not quite the sui generis game which its more enraptured devotees are sometimes tempted into claiming it to be. When James Bratsanos first created what would eventually become Lode Runner on the Commodore PET, he was according to his own testimony working from a friend’s description of an arcade game: “He didn’t explain it well, and I took creative liberties and assumed I understood what he meant. So for certain elements I completely misinterpreted it.” Bratsanos, an acknowledged non-gamer, may later have come to believe that the game his friend had been describing was Donkey Kong, and assumed that the major differences between that game and his stemmed from his youthful “misinterpretation” of his friend’s description of the former. But the chronology here doesn’t pass muster: Donkey Kong was first released in the summer of 1981, while Bratsanos is sure that he started working on his game, which originally went under the rather unpleasant name of Suicide, in 1980. Suicide became Kong only after Donkey Kong had been released and become an arcade sensation, and Bratsanos had started at the University of Washington the following fall.

So, what was it that his friend actually described to him back in 1980? The best candidate is Space Panic, a largely forgotten Japanese stand-up arcade game from that year which would seem to be the first ever example of the evergreen genre that would become known as the platformer.  Not only did Space Panic have you running and climbing your way through a vertical labyrinth, but it also allowed you to dig holes in it to trap your enemies, just like Suicide, Kong, and finally Lode Runner. Space Panic was not a commercial success, perhaps because it asked for too much too soon from an audience still enthused with simpler fare like Space Invaders; it was reported that the average session with it lasted all of 30 seconds. But it does appear that it entranced one anonymous teenage boy enough that he told his buddy James Bratsanos all about it. And from that random conversation — from that butterfly flapping its wings, one might say — eventually stemmed one of the biggest games of the 1980s.

Space Panic, the 1980 standup-arcade game at the root of the Lode Runner family tree.

But if it isn’t quite an immaculate creation, Lode Runner is a brilliant one, a classic lesson in the way that fiendish complexity can arise out of deceptive simplicity in game design. It offers just six verbs — move left, right, up, or down; dig left or right — combined with only slightly more nouns — platforms of diggable brick or impenetrable metal, ladders, trap doors, overhead poles for shimmying, monks, treasures. And yet from this disarmingly short list of ingredients arises a well-nigh infinite buffet of devious possibility.

Although Lode Runner does retain some vestiges of its arcade inspirations in the form of a score and limited lives, it’s as much a puzzle or even a strategy game as an action game at heart. (Your lives are essentially meaningless in the end; you can save your progress at any point.) Playing each level entails first experimenting and dying — dying a lot — until you can devise a thoroughgoing plan for how to tackle it. Then, it’s just a matter of executing the plan perfectly; this is where the action elements come into play. The levels in Lode Runner are dynamic enough that getting through them doesn’t require stumbling across a single rote, set-piece solution envisioned by the designer; there’s space here for player creativity, space for variation, space for quick thinking that gets you out of an unanticipated jam — or that fails to do so just when you believe you’re on the brink of victory.

The levels build upon one another, each one training you for what’s still to come as it forces you to think about your limited menu of verbs and nouns in new ways. This sort of progressive design was not a hallmark of most computer games of 1983, and thus serves to make Lode Runner stand out all the more. The world would arguably have to wait until the release of DMA Designs’s Lemmings in 1991 to play another action-puzzler that was its equal in terms of design.

Just as in Lemmings, every single detail of Lode Runner’s implementation becomes relevant as the levels become more complex, from the timing of events in the environment to the rudimentary but completely predictable artificial intelligence of the monks. Consider: the pits you drill are automatically filled in again after ten seconds, while monks climb out of pits into which they’ve fallen in just a few seconds. But what would happen if you could time things so that a pit is filled in while a monk is still inside it? The monk would get buried there permanently, that’s what, giving you a precious reprieve before the replacement who is spawned at the very top of the screen makes his way down to you once again. By the time you reach level 30 or so, you’ll be actively using the monks as your helpmates, taking advantage of the fact that they too like to pick up gold — for there’s now gold in places which you can’t reach, meaning you must depend on them to be your delivery men. Once one of them has what you need, you just need to make him fall into a pit, then walk on his head to steal the booty. Easy peasy, right? If you think so, don’t worry: there’s still 120 levels to go, each one more insidiously intricate than the last.

And then, when you’re done with all 150 levels, there’s still the level editor. Even by the standards of today, the original Apple II Lode Runner provides a lot of content. By the standards of 1983, its generosity was mind-boggling.

A phenomenal game by any standard, Lode Runner became a phenomenon of another sort in the months after its release. Doug Smith, a private, retiring fellow who loathed the spotlight, nevertheless became a household name among hardcore gamers, joining the likes of Bill Budge, Richard Garriott, and Nasir Gebelli as one of the last of the Apple II scene’s auteur-programmer stars. At a time when a major hit was a game that sold 50,000 copies, his game sold in the hundreds of thousands on the Apple II and in ports to the Commodore 64, the IBM PC, and virtually every other commercially viable computer platform under the sun. First it became the Apple II game of 1983; then it became the game of whatever year it happened to be ported to each other platform, collecting award after award almost by default. And then there was Japan.

Lode Runner appeared on the Macintosh soon after that machine’s release in 1984. Although the construction set was a a natural fit for that machine’s GUI, the actual game proved less satisfying. “What used to be a struggle strictly between the commando and the Bungeling guards is now also a battle between you and the [mouse] pointer,” wrote Macworld magazine. Such complaints would become something of a theme: Apple II purists insist to this day that no Lode Runner has ever played quite as well as the one that Doug Smith personally programmed for their favorite platform.

One of Doug Carlston’s smartest moves in the early days of Brøderbund was to forge links with the burgeoning software and gaming scene in Japan. He was particularly chummy with Yuji Kudo, the founder of Hudson Soft, Japan’s biggest software publisher of all. (A model-train enthusiast extraordinaire, Kudo took his company’s very un-Japanese name from his favorite type of steam locomotive.) The two men already had a deal in place to bring Lode Runner to Japan even before it was released in the United States. During the summer of 1983, it became one of the first ten games to be made available for the Nintendo Famicom — the videogame console that would later conquer the world as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Like Wizardry before it and Populous after it, Lode Runner turned into that rarest of birds, a Western videogame which the Japanese embraced with all the fannish obsessiveness of which they’re capable — which is, to be clear, a lot of obsessiveness indeed. Before there was Super Mario Bros. to drive sales of Nintendo consoles all over the world, there was Lode Runner to get the ball rolling in Japan itself. Sales of the game in Japan alone topped 1 million in the first eighteen months, prompting one journalist to declare Lode Runner Japan’s new “national pastime.”

The country’s Lode Runner mania reached its peak in the summer of 1985, when Hudson Soft, Brøderbund, and Sony joined forces to sponsor a national competition in the game. Of the 3700 players between the ages of nine and fourteen who entered the competition, 50 became finalists, invited to come to Tokyo and play the game on what was at that time the largest video screen in the world, 86 feet in width. A slightly uncomfortable-looking Doug Smith, coaxed into the spotlight by Brøderbund’s marketers, presided over the affair and even agreed to join the competition. (He didn’t last very long.) “I like the people of Japan,” he said. “There’s an honesty among the people that is so refreshing — they would never think of pirating computer games, for instance.” (A more likely explanation for Lode Runner’s high sales in Japan than the people’s innate honesty was, of course, the fact that piracy on the cartridge-based Famicom was a possibility for only the most technically adept.)

Lode Runner running on the biggest of all big screens in Japan.

A rare shot of Doug Smith in person, giving prizes to the winners of the Japanese Lode Runner competition.

By decade’s end, Lode Runner’s worldwide sales had topped 2.5 million copies. I can hardly emphasize enough what absurdly high figures these are for a game first sold on the humble Apple II.

When you take Brøderbund’s generous royalty and combine it with sales like this, then reckon in the fact that Lode Runner was essentially a one-man production, you wind up with one very wealthy young game programmer. Still in his early twenties, Doug Smith found himself in the enviable position of never having to work another day in his life. He bought, according to his friend Rick LaMont, “a Porsche 911 Carrera, a Bayliner speedboat, a house in Issaquah, and a wife (as a colleague once joked).”

In the face of temptations like these, Doug Smith became one of a number of early Apple II auteurs, such as the aforementioned Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli, who weren’t able to sustain their creative momentum as lone-wolf developers became teams and the title of game designer slowly separated itself from that of game programmer. He did provide Brøderbund with one Lode Runner sequel of a sort: Championship Lode Runner, with 50 new levels that had mostly been sent to the company by fans and that were (correctly) advertised as picking up in difficulty right where the first game had left off. But its technology and graphics were barely tweaked, and the decision to aim it exclusively at the hardest-core of the hardcore put a natural limit on its appeal.

After that, there followed several years of silence from Smith, off enjoying his riches and pondering the strange course his life had taken, from starving student to wealthy man of leisure in a matter of months. And truly, his is a story that could only have happened at this one brief window in time, when videogames had become popular enough to sell in the millions but could still be made by a single person.

Just as they did with Wizardry, the impatient Japanese soon took Lode Runner into their own hands, making and releasing a string of sequels in their country that would never appear elsewhere. But what ought to have been a natural ongoing franchise remained oddly under-served by Brøderbund in its country of origin; they released only one more under-realized, under-promoted sequel, for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit line only, created by their recently purchased subsidiary Synapse Software without Smith’s involvement. Perhaps they were just too busy turning all those other products into icons of their era.

It wasn’t until 1994, when Brøderbund’s ten-year option expired and all rights to the game and its trademarks reverted to Smith, that anyone attempted a full-fledged revival in the United States. Irony of ironies, the company behind said revival was Sierra, finally getting their chance with a game that had slipped through their fingers a decade before. The project was driven by Jeff Tunnell, the founder of what was now the Sierra subsidiary known as Dynamix, who had just made the classic puzzler The Incredible Machine.

Lode Runner: The Legend Returns was a symbol of everything that was right and wrong with the games industry of the mid-1990s. Dynamix added beautiful hand-painted backgrounds and a stereo soundtrack to the old formula, but in the minds of many the new version just didn’t play as well as the old; it had something to do with the timing, something to do with the unavoidably different feel of a 1990s 32-bit computer game versus the vintage 8-bit variety — and perhaps something to do as well with Tunnell’s decision to add a lot more surface complexity to the elegantly simple mix of the original, including locks and keys, snares, gas traps, bombs, jackhammers, buckets of goo, and even light and darkness. The Legend Returns did reasonably well for Sierra, but never became the phenomenon that the original had been in its home country. And as for Japan… well, it now preferred homegrown platformers that featured a certain Italian plumber. The various revivals since have generally met the same fate: polite interest, decent sales, but no return to the full-blown Lode Runner mania of the 1980s.

Lode Runner: The Legend Returns definitely looks a lot more impressive than the original, which was far from an audiovisual wonder even in its own time. Opinions are at best divided, however, on whether it plays better. One can detect the influence of Lemmings 2: The Tribes in its diverse, ever-shifting collection of obstacles and affordances, but the end result is somehow less compelling.

Smith did return to playing an active role in the games industry in the 1990s, working as the producer of a couple of Nintendo games among other things. He disappeared from view once again after the millennium, presumably occupying himself mostly with the raising of his five children. He died in 2014 at the age of just 53, of a cause that has never been publicly disclosed.

(Sources: the book Software People: Inside the Computer Business by Douglas G. Carlston; Retro Gamer 111; Ahoy! of April 1986; A.N.A.L.O.G. of March 1984; Computer Gaming World of January/February 1983, October 1983, and March 1986; Electronic Games of June 1983 and January 1985; inCider of April 1984; InfoWorld of October 31 1984; Macworld of August 1985; MicroTimes of December 1984 and September 1985; Brøderbund News of April of Fall 1985; InterAction of Fall 1994. Online sources include IGN’s 1999 interview with Doug Smith, Jeremy Parish’s eulogy to Smith, and a 1991 Usenet reminiscence by Rick LaMont.

Feel free to download the original Lode Runner and its manual for play in the Apple II emulator of your choice.)

Comments
77 Responses

- Ethan Johnson

December 18, 2020 at 6:32 pm

Lode Runner definitely has an interesting legacy though I am highly perplexed as to why you decided to do a post on it.

Also you missed probably the best source of info about the game from Retro Gamer Issue 111, which did interview Smith as well as the creator of the original game Suicide, James Bratsanos.

- Alex Smith

December 18, 2020 at 6:40 pm

Yeah, I am not the type to generally advocate major rewrites (and your amazing blog really never needs them), but you may want to consider tracking that issue down and adding a couple of paragraphs at the start here. There is a lot of history to the game before Smith got his hands on it.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 7:29 pm

Ah, don’t know how I missed that. I normally make a check through my Retro Gamer archive as a matter of course before I write something like this. Edits made. Thanks!

As for my reason for writing this piece: Lode Runner is a game whose absence on this site people have noted frequently over the years. Certainly it’s very important in the history of game design. I thought now would be good chance to correct for its absence, as a bit of a holiday palette cleanser between heavier topics. Apologies if I misjudged.

- Ethan Johnson

December 18, 2020 at 10:10 pm

I have no problem with you covering it, I just thought it’s more out of scope for what the blog is. I love anything you put out so you never need to apologize, just noting the oddity.

Happy Holidays to you Jimmy!

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 10:25 pm

Ditto.

- Simon Michael

December 18, 2020 at 10:39 pm

It’s an important game. I’m very glad you wrote this piece!

- Paul

December 22, 2020 at 12:52 pm

Another very interesting piece, on a game that was before my time (I only discovered the joys of gaming in the 90s, and even then the Loderunner remake went unnoticed by me). It’s incredible how well you bring those times to life and track the fate of games entwined with those who made them! Thanks for your great work.

That said, and because I’m a square and boring enough person to remark on this: it’s a palate cleanser, not a palette cleanser. The former is best served by offering a snack or drink of altogether different flavor in between courses; while the latter end is best achieved through applying some rather nasty chemical. Better not mix the two.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2020 at 12:56 pm

Ah, I always mix those two up. (No pun intended). At least I usually manage to catch it in articles these days…

- Matt Tyson

January 4, 2021 at 7:24 pm

Almost forgot about this game… hard to believe after how many hours I sunk into it at the time

- Elsa

June 17, 2021 at 10:48 pm

The only problem with Loderunner is that it rewards the poorer players by posting the high scorers as #1. The really good players are those who can get to level 150 with the most leftover men and the lowest score. Too bad that couldn’t be changed.

I discovered this game when we had our first computer – a macintosh 128K ($2000 on sale!!) The original version didn’t let you leave and return to the same level. You had to start all over again. As a result, no one was allowed to touch the computer until I either got to the top or lost all my players. It took me most of the weekend to do it. I’ll be 75 in a few weeks and I still love the beauty and simplicity of it. I turn off the sound forget about all the problems in the world.

- Sniffnoy

December 18, 2020 at 6:45 pm

I must nitpick here and point out that the paragraph symbols is not an ASCII character. :) No idea what sort of extended ASCII the VAX-11/780 might have used; the MCS doesn’t seem to have been introduced until 1983.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 7:32 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Alex Smith

December 18, 2020 at 7:15 pm

“and to Sirius and Synergistic, a pair of more brief-lived early Apple II hit-makers”

I am not sure its fair to call Synergistic “brief-lived.” While Bill Clardy gave up on the publishing racket very early, the company continued to exist as a development house well into the 1990s. In fact, Sierra ended up buying it. The studio was finally shut down by Sierra in 1999.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 7:34 pm

Thanks!

- Chris Floyd

December 18, 2020 at 7:21 pm

I feel like you might have buried the lede a little bit here. I believe Lode Runner was the first game–or at least the first blockbuster game–to have a level editor, which has huge implications for the gaming landscape of the 90s, with DOOM/Quake/etc. The wargame Ancient Art of War had a level editor a year later.

My memory of Lode Runner–one of my first memories of PC games at all–was building Lode Runner levels and handing them off to my babysitter to play. He never had much problem overcoming the challenges concocted by a nine-year-old.

Anyway, there’s something extraordinary about those rare games that put the very same tools that the developers use into the hands of players (especially if they’re usable by a nine-year-old). The game needs to be simple enough to have manageable tools, and deep enough to have a million viable levels inside its possibility space. That’s the magic of Lode Runner and not that many other games.

- whomever

December 19, 2020 at 1:30 am

+1. Also, having a PC (actually an XT clone) in the early 80s (well, it was my father’s, but anyway..) meant a very barren game selection, rendered in 4 color CGA and the occasional PC beep. Boy was I envious of my friends with C64s and Atari 800s (even though the XT was technically much more powerful). One of the few games that stood out was the PC port of Lode Runner (which for some reason someone had bought for me), and I did spend many happy hours creating new levels with the level editor.

- Jesse Fuchs

December 20, 2020 at 6:47 pm

Yup. I think Lode Runner is actually pretty comparable to the slightly earlier Boulder Dash in terms of elegance and level design—I don’t really know which I prefer. But Lode Runner is clearly the more important game (and I assume the bigger seller, though Boulder Dash was no slouch and has had at least as many remakes), because of that built-in level editor, whereas Boulder Dash’s only came out a few years later as a separate product. Between Lode Runner and Pinball Construction Set, that’s like 90% of any Gen X game designer’s first experience with level design right there.

On that note, Naomi Clark starts her chapter on “Conversation” in A Game Design Vocabulary with a very insightful dicussion of designing Lode Runner levels for her little sister and learning valuable lessons about game design from it. Can’t find a proper excerpt, but these snippets from Google Books will give you a bit of the gist: https://books.google.com/books?id=sZTlAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA110&vq=lode%20runner&pg=PA110#v=snippet&q=lode%20runner&f=false

- Alex Smith

December 18, 2020 at 7:33 pm

Gah, I am sorry for all the scattered comments; I usually wait until I am done reading a post and consolidate all my comments in one post. Anyway…

“After that, there was only silence from Smith, off enjoying his riches and pondering the strange course his life had taken, from starving student to wealthy man of leisure in a matter of months.”

and

“Smith did resurface from time to time in the 1990s in other games-industry contexts: working as the producer of a couple of Nintendo games, doing a bit of coding here and there.”

This really makes it sound like he essentially left the industry after Lode Runner, which is hardly fair. He worked as a programmer for EA on several titles and spent several years at DMA, where he quite fittingly contributed to a couple of Lemmings games, among others. And his time at Square was pretty substantial. He was one of the main development managers at the short-lived US branch. He contributed to the CG movies of the genre-defining Final Fantasy VII, oversaw the localization of Secret of Mana, and was executive producer on the studio’s failed attempt to carve out its own niche with the original title Secret of Evermore. That’s a lot of video game industry career.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 7:44 pm

There was a long gap between Lode Runner and his 1990s work. He did apparently have one project on the boil, but he seems not to have been able to muster the energy to see it through. Rick LaMont describes it thusly:

He started his own company called QAD. It stood for
Quick And Dirty, but he was prepared to say Quality And Diversity if he felt someone couldn’t handle the real name. He and his two partners, Chip Bulkeley and Mark Ledbury, soon began another project named Ralph. It was to be one of the first video games to utilize double-hires Apple II hardware. Mark just did the graphics. Chip ended up doing more work than Doug and insisted on renegotiating their split before proceeding. The project became more and more overdue and was eventually scrapped.

I didn’t want to get too down in the weeds on all this, but perhaps my characterization was a bit harsh. Edits made. Thanks!

I was uncertain about that Lemmings 2 credit; Doug Smith is a *very* common name, and I couldn’t find a primary source for this other than the game manual. I take it we’re sure that the Doug Smith named there is the same one?

- Alex Smith

December 18, 2020 at 7:58 pm

Pretty sure, though not 100% positive. USGamer and other sites that eulogized him said he worked at DMA, while Moby Games and other credit sites link him to the games. I get what you mean about the common name, so it might be a mistake, but if so, its wide spread in game journalism (which is sadly more plausible than it should be).

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2020 at 8:04 pm

Yeah… it’s a connection I’d love to be true, given the parallels I draw in this article between Lode Runner and Lemmings, but I don’t know of any other association between Smith and British game developers. A voice in the back of my head says to be cautious of this one…

- Alex Smith

December 18, 2020 at 8:14 pm

Yeah, the more I dig the more I believe your instincts were correct. I am just not finding anything solid. I also made the mistake of assuming Moby Games credit pages accurately reflect the credits themselves (I know most of it is fan created and none of it fact-checked, but I naively figured the contributors might at least transcribe properly). The Moby Games Body Harvest credits page specifically lists “Douglas E. Smith” as a programmer, but I checked out footage of the actual credits screen on YouTube, and its just “Doug Smith” there, which as you say is such a common name. Us Smith’s do get around.

- Chris D

December 19, 2020 at 10:45 am

It’s not impossible, but it would be an odd career move for Smith to decide to become a level designer for a (relatively) small Amiga developer in Dundee in the early nineties, especially given that he must have been pretty settled in the US with his house, five kids, boat, etc.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 10:55 am

Yeah… and DMA was doing a *lot* of interviews at the time of Lemmings 2, thanks to the success of the first game. I would think somebody would say at some point, “We’ve got this American bloke working with us who designed Lode Runner, a game that’s sold even more copies than Lemmings 1!” Nor has anyone actually involved with the Lemmings franchise ever mentioned his involvement since. I suspect this all stems from that one in-manual credit and one overeager fan who happened to spot it. As Alex Smith noted, such is the state of gaming journalism…

- Kroc Camen

December 18, 2020 at 8:04 pm

The 1995 sequel, updated to run on Windows, “Lode Runner Online: Mad Monk’s Revenge” was made available to download by one of the original devs on their site (now archived) — https://web.archive.org/web/20190705131126/http://www.daggert.net/Folio/Programming/Presage/LodeRunner/Loderunner1.htm but there’s now a modern engine-remake project making it easy to play on Mac, Windows & Linux! https://mmr.quarkrobot.com/

- Steve McCrea

December 18, 2020 at 9:05 pm

Another fascinating article, thanks!
I have always found Lode Runner to be beautiful, with not a pixel out of place.
It’s also unusual for a microcomputer game to get an arcade port.

- Kroc Camen

December 18, 2020 at 9:43 pm

Jimmy, you could link your Mac screenshot to the in-browser emulation at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mac_Lode_Runner this should be standard practice for your articles by now! There’s no need to download floppy disk images and emulators before being able to play games that you’re writing about

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 8:49 am

I’m a little reluctant to do that because a) playing that way is sometimes okay for trying a game quickly, but is seldom a great way to really dig in play seriously (and I do like to think that most of the games I recommend here reward such a commitment); and b) the stuff hosted on archive.org is often hosted illegally. I don’t want to bring potentially unwelcome attention to it by linking to it. The whole organization’s future is already in doubt thanks to the boneheaded decision to start “lending” unlimited copies of the copyrighted books hosted there. I’d be devastated if it was destroyed by lawsuits — which, yes, may very well happen anyway. (All we can hope for is that the big book publishers who are currently suing see some value in the Internet Archive’s mission and show some forbearance. Legally, the archive doesn’t have a leg to stand on.) I don’t want to add game publishers to the list of plaintiffs.

- Doug Orleans

December 19, 2020 at 10:07 am

This is a bad take, IMO! Some explanation of the nuances of the Archive here: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/23/21293875/internet-archive-website-lawsuit-open-library-wayback-machine-controversy-copyright

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 10:12 am

I hope that article’s take is correct; I was indeed going by the Ars Technica reporting. I rely on the Internet Archive extensively in both my work here and The Analog Antiquarian.

- Don Alsafi

December 18, 2020 at 10:48 pm

Also worth pointing out that the latest remake came out just three years ago!

http://www.tozaigames.com/legacy/

- Cheshire Noir

December 19, 2020 at 4:33 am

Irem even ported it to the arcades. Quite playable in MAME, assuming you can find ROMs for it.

- Kate Willaert

December 19, 2020 at 5:41 am

Alex and Ethan haven’t beat me to it yet, but I wanted to point out something important about the timeline.

In the Retro Gamer issue it says Bratsanos started college in 1981 right after high school. That means he would’ve graduated HS before summer 1981 and started college after summer 1981. Donkey Kong was released that summer, which means either he misremembered the year he graduated, or he’s misremembering the Kong connection.

Space Panic was released by Universal USA in late 1980. I think it’s more likely that his friend described Space Panic to him, he created Suicide based on the description, and then in college he renamed it Kong after this popular game with ladders. Since he never saw Space Panic and didn’t remember the name, maybe he even concluded Donkey Kong *was* the game his friend described, after discovering it had ladders and platforms.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 8:38 am

Yeah… Lode Runner’s early history was really hard to pin down even before I belatedly turned to the Retro Gamer article. We have no physical or textual evidence at all, only often-vague memories to go on, combined with a clear motivation on the part of Doug Smith not to set the record entirely straight — although I’m happy that he finally made some attempt to do so before his life ended. I would say that Space Panic — and the slightly later Apple Panic — are *so* similar to Lode Runner that there almost has to be an influence there. But it’s basically impossible at this point to tease out the exact chain of causation and influence.

Anyway, I’ve added a couple of paragraphs to try to unpack all of this as best I can. Thanks to you and everyone else who helped out. I’m afraid I whiffed a bit on this one.

- Captain Rufus

December 19, 2020 at 11:26 am

Space Panic was relatively common as a first party release for the Colecovision. However CVAddict.com says it was a 1983 release and is a 2-3 out of 10 rarity loose and boxed.

I’d say some of Lode Runner’s levels make it superior to the very abusive Space Panic but in general they don’t really play alike outside of being able to dig. Space Panic is more about setting up combos to kill enemies whereas Lode Runner is about collecting stuff. Oddly enough the double action button of the Coleco really helps it. (Why so many systems seemed content with single button controls when 1979s Intellivision and the odd kludge in the Apple 2’s sticks showed more buttons were huge ill never know.)

- Torbjörn Andersson

December 19, 2020 at 11:56 am

““What used to be a struggle strictly between the commando and the Budgeling guards is now also a battle between you and the [mouse] pointer,” wrote Macworld magazine.”

The Macintosh version I played long ago may have had mouse control (which sounds like an awful idea), but if so it also had keyboard controls (J, K, L, I to move, S and F to dig), which seemed just fine to me.

I haven’t played the Apple II version, so it’s of course quite possible that it was still the superior version.

Also, is it supposed to say “Budgeling”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 12:42 pm

Nope, a typo. Thanks!

- Jacen aka Jaina

December 19, 2020 at 1:55 pm

arranged them all so that they steadily progression in difficulty as you played through them”

I’m hesitant to post that because I genuinely can’t label why my brain thinks there’s a typo there, but you’re the English major

I’m really loving the Analog Antiquitarian, especially the stories about topics I was less familiar with than the pyramids. The hanging gardens one was fascinating, ty!

- Lisa H.

December 19, 2020 at 7:40 pm

It should be “steadily progress” or “there is a steady progression”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 8:47 pm

Thanks!

- Owen C

December 19, 2020 at 6:57 pm

Not sure if it fits within the scope of the article (and you may be already aware of it), but there was also a Lode Runner 2 in the late 90s that had an isometric perspective with 3D levels. It’s the only game in the series I have played so I can’t really compare it to the others.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2020 at 8:48 pm

A bit out of scope, I’m afraid. I wanted to focus on the original, classic Lode Runner.

- Dan Mastriani

December 19, 2020 at 10:03 pm

Fun bit of trivia related to Hudson’s Famicom Lode Runner port: the Famicom version of Hudson’s Bomberman was, supposedly, knocked out in about a day. One of the shortcuts taken to do this was using an enemy sprite from Lode Runner for the player character. So, the now iconic design for the main character of Hudson’s most enduring series only exists because of their collaboration with Brøderbund.

- Byron G

December 20, 2020 at 11:08 am

Interesting article and I will admit that Lode Runner was flying below my radar – not my type of game, though I recall a certain Dig Dug that seems similar.

I would like to remark however on how many puzzle games got an “iconic” status in the early days of computer games (this one, Lemmings, Incredible machine). In more recent years, the only puzzle game with such an impact that I can recall is Portal (1 & 2) and this came on the back of a successful franchise, but stood out for its story and narrative as well. Most other puzzle games I am aware of usually cater to a niche audience; e.g. SpaceChem, TIS-100, etc. from Zachtronics or Baba is You all seem to be programming simulations in different skins and, while successful within their scope, they never sold in huge numbers.

Does this have to do with the innovation and design effort and required to go into such games or to the fact that the wider gaming community just has different tastes?

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2020 at 4:35 pm

I can’t quite agree with your premise. The games you mention are ultra-hardcore puzzlers, but there are also more casual puzzle games — the Angry Birds franchise comes immediately to mind — that are hugely successful. And of course there are countless platformers which are essentially puzzles — i.e., you ‘re expected to play each level again and again until you can work out a successful approach, just as in Lode Runner. Indeed, I’d argue that games like these have more in common with Lode Runner than something like TIS-100.

- Doug Orleans

December 20, 2020 at 7:13 pm

Braid and The Witness are indie puzzle games but I think they had a pretty big impact too.

- Byron G

December 20, 2020 at 10:45 pm

These are all fair points and I have to agree. To be honest, I did not overlook the Angry Birds games, but I admit that I thought they didn’t fit in the description, due to the perceived (by me) ease of going through the levels. I guess that’s just one of the games’ ways of keeping the player hooked after all.

- TC

December 20, 2020 at 4:29 pm

Speaking of Dynamix, have you got any story about Impressions Games or other American strategy game developer/publisher of the 1980s-90s, like Quantum Quality Production? I’m always curious about these forgotten games that failed to make it to today’s game canon like those published by MicroProse. They always look no less interesting in screenshots and descriptions.

- TC

December 20, 2020 at 4:33 pm

And Impressions in particular published a lot of strategy games in the 1990s. Surely these titles must have some merit of their own?

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2020 at 4:41 pm

Impressions was actually a British studio. ;) I’ve looked at some of the Impressions games, but most of them are dogged by balance and interface issues that make them less than what they might have been. A pity, as their themes were often quite interesting. It’s probably the usual story about a lack of play-testing.

I confess that I know nothing about Quantum Quality Productions…

- Frank

December 20, 2020 at 7:51 pm

That was an excellent game for the time, which I spent hours on. I still have the sound of the holes being created or closing up etched in my brain to this day.

- Ice Cream Jonsey

December 20, 2020 at 9:33 pm

This was a great article. I’ve been setting up a lot of emulators lately, and Lode Runner just always holds up. Thanks for choosing this one to write about. :)

- Runnin the Lode Since 1987

December 20, 2020 at 10:49 pm

It’s a real shame people weren’t able to interview Doug Smith before Video Game History became A Thing. He’d be right up there with David Crane and the Williamses.

- Chris

December 20, 2020 at 10:54 pm

Growing up, I was obsessed with a Lode Runner clone called JetPac, which had both a shovel and a jet pack and an awesome level editor. I was hoping to read something about it.

- Ross

December 22, 2020 at 12:56 am

Jetpac or Jetpack? They appear to be two different games, and the former doesn’t really strike me as a Lode Runner clone (The latter I wouldn’t have thought of as such before, but now that you mention it, that sounds fair). I loved that game a lot and was disappointed when (the release I had at least) was unplayable on a Pentium-class PC (It’s not unexpected for DOS games of that era to become unplayably fast on a modern PC, but Jetpack because unplayably slow. I assume they’d over-optimized something in a way that was playing merry hell with branch prediction.

- Chris

December 24, 2020 at 5:03 am

Going by Wikipedia, ‘ Jetpack is a platform game available as freeware, developed by American studio Adept Software and originally published as shareware by Software Creations in 1993.’

That’s the one I played as a kid. And it wasn’t a shovel, it was a ‘phase shifter’.

- fireattack

December 21, 2020 at 1:27 am

I think it’s Porsche, not Porche

- Jimmy Maher

December 21, 2020 at 8:56 am

Thanks!

- Rick LaMont

December 27, 2020 at 7:59 am

That was my mistake. Jimmy just copy-pasted it.

- Lobster Bisque

December 21, 2020 at 2:05 am

A brief interview with Doug Smith that may be of interest:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/RCwCLP1CmOo/m/vKL1er0ey0YJ

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- Rick LaMont

December 27, 2020 at 7:52 am

This is Rick LaMont, the one quoted in the article. My 1991 Usenet post on Lode Runner certainly had legs. I’m not sure how much I can add.

There’s some confusion as to whether I was Doug’s classmate at the University of Washington or a friend. Doug was about 5 years older than me. We both attended UW but not at the same time. So we were friends, although “colleagues” or “acquatances” would be more accurate. I recall Doug saying he tried to get into the Computer Science department and then fell back on a Physics major before dropping out. Biographies usually say he was an Architecture major but I don’t remember him ever mentioning architecture.

Here’s how we met: I was a senior in high school and had published three games for the TRS-80 Color Computer including “Lancer”: http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/lancer.html
A reporter for the local Renton newspaper, The Record Chronicle, heard about it and interviewed me for an article. To my surprise, it was the front page story on the Sunday edition.

Doug also lived in Renton. He saw the article, looked up my phone number and gave me a call. His main message to me was that the Apple II had a larger market than the TRS-80 and I should develop games for it instead. He invited me over to his house to see his work in progress on Lode Runner. I took him up on both suggestions.

At this time Doug had accepted an advance from Broderbund, changed the title from Miner to Lode Runner, and was in the process of making improvements they had suggested. In particular, he made the characters move one pixel at a time rather than in 10 pixel hops. When I started writing games for the Apple II, Doug gave me a hardcopy listing of Lode Runner’s source code. It proved to be very educational because I was switching from 6809 assembly language to 6502, which is a big step DOWN.

In the “brief interview” linked above by Lobster Bisque, Doug can’t recall the name of the assembler he used for Lode Runner. I can. It was called “Big Mac”. I had planned on buying the ORCA/M assembler until Doug told me that he had evaluated it and found that it spent too much time creating temporary files on the floppy disk. Besides, he would give me a copy of Big Mac for free. I couldn’t beat that price!

- Rick LaMont

December 27, 2020 at 8:21 am

A couple of months after my picture was in the Renton newspaper, Doug’s picture was in the Seattle Times. That would have been around July 1983. Doug was not at all pleased with how it came out. First of all, his eyes were squinty in the picture. He said they took about 30 pictures with a flash bulb and it was bothering his eyes. The photo they chose to run was from the end of the session. Secondly, they printed something he had told them was off the record about how much money he had made so far.

After Doug had demonstrated the basic gameplay of Lode Runner to me, he said that some people had dismissed it as “just like Apple Panic” but he believed there was more nuance to it. When he said “Apple Panic” I translated it to “Space Panic” (being a non-Apple user at that time) and only then made the connection. So Doug was aware of the similarity in gameplay even before Lode Runner was published.

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2020 at 11:12 am

That’s really interesting to hear. Thanks for sharing these additional details!

- Jose

December 28, 2020 at 11:29 am

This Jimmy dude really does not like Ken Williams does he?

- Rick LaMont

December 29, 2020 at 2:45 am

Do you know who had a low opinion of Doug Smith? His partner on his next game, Chip Bulkeley. It was Chip who made the crack about Doug “buying a wife”. When I told him how Doug and I had met, Chip asked what Doug had gotten out of contacting me. I basically said that Doug had helped me in my career and didn’t expect anything in return. Chip said, “That’s not like Doug. He must have had something in mind for you that didn’t materialize.”

My only beef with Doug was that he sometimes took credit for other people’s work. The best example was “his” circle algorithm. The aperture effect between levels in Lode Runner is achieved by drawing concentric circles, each with a radius one pixel larger/smaller than the last. Doug was proud of this circle algorithm because it was all integer math – no floating point. He said he figured it out after reading a book about Cartesian geometry. Doug gave me pseudocode for the circle algorithm, explaining that “The e stands for epsilon.” Later, at college, I would see the algorithm again. It was Jack Bresenham’s circle algorithm. The “e” stood for “error” (i.e. the distance between a point on the true circle and the center of a pixel that approximates it). The algorithm seeks to minimize error.

Another example is the artwork for the player’s character in Lode Runner being identical to the little men in Choplifter. I never confronted Doug about it. When Mathew Jenkins brought it up, at first Doug denied it and then conceded “There is only so much you can do in 10×12 size pixel characters”. I consider it a missed opportunity for Doug to have designed a better animation for his main character. It’s a four frame animation (four different bitmaps to cycle through). Over the course of those four frames the character takes two strides: one with the left leg and one with the right. That makes sense until you consider the character is an inverted silhouette: white on black. Users can’t distinguish his left leg from his right. With four frames you can animate one smooth stride! Repeat the sequence and it appears to be a stride with the other leg. This is exactly what I did in one of my games and it came out looking really nice.

Overall I have positive memories of Doug. He did what he could to help me, even sharing the source code to his game, and never did me wrong.

- Jimmy Maher

December 29, 2020 at 3:53 pm

Yes. Doug Smith strikes me as neither a monster nor a saint. On the one hand, he repeatedly said that Lode Runner was all his own work, even though this was not true. On the other hand, he was the one who showed the initiative to port it to the Apple II and get it published, and then worked hard to polish it into the classic it is. I don’t know that I would have passed the test of character any better at his age. (I once heard someone say that moral dilemmas are seldom actually *dilemmas* in the classic sense at all. It’s just that the right choice is *hard*, the wrong one easy. That’s resonated with me ever since.) I’m glad he did finally make some effort to set the record straight — or at least allowed it to be set straight — shortly before his death.

You know who might qualify for sainthood? James Bratsanos, for evincing no bitterness whatsoever that someone else made millions off his game concept.

- Craig Grannell

February 25, 2021 at 1:43 pm

“he repeatedly said that Lode Runner was all his own work”

FWIW, when I interviewed him for the Retro Gamer piece mentioned on this page, he was upfront about that. I don’t have the final published edit here, but in the audio transcript he notes how his friend had the concept and he was the technical person. He adds that the game was pretty similar to how it ended up, and when I asked about the original gameplay ideas, he said: “The co-partner that started it originally, I have to give credit to, because he had the basic ladder and chase concept.”

He did, however, state that Choplifter didn’t impact on his character designs, citing things like the lack of ‘treadmilling’. He added: “People always said I took the people images from Choplifter, but when I wrote Lode Runner, I had never even seen Choplifter. So I think the big game I was playing at that point was Akabeh.”

Given how long ago that piece came out, it’s a bit weird to see James Bratsanos airbrushed out of Lode Runner’s history, though. (I see there’s a debate of sorts in the Wikipedia Talk page, which suggests Bratanos has even lied about the game’s history!) I don’t know how much of the interview I used for Retro Gamer, but the transcript is close to 4000 words. One of these days, I’ll have to get some of these historical interviews out there in full.

- Michael

December 29, 2020 at 12:41 am

“there followed several year of silence”
years?

- Jimmy Maher

December 29, 2020 at 3:42 pm

Thanks!

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- Steven Ohmert

January 6, 2021 at 7:33 am

I can fill in a side story surrounding the line “He borrowed enough money to buy a color monitor and joystick…”
At that time (late 1981) I was working as the manager of the Computerland Store in Renton, Wa., not far from where Doug had gone to high school (a classmate of my future wife). Also working there at the time was my good friend Mike Wise. Mike and I were both incurable computer geeks with dreams of writing games, especially for the Apple II. Mike had by this time already started a correspondence and strong relationship with key people at Broderbund Software, as both of us were dreaming of getting a job there someday, and submitted various works of ours to try to show what we could do.

Doug was a frequent customer at the store, and showed Mike and I his “Miner” game. It looked terrible because it was designed on a black-and-white monitor, which meant you could get more pixels per scan line, but if you viewed this on a color monitor, the colors would be all rainbow-shifty. This is due to the way the Apple II produced color. But it was a LOT of fun to play. Mike urged Doug to send it to Broderbund, which he did, and as you know, Broderbund rejected it. Mike got on the phone almost immediately and demanded an explanation as to why. “It looks terrible” was the answer.
“Did you play it?” He asked.
“What? No, I didn’t play it. It looked stupid”.
“You need to play it. It’s incredibly fun. How can you reject a game you’ve never even played?”
“Okay, Okay, but the color thing definitely needs to be addressed. And it needs to work with a joystick. All our best games support the joystick.”
“No problem”, said Mike.

And with that, Mike lent Doug one of our floor display Amdek Color monitors as well as a joystick. I became a reluctant co-conspirator. If the store owner ever found this out, we’d have been be fired on the spot.

Mike continued to talk with his guy at Broderbund (I forget who exactly he was corresponding with, it may have been Chris Jocumensen), and sure enough, they had played it since the last talk, and it was a hit. Everyone was anxious to see what Doug would follow up with with his new monitor/joystick in hand. Doug came into the store every day or so for the next couple of weeks and showed his progress and we gave what peanut gallery advice we had to offer. Then he sent his completed work to Broderbund and sealed the deal.

Not long after this time, Mike’s lobbying for his and my programming efforts paid off, as Gary Carlston came up from San Rafael to offer both of us jobs: two of the first positions in part of Broderbund’s new wide recruiting effort for in-house development.

So Mike and I travelled together and found new homes in San Rafael to go to work for our ‘dream jobs’.

Of course, Doug still had work to do to reach the final final, and he travelled down to Broderbund many times to complete this.

At Broderbund, Doug became close friends with Dane Bigham, who came aboard the same time as Mike and I.

Years later, Dane, Mike, myself,and Scott Shumway formed the first incarnation of the Presage Partnership. We would have wanted Doug to be part of the group, but by this point Lode Runner was already a huge hit and he was already out of our league at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

January 6, 2021 at 2:09 pm

If you folks keep turning up, I’m going have to write a whole new article. ;) Thanks for filling in that much more of the picture!

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- Roger M Schiavoni

March 13, 2021 at 6:41 pm

Fascinating article and I love all the additional commentary from folks that where there at that time and knew Doug. Discovering Lode Runner as a kid in the 80s inspired me to be a programmer and after 40 years in programming and IT, I still love it. It was, and still is, an amazing game.

BTW, maybe it was out of scope for this article, but there was also another incarnation on Xbox 360 Arcade which you could play cooperatively. I should see if I still have it. It was a lot of fun to solve those puzzle with my son.

Joysticks and game pads aside, the way to play this game is U-I-O and J-K-L. As a kid, I needed two hands, but I eventually got good enough to work 6 keys with one hand.

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- Neville Ridley-Smith

March 24, 2021 at 12:07 pm

Reading this prompted me to dig out my certificate! http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/championship-lode-runner-certificate/

The Dream of Flight
January 1, 2021

After Edison’s original phonograph came out, people said that they could not detect a difference between a phonograph and a real performance. Clearly the standard that they had for audio fidelity back in 1910 was radically different from the standard we have. They got the same enjoyment out of that Edison phonograph that we do out of [a] high-fidelity [stereo]. As audio fidelity has gotten better and better, our standards have gotten higher and higher; if we listen to a phonograph from 1910, it sounds horrible to our modern ears.

The same thing has obviously happened to flight simulators.

— Brand Fortner, 2010

It seems to me that vintage flight simulators have aged worse than just about any other genre of game. No, they weren’t the only games that required a large helping of imagination to overlook their underwhelming audiovisuals, that had sometimes to ask their players to see them as what they aspired to be rather than what they actually were. But they were perhaps the ones in which this requirement was most marked. When we look back on them today, we find ourselves shaking our heads and asking what the heck we were all thinking.

Growing up in the 1980s, I certainly wasn’t immune to the appeal of virtual flight; I spent many hours with subLogic’s Flight Simulator II and MicroProse’s Gunship on my Commodore 64, then hours more with F/A-18 Interceptor on my Commodore Amiga. Revisited today, however, all of those games strike me as absurdly, unplayably primitive. Therefore they and the many games like them have appeared in these histories only in the form of passing mentions.

The case of flight simulators thus serves to illustrate some of the natural tensions implicit in what I do here. On the one hand, I want to celebrate the games that still stand up today, maybe even get some of you to try them for the first time all these years later — and I’ve yet to find a vintage flight simulator which I can recommend on those terms. But on the other hand, I want to sketch an accurate, non-anachronistic picture of these bygone eras of gaming as they really were. In this latter sense, my efforts to date have been sadly inadequate in the case of flight simulators; the harsh fact is that these games which I’ve neglected so completely were in fact among the most popular of their time, accounting on occasion for as much as 25 percent of the computer-game industry’s total revenue. Microsoft Flight Simulator, the prototypical and perennial product of its type, was the most commercially successful single franchise in all of computer gaming between 1982 and 1995 — all despite having no goals other than the ones you set for yourself and for the most part no guns either. (Let that sink in for a moment!)

All of which is to say that a reckoning is long overdue here. This article, while it may not quite give Microsoft Flight Simulator and its siblings their due, will at least begin to redress the balance.

Many people assumed in the 1980s, as they still tend to do today, that the early microcomputer flight simulators were imperfect imitations of the bigger simulators that were used to train pilots for real-world flying. In point of fact, though, the relationship between the two was more subtle — even more symbiotic — than one might guess. To appreciate how this could be, we need to remember that the 3D-graphics techniques that were being used to power all flight simulators by the 1980s were a new technology at the time — new not just to microcomputers but to all computers. Until the 1980s, the “big” flight simulators made for training purposes were very different beasts from the ones that came later.

That said, the idea of flight simulation in general goes back a long, long way, almost all the way back to the dawn of powered flight itself. It took very little time at all after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for people to start asking how they might train new pilots in some more forgiving, less dangerous way than putting them behind the controls of a real airplane and hoping for the best. A 1910 issue of Flight magazine — the “first aero weekly in the world” — describes the “Sanders Teacher,” a mock-up of a real airplane mounted on a pivoting base so that it could sway with the wind in response to control inputs; unlike the fragile real aircraft of its era, this one was best “flown” when there was a stiff breeze.

The Sanders Teacher, one of the earliest attempts to simulate flight.

In 1929, Edwin Link of Binghamton, New York, created the Link Trainer, the first flight simulator that we might immediately recognize as such today. An electro-mechanical device driven by organ bellows in its prototype form, it looked like an amputated single-seater-airplane cockpit. The entire apparatus pitched and turned in response to a trainee’s movements of the controls therein, while an instructor sat next to the gadget to evaluate his performance. After an initially skeptical response from the market, usage of the Link Trainer around the world exploded with the various military buildups that began in the mid-1930s. It was used extensively, in both its official incarnation and in unlicensed knock-offs, by virtually every combatant nation in World War II; it was a rite of passage for tens of thousands of new pilots, marking the most widespread use of technology in the cause of simulation to that point in the history of the world.

An American student pilot in a Link Trainer, circa 1943.

The programmable digital computers which began to appear after the war held out the prospect of providing a more complete simulation of all aspect of flight than analog devices like the Link Trainer and its successors could hope to achieve. Already in 1950, the United States Navy funded a research effort in that direction at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet it wasn’t until ten years later that the first computerized flight simulators began to appear. Once again, Link Aviation Devices provided the breakthrough machine here, in the form of the Link Mark 1, whose three processors shared 10 K of memory to present the most credible imitation of real flight yet, with even wind and engine noise included if you bought the most advanced model. By 1970, virtually all flight simulators had gone digital.

But there was a persistent problem afflicting all of these efforts at flight simulation, even after the dawn of the digital age. Although the movements of cockpit instruments and even the physical motion of the aircraft itself could be practically implemented, the view out the window could not. What these machines thus wound up simulating was a totally blind form of flying, as in the heaviest of fogs or the darkest of nights, when the pilot has only her instruments to guide her. Flying-by-instruments was certainly a useful skill to have, but the inability of the simulators to portray even a ground and horizon for the pilot to sight on was a persistent source of frustration to those who dreamed of simulating flight as it more typically occurred in the real world.

Various schemes were devised to remedy the situation, some using reels of film that were projected on the “windows” of the cockpit, some even using a moving video camera which “flew” over model terrain. But snippets of static video are a crude tool indeed in an interactive context, and none of these solutions yielded anything close to the visual impression of real flight. What was needed was an out-the-window view that was generated on the fly in real time by the computer.

In 1973, McDonnell-Douglas introduced the VITAL II, a computerized visual display which could be added to existing flight simulators. Even its technology, however, was different in a fairly fundamental sense from that of the flight simulators that would appear later. The computers which ran the latter would use what’s known as raster-based or bitmap graphics: a grid of pixels stored in memory, which are painted to the monitor screen by the computer’s display circuitry without additional programming. VITAL II, by contrast, used something known as vector graphics, in which the computer’s processor directly controls the electron gun inside the display screen, telling it where to go and when to fire to produce an image on the screen. Although bitmap graphics are far easier for the programmer to work with and more flexible in countless ways, they do eat up memory, a commodity which most computers of the early 1970s had precious little of to spare. Therefore vector graphics were still being used for many applications, including this one.

Thanks to the limitations of its hardware, the VITAL II could only show white points of light on the surface of a black screen, and thus could only be used to depict a night flight. Indeed, it showed only lights — the lights of runways, airports, and to some extent their surrounding cities.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/gv99ITuVHC8

Such was the state of the art in flight simulation during the mid-1970s, when a young man named Bruce Artwick was attending the University of Illinois in Champaign.

Flight simulators aside, this university occupies an important place in the history of computing in that it was the home of PLATO, the pioneering computer network that anticipated much of the digital culture that would come two decades or more after it. A huge variety of games were developed for PLATO, including the first CRPGs and, most importantly for our purposes today, the first flight simulator to be intended for entertainment and casual exploration rather than professional pilot training. Brand Fortner’s game of Airfight wasn’t quite a real-time simulation as we think of it today — you had to hit the NEXT key over and over to update the screen — but it could almost feel like it ran in real time to those willing and able to pound their keyboards with sufficient gusto. Brian Dear described the experience in his book about the PLATO system:

By today’s standards, Airfight’s graphics and realism, like every other PLATO game, are hopelessly primitive. But in the 1970s Airfight was simply unbelievable. These rooms full of PLATO terminals weren’t “PLATO classrooms,” they were PLATO arcades, and they were free. If you were lucky enough to get in (there were always more people wanting to play than the game could handle), you joined the Circle or the Triangle teams, chose from a list of different airplane types to fly, and suddenly found yourself in a fighter plane, looking out of the cockpit window at the runway in front of you, with the control tower far down the runway… You’d hit “9” to set the throttle at maximum, “a” for afterburners, “w” a few times to pull the stick back, and then NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT to update the screen as you rolled down the runway, lifted off, and shot up into the sky to join the fight. It might be seconds or minutes, depending on how far away the enemy airplanes were, before you saw dots in the sky, dots that as you flew closer and closer turned into little circles and triangles. (So they weren’t photorealistic airplanes — it didn’t matter. You didn’t notice. This was battle. This was Airfight.) As you got closer and closer to one of these planes, the circles and triangles got more defined — still small, still pathetically primitive by today’s standards — but you knew you were getting closer and that’s all that mattered. As you got closer and closer you hit “s” to put up your sights, to aim. Eventually, if you were good, lucky, or both, you would be so close that you’d see a little empty space, an opening, inside the little circle or triangle icon. That’s when you were close enough to see what players called “the whites of their eyes” and that’s when you let ’em have it: SHIFT-S to shoot. SHIFT-S again. And again. Until you’d run out of ammo and KABOOM! It was glorious.

And it was addictive. People stayed up all night playing Airfight. If you went to a room full of PLATO terminals, you’d hear the clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-CLACKETY-CLACK-CLACK-BAM-BAM!-WHAM!-CLACK-CLACK! of everyone’s keyboards, as the gamers pounded them, mostly NEXT-NEXT-NEXT’ing to update their view and their radar displays (another innovation of this game — in-cockpit radar displays, showing you where the enemy was).

The standard PLATO terminal at that time was an astonishingly advanced piece of hardware to place at the disposal of everyday university students: a monochrome bitmap display of no less than 512 X 512 pixels. Thus Airfight, in addition to being the first casual flight simulator, was the first flight simulator of any kind to use a bitmap display. This fact wasn’t lost on Bruce Artwick when he first saw the game in action — for Artwick already knew a little something about the state of the art in serious flight simulation.

The University of Illinois’s Institute of Aviation was one of the premiere aerospace programs in the country, training both engineers and pilots. Artwick happened to be pursuing a master’s degree in general electrical engineering, but he roomed with one of the university’s so-called “aviation jocks”: an accomplished pilot named Stu Moment, who was training to become a flight instructor at the same time that he pursued a degree in business. “We agreed that Stu would teach me to fly if I taught him about digital electronics,” Artwick remembers. Although Artwick’s electrical-engineering program would seemingly mark him as a designer of hardware, the technological disciplines were more fluid in the 1970s than they’ve become today. His real passion, indulged willingly enough by his professors, had turned out to be the nascent field of bitmap 3D graphics. So, he found himself with one foot in the world of 3D programming, the other in that of aviation: the perfect resumé for a maker of flight simulators.

Airfight hit Artwick like a revelation. In a flash, he understood that the PLATO terminal could become the display technology behind a flight simulator used for more serious purposes. He sought and received funding from the Office of Naval Research to make a prototype 3D display useful for that purpose as his master’s thesis. Taking advantage of his knowledge of hardware engineering, he managed to connect a PLATO terminal to one of the DEC PDP-11 minicomputers used at the Aviation Institute. He then employed this setup to create what his final thesis called “a versatile computer-generated flight display,” submitting his code and a 60-page description of its workings to his instructors and to the Office of Naval Research.

It’s hard to say whether Artwick’s thesis, which he completed in May of 1976, was at all remarked among the makers of flight simulators already in use for pilot training. Many technical experiments like it came out of the aerospace-industrial complex’s web of affiliated institutions, sometimes to languish in obscurity, sometimes to provide a good idea or two for others to carry forward, but seldom to be given much credit after the fact. We can say, however, that by the end of the 1970s the shift to bitmap graphics was finally beginning among makers of serious flight simulators. And once begun, it happened with amazing speed; by the mid-1980s, quite impressive out-the-cockpit views, depicting nighttime or daytime scenery in full color, had become the norm, making the likes of the VITAL II system look like the most primordial of dinosaurs.

This photo from a 1986 brochure by a flight-simulator maker known as Rediffusion Simulation shows how far the technology progressed in a remarkably short period of time after bitmap 3D graphics were first introduced on the big simulators. Although the graphical resolution and detail are vastly less than one would find in a simulator of today, the Rubicon has already been crossed. From now on, improvements will be a question of degree rather than kind.

Meanwhile the same technology was coming home as well, looking a bit less impressive than the state-of-the-art simulators in military and civilian flight schools but a heck of a lot better than VITAL II. And Artwick’s early work on that PLATO terminal most definitely was a pivotal building block toward these simulators, given that the most important person behind them was none other than Artwick himself.

After university, Artwick parlayed his thesis into a job with Hughes Aircraft in California, but found it difficult to develop his innovations further within such a large corporate bureaucracy. His now-former roommate Stu Moment started working as a flight instructor right there in Champaign, only to find that equally unsatisfying. In early 1977, the two decided to form a software company to serve the new breed of hobbyist-oriented microcomputers. It was an auspicious moment to be doing so; the Trinity of 1977 — the Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Commodore PET, constituting the first three pre-assembled personal computers — was on the near horizon, poised to democratize the hobby for those who weren’t overly proficient with a soldering iron. Artwick and Moment named their company subLogic, after a type of computer circuit. It would prove a typical tech-startup partnership in many ways: the reserved, retiring Artwick would be the visionary and the technician, while the more flamboyant, outgoing Moment would be the manager and the salesman.

Artwick and Moment didn’t initially conceive of their company as a specialist in flight simulators; they rather imagined their specialty to be 3D graphics in all of their potential applications. Accordingly, their first product was “The subLogic Three-Dimensional Micrographics Package,” a set of libraries to help one code one’s own 3D graphics in the do-it-yourself spirit of the age. Similar technical tools continued to occupy them for the first couple of years, even as both partners continued to work their day jobs, hoping that grander things might await them in the future, once the market for personal computers had had time to mature a bit more.

In June of 1979, they decided that moment had come. Artwick quit his job at Hughes and joined Moment back in Champaign, where he started to work on subLogic’s first piece of real consumer software. Every time he had attempted to tell neophytes in the past about what it was his little company really did, he had been greeted with the same blank stare and the same stated or implied question: “But what can you really do with all this 3D-graphics stuff?” And he had learned that one response in particular on his part could almost always make his interlocutors’ eyes light up with excitement: “Well, you could use it to make a flight simulator, for instance.” So, subLogic would indeed make a flight simulator for the new microcomputers. Being owned and operated by two pilots — one of them a licensed flight instructor and the other one having considerable experience in coding for flight simulators running on bigger computers — subLogic was certainly as qualified as anyone for the task.

They released a product entitled simply Flight Simulator for the Apple II in January of 1980. One can’t help but draw comparisons with Will Crowther and Don Woods’s game of Adventure at this point; like it, Flight Simulator was not only the first of its kind but would lend its name to the entire genre of games that followed in its footsteps.

Fearing that his rudimentary, goal-less simulation would quickly bore its users, Artwick at the last minute added a mode called “British Ace,” which featured guns and enemy aircraft to be shot down in an experience distinctly reminiscent of Airfight. But he soon discovered, rather to his surprise, that most people didn’t find those additional accoutrements to be the most exciting aspect of the program. They enjoyed simply flying around this tiny virtual world with its single runway and bridge and mountain — enjoyed it despite all the compromises that a host machine with six-color graphics, 32 K of memory, and a 1 MHz 8-bit CPU demanded. It turned out that a substantial portion of early microcomputer owners were to a greater or lesser degree frustrated pilots, kept from taking to the air by the costs and all of the other logistics involved with acquiring a pilot’s license and getting time behind the controls of a real airplane. They were so eager to believe in what Flight Simulator purported to be that their imaginations were able to bridge the Grand Canyon-sized gap between aspiration and reality. This would continue to be the case over the course of the many years it would take for the former to catch up to the latter.

Flight Simulator on the Apple II.

Still, subLogic didn’t immediately go all-in for flight simulation. They released a variety of other entertainment products, from strategy games to arcade games. They even managed one big hit in the latter category, one that for a time outsold all versions of Flight Simulator: Bruce Artwick’s Night Mission Pinball was a sensation in Apple II circles upon its release in the spring of 1982, widely acknowledged as the best game of its type prior to Bill Budge’s landmark Pinball Construction Set the following year. subLogic wouldn’t release their last non-flight simulator until 1986, when an attempt to get a sports line off the ground fizzled out with subLogic Football. In the long run, though, it was indeed flight simulation that would make subLogic one of the most profitable companies in their industry, all thanks to a little software publisher known as Microsoft.

In late 1981, Microsoft came to subLogic looking to make a deal. IBM had outsourced to the former the operating system of the new IBM PC, whilst also charging them with creating or acquiring a variety of other software for the machine, including games. So, they wanted Artwick to create a “second generation” of his Flight Simulator for the IBM PC, taking full advantage of its comparatively torrid 4.77 MHz 16-bit processor.

Artwick spent a year on the project, working sixteen hours or more per day during the last quarter of that period. The program he turned in at the end of the year was both a dramatic improvement on what had come before and a remarkably complete simulation of flight for its era. Its implementation of aeronautics had now progressed to the point that a specific airplane could be said to be modeled: a Cessna 182 Skylane, a beloved staple of private and recreational aviation that was first manufactured in 1956 and has remained in production to this day. Artwick replaced the wire-frame graphics of the Apple II version with solid-filled color, replaced its single airport with more than twenty of them from the metropolitan areas of New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. He added weather, as well as everything you needed to fly through the thickest fog or darkest night using instruments alone; you could use radio transponders to navigate from airport to airport. You could even expect to contend with random engine failures if you were brave enough to turn that setting on. And, in a move that would have important implications in the future, Artwick also designed and implemented a coordinate system capable of encompassing the greater portion of North America, from southern Canada down to the Caribbean, although it was all just empty green space at this point outside of the four metropolitan areas.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0

This first Microsoft Flight Simulator was released in late 1982, and promptly became ubiquitous on a computer that was otherwise not known as much of a game machine. Many stodgy business-oriented users who wouldn’t be caught dead playing any other game seemed to believe that this one was acceptable; it was something to do with the label of “simulator,” something to do with its stately, cerebral personality. Microsoft’s own brief spasm of interest in games in general would soon peter out, such that Flight Simulator would spend half a decade or more as the only game in their entire product catalog. Yet it would consistently sell in such numbers that they would never dream of dropping it.

When the first wave of PC clones hit the market soon after Flight Simulator was released, the computer magazines took to using it as a compatibility litmus test. After all, it pushed the CPU to its absolute limit, even as its code was full of tricky optimizations that took advantage of seemingly every single quirk of IBM’s own Color Graphics Adapter. Therefore, went the logic, if a PC clone could run Flight Simulator, it could probably run just about anything written for a real IBM PC. Soon all of the clone makers were rushing to buy copies of the game, to make sure their machines could pass the stringent test it represented before they shipped them out to reviewers.

Meanwhile Artwick began to port Microsoft Flight Simulator’s innovations into versions for most other popular computers, under the rather confusing title of Flight Simulator II. (There had never been a subLogic Flight Simulator I on most of the computers for which this Flight Simulator II was released.) Evincing at least a modest spirit of vive la différence, these versions chose to simulate a Piper Cherokee, another private-aviation mainstay, instead of the Cessna.

Although the inexpensive 8-bit computers for which Flight Simulator II was first released were far better suited than the IBM PC for running many types of games, this particular game was not among them. Consider the case of the Commodore 64, the heart of the mid-1980s computer-gaming market. The 64’s graphics system had been designed with 2D arcade games in mind, not 3D flight simulators; its sprites — small images that could be overlaid onto the screen and moved about quickly — were perfect for representing, say, Pac-Man in his maze, but useless in the context of a flight simulator. At the same time, the differences between an IBM PC and a Commodore 64 in overall processing throughput made themselves painfully evident. On the IBM, Flight Simulator could usually manage a relatively acceptable ten frames or so per second; on the 64, you were lucky to get two or three. “We gave it a try and did the best we could,” was Artwick’s own less-than-promising assessment of the 8-bit ports.

Nevertheless, the Commodore 64 version of Flight Simulator II is the one that I spent many hours earnestly attempting to play as a boy. Doing so entailed peering at a landscape of garish green under a sky of solid blue, struggling to derive meaning from a few jagged white lines that shifted and rearranged themselves with agonizing slowness, each frame giving way to the next with a skip and a jerk. Does that line there represent the runway I’m looking for, or is it a part of one of the handful of other landmarks the game has deigned to implement, such as the Empire State Building? It was damnably hard to know.

Flight Simulator II on the Commodore 64.

As many a real pilot who tried Flight Simulator II noted, a virtual Piper Cherokee was perversely more difficult to fly than the real thing, thanks to the lack of perspective provided by the crude graphics, the clunky keyboard-based controls — it was possible to use a joystick, but wasn’t really recommended because of the imprecision of the instrument — and the extreme degree of lag that came with trying to cram so much physics modeling through the narrow aperture of an 8-bit microprocessor. Let’s say you’re attempting a landing. You hit a key to move the elevators a little bit and begin your glide path, but nothing happens for several long seconds. So, getting nervous as you see the white line that you think probably represents the runway getting a bit longer, you hit the same key again, then perhaps once more for good measure. And suddenly you’re in a power dive, your view out the screen a uniform block of green. So you desperately pound the up-elevator key and cut the throttle — and ten or twenty seconds later, you find the sky filling your screen, your plane on the verge of stalling and crashing to earth tail-first. More frantic course corrections ensue. And so it continues, with you swaying and bobbling through the sky like a drunken sailor transported to the new ocean of the heavens. Who needed enemy airplanes to shoot at in the face of all these challenges? Just getting your plane up and then down again in one piece — thankfully, the simulator didn’t really care at the end of the day whether it was on a runway or not! — was an epic achievement.

Needless to say, Flight Simulator II’s appeal is utterly lost on me today. And yet in its day the sheer will to believe, from me and hundreds of thousands of other would-be pilots like me, allowed it to soar comfortably over all of the objections raised by its practical implementation of our grand dream of flight.

At a time when books on computer games had yet to find a place on the shelves of bookstores, books on Flight Simulator became the great exception. It began in 1985, when a fellow named Charles Gulick published 40 Great Flight Simulator Adventures, a collection of setups with exciting-sounding titles — “Low Pass on the Pacific,” “Dead-Stick off San Clemente” — that required one-tenth Flight Simulator and nine-tenths committed imagination to live up to their names. Gulick became the king of the literary sub-genre he had founded, writing five more books of a similar ilk over the following years. But he was far from alone: the website Flight Sim Books has collected no less than twenty of its namesake, all published between the the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, ranging from the hardcore likes of Realistic Commercial Flying with Flight Simulator to more whimsical fare like A Flight Simulator Odyssey. The fact that publishers kept churning them out indicates that there was a solid market for them, which in turn points to just how committed to the dream the community of virtual fliers really was.

Of course, the game that called itself simply Flight Simulator was by no means the only one in the genre it had spawned. While a few companies did try to sell their own civilian flight simulators, none managed to seriously challenge the ones from subLogic. But military flight simulators were a different matter; MicroProse Software in particular made their reputation with a string of these. Often designed and programmed by Sid Meier, MicroProse’s simulators were distinguished by their willingness to sacrifice a fair amount of realism to the cause of decent frame rates and general playability, with the added attraction of enemy aircraft to shoot down and cities to bomb. (While the old “British Ace” mode did remain a part of the subLogic Flight Simulator into the late 1980s, it never felt like more than the afterthought it was.) Meier’s F-15 Strike Eagle, the most successful of all the MicroProse simulators, sold almost as well as subLogic’s products for a time; some sources claim that its total sales during the ten years after its initial release in 1984 reached 1 million units.

subLogic as well did dip a toe into military flight simulation with Jet in 1985. Programmed by one Charles Guy rather than Bruce Artwick, this F-16 and F/A-18 simulator was a bit more relaxed and a bit more traditionally game-like than the flagship product, offering air-, land-, and sea-based targets for your guns and bombs that could and did shoot back. Still, its presentation remained distinctly dry in comparison to the more gung-ho personality of the MicroProse simulators. Although reasonably successful, it never had the impact of its older civilian sibling. Instead Spectrum Holobyte’s Falcon, which debuted in 1987 for 16-bit and better machines only, took up the banner of realism-above-all-else in the realm of jet fighters — almost notoriously so, in fact: it came with a small-print spiral-bound manual of almost 300 pages, and required weeks of dedication just to learn to fly reasonably well, much less to fly into battle. And yet it too sold in the hundreds of thousands.

In the meantime, Artwick was continuing to plug steadily away, making his Flight Simulator slowly better. A version 2.0 of the Microsoft release, with four times as many airports to fly from and many other improvements, appeared already in 1984, soon after the 8-bit Flight Simulator II; it was then ported to the new Apple Macintosh, the only computing platform beside their own which Microsoft had chosen to officially support. When the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga appeared in 1985, sporting unprecedented audiovisual capabilities, subLogic released versions of Flight Simulator II for those machines with dazzling graphical improvements; these versions even gave you the option of flying a sleek Learjet instead of a humble single-prop airborne econobox. Version 3.0 of Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived in 1988, coming complete with the Learjet, support for the latest VGA graphics cards, and an in-game flight instructor among other enhancements.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 included the first attempt at in-program flight instruction. It would continue to appear in all subsequent releases, being slowly refined all the while, much like the simulator itself.

Betwixt and between these major releases, subLogic took advantage of Artwick’s foresight in designing a huge potential world into Flight Simulator by releasing a series of “scenery disks” to fill in all of that empty space with accurately modeled natural features and airports, along with selected other human-made landmarks. The sufficiently dedicated — i.e., those who were willing to purchase a dozen scenery disks at $20 or $30 a pop — could eventually fly all over the continental United States and beyond, exploring a virtual world larger than any other in existence at the time.

Indeed, the scenery disks added a whole new layer of interest to Flight Simulator. Taking in their sights and ferreting out all of their secrets became a game in itself, overlaid upon that of flying the airplane. It could add a much-needed sense of purpose to one’s airborne ramblings; inevitably, the books embraced this aspect with gusto, becoming in effect tour guides to the scenery disks. When they made a scenery disk for Hawaii in 1989, subLogic even saw fit to include “the very first structured scenery adventure”:

Locating the hidden jewel of the goddess Pele isn’t easy. You’ll have to find and follow an intricate set of clues scattered about the islands that, with luck, will guide you to your goal. This treasure hunt will challenge all of your flying skills, but the reward is an experience you’ll never forget!

The sales racked up by all of these products are impossible to calculate precisely, but we can say with surety that they were impressive. An interview with Artwick in the July 1985 issue of Computer Entertainment magazine states that Flight Simulator in all its versions has already surpassed 800,000 copies sold. The other piece of hard data I’ve been able to dig up is found in a Microsoft press release from December of 1995, where it’s stated that Microsoft Flight Simulator alone has sold over 3 million copies by that point. Added to that figure must be the sales of Flight Simulator II for various platforms, which must surely have been in the hundreds of thousands in their own right. And then Jet as well did reasonably well, while all of those scenery disks sold well enough that subLogic completed the planned dozen and then went still further, making special disks for Western Europe, Japan, and the aforementioned Hawaii, along with an ultra-detailed one covering San Francisco alone.

When we start with all this, and then add in the fact that subLogic remained a consistently small operation with just a handful of employees, we wind up with two founders who did very well for themselves indeed. Unsurprisingly, then, Bruce Artwick and Stu Moment, those two college friends made good, were a popular subject for magazine profiles. They were a dashing pair of young entrepreneurs, with the full complement of bachelor toys at their disposal, including a Cessna company plane which they flew to trade shows and, so they claimed, used to do modeling for their simulations. When David Hunter from the Apple II magazine Softalk visited them for a profile in January of 1983, he went so far as to compare them to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (Sadly, he didn’t clarify which was which…)

Speed is exhilarating. Uncontrolled growth is intoxicating. As long as youth can dream, life will never move fast enough.

Whether it’s motorcycles, cars, planes, skiing, volleyball, or assembly language, Bruce Artwick likes speed. He likes Winchester disk drives, BMWs, zooming through undergraduate and graduate school in four years, and tearing down the Angeles Crest Highway on a Suzuki at a dangerous clip. The president of subLogic, Artwick is a tall, quiet, 29-year-old bachelor. He possesses a remarkable mind, which has created several of the finest programs ever to grace the Apple’s RAM.

Contrast Artwick with Stu Moment. Outgoing, of medium height, and possessed of an exceptional love of flying, Moment is subLogic’s chairman of the board. A businessman, Moment has steered the company to its present course, complementing Artwick’s superior software-engineering talents with organizational and financial skills. He’s even picked up some modest programming skills, designing a system for logging flight hours at a fair-sized flying institute.

Redford and Newman. Lewis and Clark. Laurel and Hardy. Jobs and Wozniak. Artwick and Moment. The grand adventurers riding the hard trail, living and playing at lives larger than life. It’s an old story.

Stu Moment and Bruce Artwick with their Cessna on a cold morning for flying, 1982.

When the journalists weren’t around, however, the dynamic duo’s relationship was more fractious than the public realized. Artwick wanted only to pursue the extremely profitable niche which subLogic had carved out for themselves, while Moment’s natural impulse was to expand into other areas of gaming. Most of all, though, it was likely just a case of two headstrong personalities in too close a proximity to one another, with far too much money flying through the air around them. That, alas, is also an old story.

As early as 1981, the two spent some time working out of separate offices, so badly were they treading on one another’s toes in the one. In 1984, Artwick, clearly planning for a potential future without Moment, formed his own Bruce Artwick Organization and started providing his software to subLogic, which was now solely Moment’s company, on a contract basis.

The final split didn’t happen until 1989, but when it did, it was ugly. Lawsuits flew back and forth, disputing what code and other intellectual property belonged to subLogic and what belonged to Artwick’s organization. To this day, each man prefers not to say the other’s name if he can avoid it.

This breakup marked the end of the Flight Simulator II product line — which was perhaps just as well, as the platforms on which it ran were soon to run out of rope anyway in North America. Moment tried to keep subLogic going with 1990’s Flight Assignment: Airline Transport Pilot, a simulation of big commercial aircraft, but it didn’t do well. He then mothballed the company for several years, only to try again to revive it by hiring a team to make an easier flight simulator for beginners. He sold both the company and the product to Sierra in November of 1995, and Flight Light Plus shipped three months later. It too was a failure, and the subLogic name disappeared thereafter.

It was Artwick who walked away from the breakup with the real prize, in the form of the ongoing contract with Microsoft. So, Microsoft Flight Simulator continued its evolution under his steady hand. Version 4.0 shipped in 1989, version 5.0 in 1993. Artwick himself names the latter as the entire series’s watershed moment; running on a fast computer equipped with one of the latest high-resolution Super-VGA graphics cards, it finally provided the sort of experience he’d been dreaming of when he’d written his master’s thesis on the use of bitmap 3D graphics in flight simulation all those years before. Any further audiovisual improvements from here on out were just gravy as far as he was concerned.

Flying above San Francisco in Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0.

Such a watershed strikes me as a good place to stop today. Having so belatedly broken my silence on the subject, I’ll try to do a better job now of keeping tabs on Flight Simulator as it goes on to become the most long-lived single franchise in the history of computer gaming. (As of this writing, a new version has just been released, spanning ten dual-layer DVDs in its physical-media version, some 85 GB of data — a marked contrast indeed to that first cassette-based Flight Simulator for the 16 K TRS-80.) Before I leave you today, though, we should perhaps take one more moment to appreciate the achievements of those 1980s versions.

It’s abundantly true that they’re not anything you’re likely to want to play today; time most definitely hasn’t been kind to them. In their day, though, they had a purity, even a nobility to them that we shouldn’t allow the passage of time to erase. They gave anyone who had ever looked up at an airplane passing overhead and dreamed of being behind its controls a way to live that dream, in however imperfect a way. Although it billed itself as a hardcore simulation, Flight Simulator was in reality as much an exercise in fantasy as any other game. It let kids like me soar into the heavens as someone else, someone leading a very different sort of life. Yes, its success was a tribute to its maker Bruce Artwick, but it was also, I would argue, a tribute to everyone who persevered with it in the face of a million reasons just to give up. The people who flew Flight Simulator religiously, who bought the books and worked through a pre-flight checklist before taking off each time and somehow managed to convince themselves that the crude pixelated screen in front of them actually showed a beautiful heavenly panorama, did so out of love of the idea of flight. For them, the blue-and-green world of Flight Simulator was a wonderland of Possibility. Far be it from me to look askance upon them from my perch in their future.

(Sources: the book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture by Brian Dear and Taking Flight: History, Fundamentals, and Applications of Flight Simulation by Christopher D. Watkins and Stephen R. Marenka; Flight of December 10 1910 and March 22 1913; Softalk of January 1983; Kilobaud of October 1977; Softalk IBM of February 1983; Data Processing of April 1968; Compute!’s Gazette of January 1985; Computer Gaming World of April 1987 and September 1990; Computer Entertainment of July 1985; PC Magazine of January 1983; Illinois CS Alumni News of spring 1996; the article “High-Power Graphic Computers for Visual Simulation: A Real-Time Rendering Revolution” by Mary K. Kaiser, presented to the 1996 symposium Supercomputer Applications in Psychology; Bruce Artwick’s Masters thesis “A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display”; flight-simulator product brochures from Link and Rediffusion; documents from the Sierra archive housed at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York; a brochure from an exhibition on the Link Trainer at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in 2000. Online sources include a VITAL II product-demonstration video; an interview with Bruce Artwick by Robert Scoble; a panel discussion from the celebration of PLATO’s 50th anniversary at the Computer History Museum; “A Brief History of Aircraft Flight Simulation” by Kevin Moore; the books hosted at Flight Sim Books. My guiding light through this article has been Josef Havlik’s “History of Microsoft Flight Simulator.” He did at least half of the research so that I didn’t have to…)

Comments
51 Responses

- Not Fenimore

January 1, 2021 at 5:24 pm

Typo: “Therefore raster graphics were still being used for many applications” from context I thi k you mean vector graphics.

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2021 at 6:53 pm

Thanks!

- Alex Smith

January 1, 2021 at 5:26 pm

Nice to see you tackle the subject. One thing on the origins though is that you actually missed the first PLATO flight sim, which was the non-combat oriented Airace (meant to be understood as “Air Race” rather than “Air Ace” within the limitations of PLATO program names) by Silas Warner, which informed Fortner’s work on Airfight.

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2021 at 7:04 pm

I was aware of it, but it was apparently much farther from the ideal of a real-time flight simulator than Airfight, so much so that I have difficulty awarding it the label of “first PLATO flight sim” without laying out a lot of qualifiers. As Brand Fortner remembers it in Brian Dear’s book, it took about ten seconds to update the screen each time you pressed the NEXT key.

- Jeff Nyman

January 3, 2021 at 11:17 pm

The history of that particular game is interestingly tangled when you read PLATO references from the time.

Historically “Airace” (or “Air Race”) is interesting because many sources say that the game was simply an airplane racing game. Yet others refer to it as “a non-combat multiplayer flight sim.” Yet, were you really simulating flight?

What’s always been interesting to people researching the history of PLATO games is that if you look at PLATO Curricular Materials. No. 2., which specifically detailed “curricular development on the PLATO system,” it mentions “Air Race” (specifically by Silas Warner) as “A simulated flying lesson in which the player operates the controls of an airplane.”

Notice that very specific wording? We know that Silas Warner looked at the code for the game “Spasim” and some of that code was modified to basically create “Airace.” The game most definitely showed a cockpit view of the horizon and other players as you raced against them. So was the PLATO curricular guide trying to make it seem more “educational” in a simulation context than as a game? Well, that same PLATO curricular guide refers to “Spasim” as “a Physical Vector simulation of space travel; conflict between spaceships and battleships.”

So … clearly they weren’t too worried about how much something sounded like a game versus pure simulation.

Yet notice how the PLATO materials might be using the term “simulation” loosely there for “Spasim”, while it was very specific about “Air Race” being a “simulated flying lesson” and nothing at all about racing?

This has led to a lot of speculation about what was being referenced regarding “Airace” in various contexts. The PLATO curricular materials often seem to be referring to something entirely different, but always crediting Silas Warner with it.

- tedder

January 1, 2021 at 6:41 pm

When I was in high school in the 90s, my mediocre school district had one great thing: an aviation ground school run by a science teacher. I wasn’t enrolled as a student but spent a lot of time in the class setting up Flight Simulator scenarios. There were six computers (386) with yokes plus an electromechanical simulator of some sort.

I remember the field trips: national guard facilities, international airport tower, several local fields. I also remember the battle with the school superintendent who deemed flying too risky. I think the program withered after that.

I would probably fly now but I live in a city, too far from a GA field to be practical.

- mycophobia

January 1, 2021 at 7:59 pm

Perhaps redundant: “To this day, each man prefers to avoid saying the other’s name if he can avoid it.”

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2021 at 8:36 pm

Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

January 1, 2021 at 8:22 pm

Typo spotting: You have “fight simulator” for “flight simulator” early on.

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2021 at 8:37 pm

Freudian slip? ;) Thanks!

- Mike Duncan

January 1, 2021 at 8:59 pm

Sometimes I think the deadly 8088 lag in Flight Simulator is an analogy for what our brains are doing when attempting philosophy.

- Roy Jacobs

January 1, 2021 at 10:44 pm

Artwick also wrote a highly technical book on all the techniques used to actually render these scenes on machines of the time, called “Microcomputer Displays, Graphics and Animation”. It’s a pretty interesting read.

- CdrJameson

January 1, 2021 at 11:31 pm

If you think the Commodore 64 was bad for flight simulators, I first played Flight Simulation on the 16K ZX81. That was a challenge.
You could do ‘landing’ and that was it.
You’d have to play the more advanced Spectrum version if you also wanted to take off!

I remember seeing one of those camera based flight simulators in a museum – the terrain was like a model railway on a conveyor belt, except it could loop underneath and come back around again later. You could also apparently ‘crash’ you aircraft if you really tried, by running the camera into the taller bits of the scenery. This made you unpopular with the simulator technicians.

- John Elliott

January 1, 2021 at 11:42 pm

When at school, I did my work experience with a company that made displays for flight simulators (this would be the early 1990s). As I recall, cameras flying over model terrain were still a thing then.

I’m also reminded of the Sinclair User review that drew a distinction between “real flight simulators” which try to replicate the characteristics of a particular aircraft, and “fraudulent flight simulators” which simplify the controls, give you a vague notion of flying a plane and concentrate more on combat.

- Bogdanow

January 2, 2021 at 12:02 am

From the 8-bit era (Atari XL in my case), I recall 2 flight simulators. First was a disaster. Fighter Pilot pretended to simulate F-16, but I was unable to do anything with that. But another one…, it was a very different beast. It was a Solo Flight from Microprose. I put hundreds of hours into that game. It captured the feeling of flying very well and even added a task of transporting mail on top of that.

- Gnoman

January 2, 2021 at 2:37 am

Strangely, the flight sim market seems to be in a bit of decline nowadays. You only have two major makers of the pacific style, and neither Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane are annual releases nowadays.

Perhaps more strangely, the combat sim is almost gone. Even arcade-ish stuff is rare, and the once-common detailed military sim with dynamic campaign and meticulous attention to detail is all but extinct. All that’s left is multiplayer stuff like War Thunder.

- Captain Rufus

January 2, 2021 at 10:12 am

Sims more or less became more and more obsessed with a small hard-core niche and their desires. The more casual level Microprose styled sims just died off because of it. And apparently sims of a flight type in general.

A few exist sure but small dev teams or are either too simple or too complex especially now in our non physical manuals era.

Microprose hit a perfect sweet spot imo. Real enough to feel like it, accessible enough to be fun and not a lifestyle choice.

(Maybe some of the Jane’s sims were there but they are very picky on what they run on. You need a really good Pentium 3 with a good 3dfx card and Windows 98 plus a mid grade flight stick.)

- Captain Kal

January 5, 2021 at 12:01 pm

>>>Microprose hit a perfect sweet spot imo. Real enough to feel like it, accessible enough to be fun and not a lifestyle choice<<<

I think the Strike Fighter 2 series, (http://www.thirdwire.com/index2.htm), is a worthy successor. Although sometimes I still play F-19 with Dosbox!!

You may find the following link interesting:

https://youtu.be/Vzod8I2-gTs

I was able to install and play Jane's USAF, on a Zen 2 3800X with a Vega 56 machine !!

Project Wingman (https://www.gog.com/game/project_wingman), is another Ace Combat clone!!

- Scott

January 5, 2021 at 11:35 pm

Yea ! Someone remembers F-19

- Maxim

January 3, 2021 at 12:38 am

Ace Combat series looks quite alive.

- Gnoman

January 4, 2021 at 6:30 am

Back in the PS2 era there were at least 4 series of the sort, all of which had some major gimmick to make them stand out. Ace Combat is the only survivor, and even that series is considerably lessened – after 3 PS1 games and 3 PS2 games, there were only 2 in the 360/PS3 era and only one since.

- Nate

January 6, 2021 at 6:19 pm

Have you seen DCS? It’s amazing and has both realism depth as well as real dogfighting tactics. I don’t think the flight simulator market is dead.

- MrMaestro

January 2, 2021 at 5:18 am

Looking Glass Studios’ Flight Unlimited II from 1997 is the oldest flight sim that still holds up IMO. It ditched the idea of trying simulate the entire world with generic terrain and instead covers only the San Francisco Bay Area. It uses satellite photos in just enough detail to be able to fly by visual flight rules. You can literally look out the window to see where you are. Air traffic control with real voices and complex weather is simulated too.

The 3D graphics are obviously pretty basic by today’s standards but I think they’re quite amazing considering it only needs a CPU of a few hundred MHz and a basic 3D accelerator card of that era.

I reckon it took until Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 for that series to catch up.

- Pedro Timóteo

January 2, 2021 at 11:09 am

Version 3.0 of Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived in 1988, coming complete with the Learjet, support for the latest 256-color VGA graphics cards,

Nitpicking, but while 3.0 and 4.0 supported VGA cards (which could do 256 colors), I’m pretty sure both games only used them to do higher resolutions than EGA could (640x350x16 colors), such as 640x480x16 colors. Certainly, all the screenshots on Mobygames show 16 colors only. The first version to actually support more than 16 colors was 5.0.

Other than MS’s 4.0, the flight simulators I played the most, back in the day, were Flight Simulation on the ZX81, Project Stealth Fighter on the ZX Spectrum (almost the same as the better known C64 original), and its later, enhanced PC version (F-19 Stealth Fighter), and years later Falcon 3.0 on the PC.

- Pedro Timóteo

January 2, 2021 at 11:37 am

Happy 2021, by the way! :)

- Jimmy Maher

January 2, 2021 at 12:47 pm

Ditto!

- Jimmy Maher

January 2, 2021 at 12:47 pm

Thanks!

- Adam Sampson

January 2, 2021 at 12:29 pm

“a flight-simulator maker known as Rediffusion” – Rediffusion are better known in the UK as a cable TV/radio and TV rental company, active from the late 1920s until the mid 1980s. The disintegrating remains of Rediffusion cable systems are still a fairly common sight in some UK cities. Rediffusion Simulation was a spinoff – they started out making navigation systems simulators during WW2, and eventually outlived the parent company, being sold to Hughes and then Thales.

- Jimmy Maher

January 2, 2021 at 12:50 pm

I didn’t know that. Thanks!

- John

January 2, 2021 at 2:04 pm

My introduction to flight simulators was Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer, which I played on an Apple IIc. If my memory is to be trusted, it looked a little better than the screenshot you have here for Flight Simulator for the Apple II. (I am not certain that my memory is to be trusted.) It was a moderately amusing game for its time, but not one that stuck with me. The problem, I think, is that there was so little to do. You could take off, land, maybe do a little acrobatics or stunt flying, and that was about it. You couldn’t really go anywhere. There was nowhere to go. The world was a mostly featureless plain, only occasionally interrupted by hangars and other crude polygonal objects. To the extent that the game had a saving grace it was that it simulated a variety of aircraft, including the SR-71 (which shared an in-game model with the F-16). My favorite thing in the game was to attempt to set altitude records I the SR-71 and then crash when my plane invariably stalled out at extreme altitude. I remember that if you got high enough, the sky would go dark and stars would become visible. I didn’t learn until years later that I was essentially re-creating one of the Yeager scenes from The Right Stuff over and over again. (I still haven’t seen that movie all the way through.) Advanced Flight Trainer was also my last flight simulator. While modern flight simulators offer more places to go–up to and including most actual places, apparently–I’m not convinced that they offer that much more to do and making the simulation more complex unfortunately doesn’t make it any more appealing to me. Most of what I really wanted from flight sims I got got from the related but more arcade-y and explicitly game-ish space sim genre.

- Sung

January 2, 2021 at 3:52 pm

Your description of “flying” on the C64 is hilariously on point. As dumb as this may sound, for the longest time, I thought flying was actually that slow — like if I ever found myself in front of an airplane, I was fully prepared for the delays. ;)

- Doug Orleans

January 2, 2021 at 5:47 pm

I did a summer internship at Sun Microsystems in 1991, and spent many hours in the office after work flying around in Aviator, a barebones but very pretty networked flight simulator for Sun workstations. I can’t find any screenshots for it but here’s a contemporary article: https://www.cbronline.com/news/aviator_15_for_sun_networks_opens_up_graphics_workstation_games_market/

- Ola

January 2, 2021 at 10:48 pm

While the introductory quote is true and an interesting observation, I also find it rigid and smugly narrow-minded. I have stopped being surprised by how easy it is to recalibrate your brain and enjoy old games and old technology. I would have no problem enjoying C64 FSII today – just give me a few minutes to readjust my graphics and frame rate expectations and I am sure I would soon find it immensely fascinating.

Just yesterday I set up Mario 64 on a screen side by side to Super Mario Odyssey (which I had bought as a Christmas present for my nephews). They didn’t even comment on the differences. They switched from game to game, enjoying them both just as much.

- Nathan

January 3, 2021 at 1:03 am

That version 1.0 screenshot looks like it has more than 4 colors. What’s up?

- Jimmy Maher

January 3, 2021 at 8:38 am

Flight Simulator uses composite artifact colors to increase its color palette. As usual, you can find a pretty good technical explanation on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors.

- Ahab

January 4, 2021 at 2:32 pm

I was under the impression that FS1 came out on Apple II before TRS-80. Both Wikipedia and Mobygames say so, though they’re inconsistent on the exact dates. One factor confusing the issue is that there are at least three official versions on the Apple II, and the earliest one was tape-only, doesn’t have the bridge, or an overhead view, or recognize the difference between landing and crashing, doesn’t work on AppleWin, and is a pain to load on MAME.

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2021 at 2:59 pm

I’m pretty confidant in that release date of January of 1980 — but I’m embarrassed to say that you’re right, I reversed the release order. It was indeed the Apple II version that came first. I can’t even blame my secondary sources; I just flat-out misread them. Thanks!

- Graham M

January 4, 2021 at 6:14 pm

“In 1929, Edwin Link of Birmingham, New York”

Should be Binghamton, New York.

Thank you for continuing your work with this ongoing history.

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2021 at 6:44 pm

Thanks!

- Simmerhead

January 7, 2021 at 9:11 am

Flight sims have been the backbone of my gaming history. In fact, it was because of F/A-18 Interceptor for the Amiga that I actually bought one in 1989 – my very first computer. While all my friends had Commodore 64 and 128, I thought they were shit. There wasn’t a single game I enjoyed playing on it, but the Amiga with it’s notch above graphics and audio were amazing. However my love for the Amiga has faded. I used it for only two years, and replaced it with a 386 in 1991, and I’ve been a PC guy ever since. I bought a used one 15 years ago for nostalgic reasons, but got rid of it rather quickly. It was just too slow for me having gotten used to the blazing speeds of modern PCs. But it was on the PC that I first got hooked on Microsoft’s flight simulator series, and I’ve wasted 1000s of hours since version 5. They were always pretty demanding on the hardware, and in fact, Flight Simulator X is still hard to run on top of the line PCs – 14 years after release. Each version has seen amazing enhancements in visuals, and as your article points out, they don’t age gracefully. And with the 2020 versions, every flight sim under the sun seems outdated yet again.

- Buck

January 8, 2021 at 4:40 pm

“My” first PC was an Apple IIe with almost no games to play on it, but we had the subLogic Flight Simulator and Apple Panic. Even back then it was a novelty that I quickly put aside. There wasn’t much to do and there wasn’t much to see, and it barely felt like flying at all. But I still very much like to play Dynamix and Microprose flight simulators to this day.

- Lt. Nitpicker

January 8, 2021 at 8:42 pm

One of the more amusing things I read in Brian Bagnall’s “Commodore: The Amiga Years” (besides his hilariously screwed up timeline of the latter half of the NES launch) was Andy Finkel remarking that he really wanted Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Amiga, seemingly unaware that Sublogic handled most versions of the game not on the Mac or PC.

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2021 at 10:33 pm

I salute your name, Lieutenant!

- Mark Williams

January 9, 2021 at 9:25 pm

My father was a commercial pilot, and trained on the old simulators that showed a landscape on the cockpit windows by flying a small camera over a model landscape. His copilot nearly had a heart attack on one simulated approach when a fly landed on the lens!

- Rob Garrett

January 10, 2021 at 1:58 pm

“Various schemes were devised to remedy the situation, some using reels of film that were projected on the “windows” of the cockpit, some even using a moving video camera which “flew” over model terrain.”

I’ve just finished a book about the Apollo Moon landings (Sunburst and Luminary – worth a read) and it talks about the simulator for the Lunar Module doing similar. An accurate model of the lunar landing site was created on a moving belt, and a camera could travel left/right while the belt moved forwards to create an image displayed to the astronauts while they tried to land. They had particular fun putting objects like model cars on the terrain to land next to – they’re unnaturally large from the camera and would surprise the guests that were invited for a spin when the program was being promoted.

- Andy Silverman

January 11, 2021 at 5:13 pm

Should you be interested in delving into the post-Microsoft acquisition years between 1995 and roughly 2002, I’d be happy to share personal insights. I was the primary program manager in the development team for MSFS during most of that span of time.

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2021 at 8:22 am

Wonderful. Will be in touch when the time comes!

- TM

April 2, 2021 at 8:11 am

A minor correction to an otherwise great article: “viva la différence” should be “vive la différence” (unless the Spanish+French mix is intentional, but that would be a bit weird).

- Jimmy Maher

April 2, 2021 at 8:17 am

Thanks!

- Ian Crossfield

May 25, 2021 at 1:40 am

“When we look back on them today, we find ourselves shaking our heads and asking what the heck we were all thinking.”

Upon reading this I thought not of flight simulators (which I never played so often) but rather of the original MechWarrior game (released 1989), which also relied on chunky, primary-colored 3D graphics. No matter how often I’ve tried, I can’t play and enjoy the game like I know I once did.

Which makes me wonder: any chance of a D.A. BattleTech article at some point? The mid-to-late ’90s were really the heyday of the franchise (>20 games, and counting!), and the role-playing foundation of it all might offer an interesting counterpoint to D&D.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2021 at 5:24 am

I don’t have any plans to do so, no. They don’t look like games that I would find all that personally appealing, and I’m not sure their role in history is big enough to make them worth covering on that basis. Sorry!

Microsoft Space Simulator (or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
January 15, 2021

No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars.

— Quintus Ennius, circa 200 BC

It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had escalated to an unimaginable degree, a fractious nation’s most prominent civil-rights leader and one of its presumptive presidential candidates had been assassinated, and the streets had burned with radical and reactionary violence. And there had been a pandemic to boot, an unusually virulent flu virus responsible for an estimated 100,000 deaths in the United States alone.

And then, at the end of it all, human beings orbited another world. Apollo 8 slipped the surly bonds of Earth on December 21, 1968. Not quite three days later, on Christmas Eve, it entered Lunar orbit.

Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders sent home pictures of the Moon from close up to mark this momentous event. But the photographs they took that resonated the most were actually those of the Earth, revealed from 240,000 miles away to be the tiniest of islands in the hostile ocean of the cosmos. The straight-laced pilots and engineers inside the spacecraft were the farthest thing from poets, but they rose to the occasion on this enchanted evening. As millions of people all over the Earth gazed at their planet — at their desperately fragile-looking home — flickering there on their television screens, the astronauts read aloud from the Book of Genesis. At that moment, it didn’t matter whether you were a believer or not; those ancient words echoing down through time transcended religious dogma — transcended, dare we say it, religion itself.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Mission Commander Borman closed the proceedings just before the spacecraft swung around to the dark side of the Moon and lost contact with home: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

Although my editing process means it will be a couple of weeks yet before you read these words, I’m writing them between the Christmas and New Year’s of 2020, a natural time for contemplation and stock-taking. And we certainly have plenty to contemplate: 2020 was also one hell of a year, arguably the most cataclysmic in the Western world since 1968. The last twelve months have been marked by a worldwide pandemic which has altered all of our lives immeasurably, combined with worldwide demands for racial justice that are, one might say, the business that was left unfinished after Martin Luther King’s assassination. The world around us today looks completely different from the one we knew 365 days ago, and it’s not clear when or even whether the Old Normal will return.

But alas, there was no grace note like Apollo 8 to close this year and help us to put things in their proper perspective. Back in 1968, we firmly believed that this year’s most memorable Christmas greeting might come from astronauts near Jupiter or Saturn, but the reality is that a human being hasn’t left Earth orbit since 1972.

Nevertheless, some sort of perspective is sorely needed after a year like the one we’ve just experienced. For better or for worse, we’re living an ever-increasing proportion of our lives virtually. So, perhaps we can find a way to see a bigger picture that way. Perhaps the time is right to talk about Microsoft Space Simulator.

Space Simulator was the brainchild of an enigmatic fellow named Charles Guy, who didn’t give interviews during his lifetime and who died young from cancer in 2004, thus complicating the work of writers like me immeasurably. Born in 1961 in Indianapolis, Indiana, he attended the University of Purdue, but dropped out when his expertise in 3D graphics won him a job at subLogic in Champaign, Illinois, the maker of the hugely successful Flight Simulator. Bruce Artwick and Stu Moment, the company’s founders, first brought Guy on to help Artwick with the programming burden as they ported their flagship product to more and more platforms.

Soon, however, Guy got a project of his own: he was placed in charge of Jet, a simulation of the F-16 and F/A-18 fighter jets. As they had done with Flight Simulator, subLogic ported and supported Jet for years after its initial release in 1985, keeping Guy plenty busy. But the Jet line ended in 1989, when subLogic effectively split into two separate companies amidst lawsuits and recriminations, with one of the companies being led by each of the two erstwhile founders.

Guy backed the right horse; he left subLogic to join Artwick’s appropriately named Bruce Artwick Organization, which had walked away with the crown jewel of the old subLogic simulation empire: the contract to make Microsoft Flight Simulator for MS-DOS and the Macintosh. He worked on those programs for a brief while, then convinced Artwick and Microsoft to let him make Space Simulator.

The fact was, Guy’s bona fides as an expert in winged flight weren’t quite up to those of Bruce Artwick or Stu Moment. He had duly attempted to qualify for a pilot’s license back in the 1980s, thus conforming to what had become something of a subLogic tradition, but his airplane nearly spun out of control when he was practicing stalls one night. “He managed to recover, but never flew a plane again after that,” remembers a friend.

Guy’s real passion was astronomy. Heaven in the metaphorical and literal sense was one to him: few things moved him more than a clear night sky full of stars. It had all begun when he was fifteen years old and happened to look up on just such a perfect night:

What I saw was so intense that it frightened me. I had to look down at the ground. It was too much. Slowly, I built up the nerve to look at it more and more with my naked eyes. And eventually, I got to the point where I couldn’t stop looking at it. I became more and more obsessed with it.

The scale of it was frightening to me. I felt like I was standing on a pinpoint, oppressed by the size of this thing. It really did frighten me, but I found that this fear really isn’t like normal fear. It is the kind of fear that is respectful, although it becomes a fear that must be conquered and resolved. It leads toward growth and understanding.

When he talked about stargazing, he did so as if he was actually traveling to the stars he saw through his telescope, as perhaps he was in spirit: “I’ll tell you where I’m headed. I’m headed to Sagittarius. I’ll often go to M22, then M8, then M17. I like to go south to north, hitting all the H2 regions, and the good globular and open clusters. There are a lot of them in Sagittarius.” It was only natural for him to make a game where you could take just the sorts of trips he was already taking in his mind’s eye.

Space Simulator is a game of two halves — assuming, that is, that we can agree to call a piece of software with no goals and no real rules a game at all — and they don’t always fit together perfectly. On the one hand, Space Simulator is exactly what you might expect from its own name and that of the development studio behind it: a serious simulation of spaceflight. You can fly historical craft like the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules, the Space Shuttle, or even the Manned Maneuvering Unit used by Shuttle astronauts for spacewalks. Or you can explore farther afield from Earth in one of a variety of theoretical spacecraft of the future. Either way, the experience can be as realistic as you want it to be. You can use the program’s many available shortcuts to slew your way around the galaxy without ever touching a thruster control for yourself, or you can sit down with pen and paper and plot your own orbits and trajectories; doing so requires far more higher-math skills than I possess, but I’m told that, if you have the requisite skills, you’ll find the program to be an entirely consistent, entirely realistic environment in which to play NASA navigator. Of course, at some point you’ll have to bite the bullet and embrace some of the simulator’s shortcuts, as some of the voyages you can plot for yourself will take billions of years if you insist on making them in real time.

The other side of Space Simulator — the side nearer to Charles Guy’s heart, one senses — are the actual places you can fly or slew your way to. In fact, Space Simulator boasts what must be as large a virtual “world” as has ever been built into a game, encompassing the full extent of the Milky Way Galaxy and some distance beyond. (“Can you believe that we’re going to try to put all of this inside a computer?” exclaimed Guy spontaneously one evening under one of his beloved clear night skies.) You can visit the stars and planets and moons of our solar system or the ones that are theorized to exist in others, and just gaze in wonder or make pictures or even videos of your discoveries, knowing that what you see and record is as accurate as the state of the science of astronomy during the early 1990s could make it. All of it is presented in Super VGA graphics at a resolution of 800 X 600, meaning it still looks pretty good today. The sense of wonder was and still remains strong with this one.

Indeed, a palpable spirit of starry-eyed idealism still clings to Microsoft Space Simulator all these years later. Defying their 1990s reputation as soulless dirty tricksters — a reputation which was well-earned in many other contexts — Microsoft worked enthusiastically with Charles Guy and the rest of the Bruce Artwick Organization for some three years to stuff the entirety of a galaxy onto three floppy disks. Grant Fjermedal, a journalist who was there through much of the process, shares this anecdote about the arrival of an early version at Microsoft, one which for the first time let you explore the galaxy using a joystick.

The evening after it arrived, in March of 1993, program manager Jon Solon carried [the] disks home and loaded it on his machine. He flew through space until after midnight, chasing down planets and orbiting the Moon, excited about being able to leave the keyboard controls behind in favor of the more fluid joystick. Jon, who had been program manager for three versions of Flight Simulator, compared the experience to the first time he took off from Chicago’s Meigs Field, circled the skyscrapers, and successfully landed.

All the next day at Microsoft, people were hunting through storage rooms (and through the offices of their pals) looking for joysticks that weren’t being used. There were those who flew, and those who enthused. People were being flagged down and dragged into offices: “I’ve got to show you something — watch this!” It was a day when the door seemed to open wider than ever before.

Far from limiting the scope of the simulation, Jon Solon and the others at Microsoft encouraged Charles Guy to expand it. It was Solon, for example, who insisted that it ought to be possible to land your spacecraft on the planets you encountered, in order to see their diverse environments firsthand.

When the finished Space Simulator finally shipped in late 1994, Microsoft got behind it in a big way. The manual they included in the box was a minor wonder in itself, a patient introduction to the program’s complexities in more than 200 friendly, well-written, eminently approachable pages; few to no other software publishers would have had it in them to produce a manual like this, for any sort of program. In addition to a lavish advertising campaign positioning Space Simulator as the natural heir to the 3-million-selling Flight Simulator, Microsoft published not one but two strategy guides through their own press, and granted Sybex Books special inside access so they could publish a third. (These three books nicely encompassed the full range of Space Simulator’s personality: the Sybex book was the hardcore one, its second half chock full of equations and subsection titles like “Geometric Properties of All Conic Sections”; meanwhile one of the Microsoft books was most interested simply in helping you to take in the galaxy’s sights, while the third aimed for a point somewhere in between the other two.)

With support like this behind his creation, an ebullient Charles Guy was moved to exclaim that Space Simulator “might bring on a whole new social revolution!” Or a “spiritual revolution,” as Grant Fjermedal put it: “Perhaps a tool to simulate even a part of the vastness of space will lead us to ponder what that vastness might mean for humanity, as we glide through the soft darkness of space, clutching hold of our garden planet in orbit around our gracious middle-aged Sun.” For truly Space Simulator contains multitudes. One can be merrily slewing through the galaxy, only to look down and realize that 40 years, 400,000 years, 4 million years have passed since one left Earth. Through Space Simulator, we can almost glimpse infinity. The contemplation of such enormity, like that of a single grain of sand, can be a source of both existential terror and spiritual comfort. “It was while traveling the stars at a time-scale setting of 68 years per second,” writes Fjermedal, “that I most fully understood the vastness of our galaxy and the brevity of our lives.”

Unfortunately, the public proved for once resistant to Microsoft’s much-vaunted marketing acumen when it came to Space Simulator. In retrospect at least, the problems with the product as a commercial proposition aren’t hard to identify. It was the ultimate in “make your own fun” games, even more so than a so-called “software toy” like, say, SimCity — or for that matter Flight Simulator. When you start the game, you find yourself parked in orbit around Earth. From there, it’s entirely up to you to decide what you want to do and how you want to do it by digging through a cryptic nest of menus; Space Simulator absolutely demands that you read that brilliant manual through, carefully and completely, to get much of anywhere with it. And even after you do so, it demands that you be the type of person who considers unguided, goal-less exploration fun. Space Simulator does have support for “missions,” which are exactly what they sound like they would be, even to the point of including a scoring system, but this capability is weirdly under-utilized. The game includes just two of them out of the box: one covering Apollo 17, the final mission to the Moon, and the other covering a typical Shuttle mission. One suspects that Microsoft envisioned a robust Space Simulator aftermarket that would have included more “mission disks” among other products, much like the many scenery disks which were released for Flight Simulator.

But sadly, sales of Microsoft Space Simulator never justified any such further releases. The dedicated gaming press, and dedicated gamers in general, didn’t know quite what to make of it, even as it was far too demanding for more casual users. Of course, Microsoft Flight Simulator was another willfully cerebral, esoteric, goal-less experience that defied all of the conventional wisdom about what made a hit computer game, and yet managed to become the best-selling computer-gaming franchise of its generation. Why was Space Simulator so different? Perhaps its spaces were just too vast, its conceptual grandiosity too intimidating. It’s easier to get a handle on the idea of flying a small plane from airport to airport, even if there isn’t much point to it beyond the fantasy of being up there in the wild blue yonder, than it is to conceive and plan a voyage to Polaris in a Bussard ramjet. Maybe the idea of a voyage of a million years simply strained too many imaginations past the breaking point.

Whatever the reason for its commercial failure, Microsoft Space Simulator went quietly out of print within a couple of years, even as Flight Simulator continued to go strong. Charles Guy left the Bruce Artwick Organization shortly after it became clear that his passion project would not be fomenting any social revolutions. He bounced around the games industry in various programming roles for the rest of his life, but never got a chance to helm a game of his own of any sort again, much less one with the scope of this one.

Space Simulator is an oddly forgotten artifact today; you’ll be hard-pressed to find any online discussion of it at all. And that’s a shame, as it possesses at least two sources of enduring interest. In one sense, it’s a fascinating product of its time, that heady cusp of the second, ultimately more enduring home-computer boom, when the multimedia capabilities of the latest machines were inspiring more big companies than just Microsoft to take a flier on unabashedly intellectual, crazily idealistic software.

In another sense, though, Space Simulator transcends its time. No one since Charles Guy has attempted to make a piece of software quite like this one. There are certainly technical simulations of spaceflight that are even more detailed than Space Simulator, just as there are planetarium programs to let you do virtual stargazing with the benefit of an additional quarter-century of astronomical discoveries. Yet no one else has given you a spacecraft and then just set you loose to go explore the natural wonders of our galaxy with it, thereby giving you a more embodied sort of window onto our staggeringly magnificent and terrifyingly immense universe than any planetarium can hope to create. Computer games are not known for their ability to provoke spiritual awakenings, but if any one of them can, perhaps it is this one. Stare, if you dare, into the vastness, and see that it is good. A little perspective is never a bad thing.

A Microsoft Space Simulator Gallery

Saturn, possibly the most beautiful of all the planets of our solar system — after Earth, that is. While we watch the planet itself rotate in the top window, we watch some of the more prominent of its dozens of moons orbit in the bottom window. You may find that you can spend a surprisingly long time just watching their clockwork motion.

Another view of Saturn, with the spaceship we’ve used to visit it in the foreground.

Returning to Earth in the Galactic Explorer, a spacecraft obviously modeled after the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, given that the space station before us betrays the same influence, we can almost imagine this scene as a lost frame from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film.

In another scene that might easily have come from 2001, a space station orbits the Moon.

A once-familiar sight from the real world: the Space Shuttle touches down at Cape Canaveral.

The Andromeda Galaxy, seen from well beyond the border of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The programmers among you will appreciate what an awesome feat it is to devise a coordinate system able to pinpoint a location 2.5 million light years from Earth as well as it can a single runway in Florida.

The Whirlpool Galaxy, 23.5 million light years away from Earth.

The dream of constructing a Space Station Freedom in Earth orbit was still alive when Space Simulator was under development. The plan to do so, first mooted by President Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union Address in 1984, was scrapped completely by the end of the 1990s.

In yet another scene from a future that’s been inordinately slow in arriving, we soar above a colony on Mars.

Space Simulator can also be used as a planetarium, showing a view of the sky from any position on Earth at any time you wish.

This error message appears surprisingly often as you explore, providing as good an illustration as any of the sheer scale of the simulation.

Our one and only home in a beautiful but inhospitable universe. May we be better stewards of it after 2020 than we’ve been in the years prior…

(Sources: the books Microsoft Space Simulator: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba, Adventures in Space Simulator: The Ultimate Desktop Astronaut’s Guide by Grant Fjermedal, and Space Simulator Strategies and Secrets by Nick Dargahi; Computer Gaming World of December 1994; Computer Play of November 1988. The “Talk” page of the Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Space Simulator proved one of my few sources of personal information on the enigmatic Charles Guy.

Microsoft Space Simulator has been out of print for many years. Therefore I’ve put it up here for download, packaged so as to be as easy as possible to get running under DOSBox on a modern Windows, Macintosh, or Linux system. Happy exploring! May you find the perspective you crave.)

Comments
43 Responses

- Jason Dyer

January 15, 2021 at 5:29 pm

I’ve been looking forward to this one, thanks so much!

Yet no one else has given you a spacecraft and then just set you loose to go explore the natural wonders of our galaxy with it, thereby giving you a more embodied sort of window onto our staggeringly magnificent and terrifyingly immense universe than any planetarium can hope to create.

I assume you are including it in the “technical simulations of spaceflight” line, but Orbiter really does feel like a spiritual successor to me.

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/index.html

- Sean Barrett

January 15, 2021 at 6:24 pm

This is not a very big deal, but

“Jet, which featured the guns and bombs and enemies that Flight Simulator had always so conspicuously lacked”

is not accurate! One or both of subLogic Flight Simulator 1/2 had combat, triggered by pressing “w” to “Declare War”. The internet disagrees about which, and I didn’t have the patience to wade through the manuals to figure it out for myself, but see for example the 2nd paragraph of https://www.mobygames.com/game/flight-simulator

- Jim Hansen

January 15, 2021 at 10:08 pm

Yes, in fact if I recall correctly, you could dogfight with a bi-plane in Flight Simulator at one point – and maybe (less memory on this one) drop handheld bombs ala World War I.

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2021 at 10:13 pm

It’s a bit of an edge case. The “British Ace” mode was indeed present in Flight Simulator until… Microsoft’s version 3.0? 4.0? But it was always an afterthought, and rather orthogonal to the simulator’s real appeal. Still, in the interest of strict accuracy… edit made. Thanks!

- Martin Noutch

January 15, 2021 at 10:13 pm

We had it. I reckon I was a little young to enjoy it, aged about 9, but I know my dad stayed awake some long nights among the stars.

But years later I experienced something like Guy’s epiphany, when I walked out one night and lay on the grass of the moonlit park and looked out at the half moon. Suddenly, I realised that my back was pressed against the outer surface of a sphere, held there by gravity in the plane, more or less, of the solar system, and that rather than looking /up/, I was really looking /forward/ into space.

The moon and stars are more interesting since then somehow.

- Alberto

January 15, 2021 at 11:08 pm

I find utterly mind-boggling the very idea that the day “Oct 17th 5819536” will exist, even if it will be called differently (provided that there will be creatures able to name it at all).

Astronomy, even in its pop-science incarnations, has always the power to make us meditate.

Thanks for another great article!

- Michael

January 15, 2021 at 11:42 pm

” Of course, Microsoft Flight Simulator was another willfully cerebral, esoteric, goal-less experience that defied all of the conventional wisdom about what made a hit computer game, and yet managed to become the best-selling computer-gaming franchise of its generation. Why was Space Simulator so different?”
So, I admit to not having much experience with Flight Simulator programs, but it always seemed to me that there was one very clear goal there: Not to Crash. Specifically, to successfully land without crashing.
If “Space Simulator” lacked a similar possibility of “losing” (say, by flying into a star or hitting a stray asteroid), then I think it would inevitably be a far less addicting experience. Or am I wrong, and Microsoft Flight Simulator really was just cruising around the Earth with no possibility of any problem?

- Andrew Pam

January 16, 2021 at 12:39 am

“dirty trickters” – typo for “tricksters”

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2021 at 9:15 am

Thanks!

- Andrew Silverman

January 16, 2021 at 12:45 am

“His airplane fell into a spin during his first solo” – I have to question the veracity of this claim. A first solo for any pilot is a quick trip around the airport traffic pattern, which never gets to an altitude of much more than 1000′ above ground level. Entering a spin from this limited altitude would very likely have been a fatal event. I wouldn’t call it “impossible” but the description seems highly suspect. There are other less “developed” problems, such as a simple stall and/or an incipient spin which would be nearly as dangerous but potentially more recoverable. Either way, I don’t doubt that -something- bad happened to him during his first solo, but there’s probably more to the story.

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2021 at 9:19 am

Yeah… it’s a second-hand — now third-hand — description, but I like to include such personal anecdotes whenever possible. I’ll blur the details a bit more. Thanks!

- HWG

January 16, 2021 at 2:30 am

Charles was my uncle. Really amazing guy. I wish I could have had more time with him. I don’t have anything particularly relevant to add to the post but I’d enjoy having a chat about him if you have the time and interest. Shoot me an email.

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2021 at 9:25 am

Cool. Will be in touch!

- Will Miles

January 16, 2021 at 5:34 am

“Mission Commander Bowman” -> “Mission Commander Borman”. While Mike Oldfield’s “The Songs of Distant Earth” album does indeed feature samples from Apollo 8, Commander Bowman was from a different Clarke novel.

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2021 at 9:16 am

:) Thanks!

- Laertes

January 16, 2021 at 12:31 pm

You can do similar time and space exploration, albeit without a spaceship, with Stellarium:

https://stellarium.org/

- Lisa H.

January 16, 2021 at 6:20 pm

Throwing in another vote to check out Stellarium.

- Martin

January 16, 2021 at 4:46 pm

So this does the Space Shuttle which is basically a big ol’ glider. How good a flight sim job does it do with it?

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2021 at 10:25 am

It does okay. It’s certainly more abstracted and forgiving than a dedicated Space Shuttle simulator, but the remarkable thing is that it does it at all. The atmospheres of not just Earth but many other planets are modeled.

- Lisa H.

January 16, 2021 at 6:20 pm

The scale of it was frightening to me. I felt like I was standing on a pinpoint

I mean, we are. Even a pinpoint might be a bit large of an object to use for this metaphor.

Stare, if you dare, into the vastness, and see that it is good. A little perspective is never a bad thing.

Insert Total Perspective Vortex joke here.

- Nate

January 16, 2021 at 6:40 pm

Thanks for this meditation on our place in the universe.

Shouldn’t it be “New Year’s” (or even Day)?

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2021 at 10:29 am

I seen it written both ways. (Is “New Year’s Day” really a possessive?) But it probably reads better with the apostrophe since I choose to drop the “Day.” Thanks!

- Lisa H.

January 19, 2021 at 2:36 am

New Year’s Day is a possessive, yes – the day that belongs to the new year, i.e. instead of the old one.

- Aaron

January 16, 2021 at 6:42 pm

> No one since Charles Guy has attempted to make a piece of software quite like this one…no one else has given you a spacecraft and then just set you loose to go explore the natural wonders of our galaxy with it, thereby giving you a more embodied sort of window onto our staggeringly magnificent and terrifyingly immense universe than any planetarium can hope to create.

I’d offer that Space Engine ( http://spaceengine.org/ ) does actually meet this description, and is perhaps a spiritual successor to Space Simulator, with the many bells and whistles that come with 2020-era software and computing horsepower.

If the author agrees, perhaps a mention, thereof, in an update to the article would be in order.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2021 at 10:38 am

Stellarium, which was mentioned by other commenters, doesn’t get there because it doesn’t have the embodied, “traveling” aspect of Space Simulator. This Space Engine — which I confess I’d never heard of before your comment — does seem to be the closest thing yet.

That said, it doesn’t seem to simulate any specific craft, or to be all that interested in the nitty-gritty mechanics of practical spaceflight at all. So, I’d say that there is software which allows you to explore the known natural universe, and software — like Kerbal Space Program — which simulates real-world *spaceflight*, but nothing which attempts to do both in the way of Space Simulator. Whether attempting to do both was really advisable, from a commercial or design perspective, is of course another question. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Space Simulator mixed two things which would each have been more satisfying alone.

- Wouter Lammers

January 16, 2021 at 7:23 pm

I spotted an “I’ll you where I’m headed”

Very interesting article! I was very much active in gaming at this time but this completely passed by me!

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2021 at 10:39 am

Thanks!

- Gnoman

January 17, 2021 at 12:50 am

I think that part of the lack of success this game found was that there were games like the Elite series that had more “game” to them, while giving a similar experience in other ways.

Another large part is that this sort of thing really hammers in the scope of the universe, and that’s more than our puny brains are equipped to handle. I remember spending many agonizing nights as a child struggling with the concept of infinity.

- Martin

January 17, 2021 at 2:19 pm

Was thinking the same thing. The Elite code could have only been around 20k so quite a bit of gaming could have been added in a small amount of space.

You implied that it supported the method to add additional mission packs. Was the “how” of doing that ever made available to allow people, even now, to give it new missions?

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2021 at 11:22 am

No, hooks for making new missions weren’t exposed to end users, which was a bit of a deviance from the software’s guiding philosophy of being a tool for letting the user’s creativity flourish.

- Josh T.

January 17, 2021 at 4:16 pm

“identity” -> “identify”
“want to it” -> “want to do it”

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2021 at 5:04 pm

Thanks!

- Jason

January 18, 2021 at 10:30 am

“The contemplation of such enormity, like that of a single grain of sand…”

I hope a few people clicked that link. Thanks for reminding me of a great album that I hadn’t heard in way too long.

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2021 at 11:18 am

That’s my favorite rendition of what may be my favorite Bob Dylan song. (“A Simple Twist of Fate” — preferably the live version by the Jerry Garcia Band — and “Tangled Up in Blue” — preferably the version found on Dylan’s Bootleg Series — are the other contenders.)

- Aula

January 18, 2021 at 7:47 pm

“but the reality is that we can barely get into Earth orbit these days, much less to the Moon, still less to the other planets in our solar system.”

That might have been a reasonable statement ten years ago when the space shuttles were retiring, but now it seems utterly uninformed. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has already taken people to orbit, and joining it will be Boeing’s Starliner, Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, NASA’s Orion, and SpaceX’s Starship. It’s likely that at least one of these other orbiters will become operational within a year, and all are scheduled to do so in at most a few years. Some of these vehicles will be used to take humans to the Moon, and Starship is planned to take them even to Mars.

BTW, if you want to try docking Crew Dragon to the ISS, go to https://iss-sim.spacex.com/

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2021 at 10:54 pm

I think some of those projects are still a little more aspirational at this stage than the glossy brochures might suggest. But point taken. I softened the wording. Thanks!

- Mike Taylor

January 18, 2021 at 10:32 pm

“One can be merrily slewing through the galaxy, only to look down and realize that 40 years, 400,000 years, 4 million years have passed since one left Earth. Through Space Simulator, we can almost glimpse infinity. The contemplation of such enormity …”

Jimmy, I know you like pedantry; I wouldn’t bring this up otherwise. But “enormity” does not mean large size in general, but enormous wickeness in particular. So one might talk about the enormity of PInochet’s regime in Chile, for example.

Hope this is helpful!

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2021 at 10:56 pm

Thanks, but in American English at least both meanings apply.

- TC

January 19, 2021 at 2:31 am

Seeing MS again reminds me, would you cover the multimedia CD-ROM industry, like the heyday of Dorling-Kindersley or Microsoft Home? That’s a field that attracted many stellar talents, but unlike video games, is under-appreciated in journalism.

- TC

January 19, 2021 at 2:35 am

Come to think of that, for a lot of people, Encarta MindMaze also was one of the nostalgic childhood games.

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2021 at 10:22 am

I do plan to write at some length about the Voyager CD-ROMs, and about the many musicians — Todd Rundgren, Prince, Billy Idol, the Residents, Peter Gabriel, etc. — who made interactive CD-ROMs during the 1990s. Microsoft Home and the like will probably get a mention here and there, but, given that they’re more reference works than creative ones, I’m not sure I have quite as much to say about them.

- Solstar

February 11, 2021 at 10:16 am

The time i spent with this one in the 90’s was stupidly high. I enjoyed every aspects of it and probably should go back tying it again, for as obsolete it may be by now (space concepts wise)

- chris green

June 14, 2021 at 6:19 pm

I was a friend and colleague of Charles for many years at SubLOGIC and elsewhere.
Thank you for this appreciation of his work.

The Second Coming of Star Wars
February 5, 2021

It’s all but impossible to overstate the influence that Star Wars had on the first generation of microcomputer games. The fact is, Star Wars and early home computers were almost inseparable — in some odd sense part of the same larger cultural movement, if you will.

The first film in George Lucas’s blockbuster trilogy debuted on May 25, 1977, just days before the Apple II, the first pre-assembled personal computer to be marketed to everyday consumers, reached store shelves. If not everyone who loved Star Wars had the money and the desire to buy a computer in the months and years that followed, it did seem that everyone who bought a computer loved Star Wars. And that love in turn fueled many of the games those early adopters made. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels and, perhaps more arguably, the Star Trek television and movie franchise are the only other traditional-media properties whose impact on the fictions and even mechanics of early computer games can be compared to that of Star Wars.

And yet licensed takes on all three properties were much less prominent than one might expect from the degree of passion the home-computer demographic had for them. The British/Australian publisher Melbourne House had a huge worldwide hit with their rather strange 1982 text-adventure adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but never scaled similar heights with any of their mediocre follow-ups. Meanwhile Star Trek wound up in the hands of the software arm of the print publisher Simon & Schuster, who released a series of obtuse, largely text-based games that went absolutely nowhere. And as for Star Wars, the hottest property of them all… ah, therein lies a tale.

Like The Lord of the Rings before it, Star Wars was a victim of the times in which its first licensing deals were signed. In the months before the first movie was released, both George Lucas himself and 20th Century Fox, the studio that distributed the film, sought after someone — anyone — who would be willing to make a line of toys to accompany it. They were turned down again and again. Finally, Marc Pevers, Fox’s president of licensing, got a nibble from a small toy maker called Kenner Products.

Kenner was owned at that time by the big corporate conglomerate General Mills, who also happened to own Parker Brothers, the maker of such family-board-game staples as Monopoly, Clue, and Sorry!. Thus when Kenner negotiated with Lucas and Fox, they requested that the license cover “toys and [emphasis mine] games,” with responsibility for the latter to be kicked over to Parker Brothers. For at this early date, before the release of the Atari VCS videogame console, before even the arrival of Space Invaders in American arcades, “games” meant board games in the minds of everyone negotiating the deal. Indeed, Kenner explicitly promised that at a minimum they would produce four action figures and a “family game” to help prime the pump of a film whose commercial prospects struck just about everyone as highly dubious.

There are conflicting reports as to the other terms of the deal, but it seems most likely that Kenner agreed to pay Lucas and Fox either a 5-percent royalty or a flat $100,000 per year, whichever amount was greater. If Kenner ever failed to pay at least $100,000 in any given year, the arrangement would end immediately. Otherwise, it would go on in perpetuity. It was quite a sweet deal for Kenner by any standard, very much a reflection of the position of weakness from which Fox and Lucas were negotiating; one Kenner employee later joked that they had gotten Star Wars for “$50 and a handshake.”

Of course, we all know what happened with that first Star Wars film upon its release a few months after the contract was signed. After a slow start in 1977 while they tooled up to meet the completely unexpected level of demand, Kenner sold 42 million pieces of Star Wars-branded merchandise in 1978 alone; by 1985, the worldwide population of Star Wars action figures was larger than the United States’s population of real human beings. Lucas publicly excoriated Marc Pevers for a deal that had cost him “tens of millions,” and the two wound up in libel court, the former eventually forced to pay the latter an unspecified sum for his overheated remarks by a settlement arrangement.

Lucas’s anger was understandable if not terribly dignified. As if the deal for the toy rights alone wasn’t bad enough, Pevers had blithely sold off the videogame rights for a song as well, simply by not demanding more specific language about what kinds of games the phrase “toys and games” referred to. Kenner’s first attempt at a Star Wars videogame came already in 1978, in the form of a single-purpose handheld gadget subtitled Electronic Laser Battle. When that didn’t do well, the field was abandoned until 1982, when, with the Atari-VCS-fueled first wave of digital gaming at its height, Parker Brothers released three simple action games for the console. Then they sub-contracted a few coin-op arcade games to Atari, who ported them to home consoles and computers as well.

But by the time the last of these appeared, it was 1985, the Great Videogame Crash was two years in the past, and it seemed to the hidebound executives at General Mills that the fad for videogames was over and done with, permanently. Their Star Wars games had done pretty well for themselves, but had come out just a little too late in the day to really clean up. So be it; they saw little reason to continue making them now. It would be six years before another all-new, officially licensed Star Wars videogame would appear in North America, even as the virtual worlds of countless non-licensed games would continue to be filled with ersatz Han Solos and Death Stars.

This state of affairs was made doubly ironic by the fact that Lucasfilm, George Lucas’s production company, had started its own games studio already in 1982. For most of its first ten years, the subsidiary known as Lucasfilm Games was strictly barred from making Star Wars games, even as its employees worked on Skywalker Ranch, surrounded with props and paraphernalia from the films. Said employees have often remarked in the years since that their inability to use their corporate parent’s most famous intellectual property was really a blessing in disguise, in that it forced them to define themselves in other ways, namely by creating one of the most innovative and interesting bodies of work of the entire 1980s gaming scene. “Not being able to make Star Wars games freed us, freed us in a way that I don’t think we understood at the time,” says Ron Gilbert, the designer of the Lucasfilm classics Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. “We always felt we had to be making games that were different and pushed the creative edges. We felt we had to live up to the Lucasfilm name.” For all that, though, having the Lucasfilm name but not the Star Wars license that ought to go with it remained a frustrating position to be in, especially knowing that the situation was all down to a legal accident, all thanks to that single vaguely worded contract.

If the sequence of events which barred Lucasfilm from making games based on their own supreme leader’s universe was a tad bizarre, the way in which the Star Wars rights were finally freed up again was even stranger. By the end of 1980s, sales of Star Wars toys were no longer what they once had been. The Return of the Jedi, the third and presumably last of the Star Wars films, was receding further and further into the rear-view mirror, with nothing new on the horizon to reignite the old excitement for the next generation of children. For the first time, Kenner found themselves paying the guaranteed $100,000 licensing fee to Lucas and Fox instead of the 5-percent royalty.

At the beginning of 1991, Kenner failed to send the aforementioned parties their $100,000 check for the previous year, thereby nullifying the fourteen-year-old contract for Star Wars “toys and games.” Fan folklore would have it that the missing check was the result of an accounting oversight; Kenner was about to be acquired by Hasbro, and there was much chaos about the place. A more likely explanation, however, is that Kenner simply decided that the contract wasn’t worth maintaining anymore. The Star Wars gravy train had been great while it lasted, but it had run its course.

There was jubilation inside Lucasfilm Games when the staff was informed that at long last they were to be allowed to play in the universe of Star Wars. They quickly turned out a few simple action-oriented titles for consoles, but their real allegiance as a studio was to personal computers. Thus they poured the most effort by far into X-Wing, the first Star Wars game ever to be made first, foremost, and exclusively for computers, with all the extra complexity and extra scope for design ambition which that description implied in those days.

Lawrence Holland, circa 1992.

The mastermind of X-Wing was a soft-spoken, unassuming fellow named Lawrence Holland, whose path into the industry had been anything but straightforward. His first passion in life had been archaeology and anthropology; he’d spent much of his early twenties working in the field in remote regions of East Africa and India. In 1981, he came to the University of California, Berkeley to study for a doctorate in anthropology. He had never even seen a personal computer, much less played a computer game, until he became roommates with someone who had one. Holland:

I was working as a chef at a restaurant in Berkeley — and I realized I didn’t particularly want to do that for the next six years while I worked on my doctorate. At the time, my roommate had an Atari 800, and he was into programming. I thought, “Hey, what a cool machine!” So I finally got a Commodore 64 and spent all my spare time teaching myself how to use it. I’d always wanted to build something, but I just hadn’t found the right medium. Computers seemed to me to be the perfect combination of engineering and creativity.

The barriers to entry in the software industry were much lower then than they are today; a bright young mind like Holland with an aptitude and passion for programming could walk into a job with no formal qualifications whatsoever. He eventually dropped out of his PhD track in favor of becoming a staff programmer at HESWare, a darling of the venture capitalists during that brief post-Great Videogame Crash era when home computers were widely expected to become the Next Big Thing after the console flame-out.

While working for HESWare in 1985, Holland was responsible for designing and programming a rather remarkable if not quite fully-realized game called Project: Space Station, a combination of simulation and strategy depicting the construction and operation of its namesake in low Earth orbit. But soon after its release HESWare collapsed, and Holland moved on to Lucasfilm Games. Throughout his many years there, he would work as an independent contractor rather than an employee, by his own choice. This allowed him, as he once joked, to “take classes and keep learning about history and anthropology in my copious spare time.”

In writing about the LucasFilm Games of the late 1980s and early 1990s in previous articles, I’ve focused primarily on the line of graphic adventures which they began in 1987 with Maniac Mansion, stressing how these games’ emphasis on fairness made them a welcome and even visionary alternative to the brutality being inflicted upon players by other adventure developers at the time. But the studio was never content to do or be just one thing. Thus at the same time that Ron Gilbert was working on Maniac Mansion, another designer named Noah Falstein was making a bid for the vehicular-simulation market, one of the most lucrative corners of the industry. Lawrence Holland came to Lucasfilm Games to help out with that — to be the technical guy who made Falstein’s design briefs come to life on the monitor screen. The first fruit of that partnership was 1987’s PHM Pegasus, a simulation of a hydrofoil attack boat; it was followed by a slightly more elaborate real-time naval simulation called Strike Fleet the following year.

With that apprenticeship behind him, Holland was allowed to take sole charge of Battlehawks 1942, a simulation of World War II aerial combat in the Pacific Theater. He designed and programmed the game in barely six months, in time to see it released before the end of 1988, whereupon it was promptly named “action game of the year” by Computer Gaming World magazine. Battlehawks 1942 was followed in 1989 by Their Finest Hour, another winner of the same award, a simulation of the early air war in Europe; it was in turn followed by 1991’s Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, a simulation of the later years of war there. Each simulator raised the ante over what had come before in terms of budget, development time, and design ambition.

The Early Works of Lawrence Holland

Project: Space Station (1985) is an amazingly complex simulation and strategy game for the humble Commodore 64. Holland took the project over after an earlier version that was to have been helmed by a literal rocket scientist fell apart, scaling down the grandiose ideas of his predecessor just enough to fit them into 64 K of memory.

PHM Pegasus (1987) was designed by Noah Falstein and implemented by Holland. It simulates a military hydrofoil — sort of the modern equivalent to the famous PT Boats of World War II.

Strike Fleet (1988), Holland’s second and last game working with Falstein as lead designer, expands on the concept of PHM Pegasus to let the player lead multiple ships into fast-paced real-time battles.

Battlehawks 1942 (1988) was Holland’s first flight simulator, his first project for LucasArts on which he served as lead designer as well as programmer, and the first which he coded on MS-DOS machines rather than the Commodore 64. A simulation of carrier-based aviation during the fraught early months of World War II in the Pacific, it was implemented in barely six months from start to finish. Dick Best, the leader of the first dive-bomber attack on the Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway — and thus the tip of the spear which changed the course of the war — served as a technical advisor. “I am thinking about buying an IBM just so I can play the game at home,” said the 78-year-old pilot to journalists.

Their Finest Hour (1989) was the second game in what would later become known as Holland’s “air-combat trilogy.” A portrayal of the Battle of Britain, it added a campaign mode, a selection of set-piece historical missions to fly, and even a mission builder for making more scenarios of your own to share with others.

Holland’s ambition ran wild in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991). Beginning as a simulation of such oddball latter-war German aircraft as the Messerschmitt Me-163 rocket plane and the Me-262 jet fighter, it wound up encompassing the entire second half of the air war in Europe, including a strategy game about the Allied strategic-bombing campaign that was detailed enough to have been put in a separate box and sold alone. As much a gaming toolbox as a game, it was supported with no fewer than four separate expansion packs. Holland and Edward Kilham, his programming partner for the project, crunched for a solid year to finish it, but nevertheless ended a good twelve months behind schedule. With this object lesson to think back on, Holland would rein in his design ambitions a bit more in the future.

As I described at some length in a recent article, flight simulators in general tend to age more like unpasteurized milk than fine wine, and by no means is Holland’s work in this vein entirely exempt from this rule. Still, in an age when most simulators were emphasizing cutting-edge graphics and ever more complexity over the fundamentals of game design, Holland’s efforts do stand out for their interest in conveying historical texture rather than a painstakingly perfect flight model. They were very much in the spirit of what designer Michael Bate, who used a similar approach at a slightly earlier date in games he made for Accolade Software, liked to call “aesthetic simulations of history.” Holland:

Flight simulators [had] really focused on the planes, rather than the times, the people, and how the battles influenced the course of the war. [The latter is] what I set out to do. It’s become my philosophy for all the sims I’ve done.

We get letters from former pilots, who say, “Wow! This is great! This is just like I remember it.” They’re talking about a gut, sensory impression about the realism of flying and interacting with other planes — not the hardcore mathematical models. I’ve focused on that gut feeling of realism rather than the hardcore mathematical stuff. I’ve emphasized plane-to-plane engagement, seat-of-the-pants flying. I like to keep the controls as simple as possible, so someone can jump in and enjoy the game. Of course, the more technically accurate the flight model, the more difficult it is to fly. Unless they’re really familiar with flight simulators, people tend to be intimidated by having to learn the uses of a bunch of different keys. That makes a game hard to get into. I want them to be able to hop into the cockpit and fly.

In some ways at least, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe remains to this day the most ambitious game Lawrence Holland has ever made. At a time when rival flight simulators like Falcon were going micro, attempting to capture a single aircraft with a pedant’s obsession for detail, Secret Weapons provided a macro-level overview of the entire European air war following the entry of the United States into the conflict. Holland called it a “kitchen-sink” game: “It’s fun and challenging to keep thinking of different ways for the player to interact with the product on different levels.” In Secret Weapons, you could pilot any of eight different airplanes, including the experimental German rocket planes and jets that gave the game its misleadingly narrow-sounding name, or even fly as a gunner or bombardier instead of a pilot in a B-17. You could go through flight school, fly a single random mission, a historical mission, or fly a whole tour of duty in career mode. Or you could play Secret Weapons as a strategy game of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, flying the missions yourself if you liked or letting the computer handle that for you; this part of the game alone was detailed enough that, had it been released as a standalone strategy title by a company like SSI, no one would have batted an eye. And then there were the four (!) expansion packs LucasArts put together, adding yet more airplanes and things to do with them…

Of course, ambition can be a double-edged sword in game design. Although Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe came together much better in the end than many other kitchen-sink games, it also came in a year late and way over budget. As it happened, its release in late 1991 came right on the heels of the news that Lucasfilm Games was finally going to be allowed to charge into the Star Wars universe. Lawrence Holland’s life was about to take another unexpected twist.

It isn’t hard to figure out why LucasArts — the old Lucasfilm Games adopted the new name in 1992 — might have wished to create a “simulation” of Star Wars space battles. At the time, the biggest franchise in gaming was Origin Systems’s Wing Commander series, which itself owed more than a little to George Lucas’s films. Players loved the action in those games, but they loved at least equally the storytelling which the series had begun to embrace with gusto in 1991’s Wing Commander II. A “real” Star Wars game offered the chance to do both things as well or better, by incorporating both the spacecraft and weapons of the films and the established characters and plot lore of the Star Wars universe.

Meanwhile the creative and technical leap from a simulation of World War II aerial combat to a pseudo-simulation of fictional space combat was shorter than one might initially imagine. The label of space simulator was obviously a misnomer in the strictly literal sense; you cannot simulate something which has never existed and never will. (If at some point wars do move into outer space, they will definitely not be fought anything like this.) Nevertheless, X-Wing would strive to convey that feeling of realism that is the hallmark of a good aesthetic simulation. It wouldn’t, in other words, be an arcade game like the Star Wars games of the previous decade.

In point of fact, George Lucas had aimed to capture the feel of World War II dogfighting in his movies’ action sequences, to the point of basing some shots on vintage gun-camera footage. It was thus quite natural to build X-Wing upon the technology last seen in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. You would have to plan your attacks with a degree of care, would have to practice some of the same tactics that World War II fighter pilots employed, would even have to manage the energy reserves of your craft, deciding how much to allocate to guns, shields, and engines at any given juncture.

Still working with LucasArts as an independent contractor, Holland hired additional programmers Peter Lincroft and Edward Kilham — the former had also worked on Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe — to help him out with the project. LucasArts’s in-house staff of artists and composers saw to the audiovisual assets, and their in-house designers developed most of the missions. With the struggle that his last game had been still high in his memory, and knowing all too well that LucasArts’s first Star Wars computer game needed to be released in a timely fashion if it was to compete with the Wing Commander juggernaut, Holland abandoned any thoughts of dynamic campaigns or overarching strategic layers in favor of a simple series of set-piece missions linked together by a pre-crafted story line — exactly the approach that had won so much commercial success for Wing Commander. In fact, Holland simplified the Wing Commander approach even further, by abandoning its branching mission tree in favor of a keep-trying-each-mission-until-you-win-it methodology. (To be fair, market research proved that most people played Wing Commander this way anyway…)

Smoke ’em if you got ’em: X-Wing in action.

X-Wing’s not-so-secret weapon over its great rival franchise was and is, to state it purely and simply, Star Wars. Right from the iconic flattened text crawl that opens the game, accompanied by the first stirring chords of John Williams’s unforgettable theme music, it looks like Star Wars, sounds like Star Wars, feels like Star Wars. The story it tells is interwoven quite deftly with the plot of the first film. It avoids the slightly ham-handed soap-opera story lines which Wing Commander loves to indulge in in favor of a laser focus on the real business at hand: the destruction of the Death Star. Whereas Wing Commander, with its killer alien cats and all the rest, never rises much above the level of earnest fan fiction, X-Wing is… well, it certainly isn’t great literature, any more than the films upon which it’s based are profound drama, but it is solidly crafted pulp fiction for the kid in all of us, and this quality makes it exactly like the aforementioned films. Playing it really does feel like jumping into one of them.

But X-Wing also has an Achilles heel that undoes much of what it does so well, a failing that’s serious enough that I have trouble recommending the game at all: its absolutely absurd level of difficulty. As you advance further in the game, its missions slowly reveal themselves to be static puzzles to be solved rather than dynamic experiences. There’s just one way to succeed in the later missions in particular, just one “correct” sequence of actions which you must carry out perfectly. You can expect to fly each mission over and over while you work out what that sequence is. This rote endeavor is the polar opposite of the fast-paced excitement of a Star Wars film. As you fail again and again, X-Wing gradually becomes the one thing Star Wars should never be: it becomes boring.

There’s a supreme irony here: LucasArts made their name in adventure games by rejecting the idea that the genre must necessarily entail dying over and over and, even worse, stumbling down blind alleys from which you can never return without restoring or restarting. But with X-Wing, the company famous for “no deaths and no dead ends” delivered a game where you could effectively lock yourself out of victory in the first minute of a mission. It’s hard to conceive of why anyone at LucasArts might have thought this a good approach. Yet Computer Gaming World’s Chris Lombardi was able to confirm in his eventual review of the game that the punishing mission design wasn’t down to some colossal oversight; it was all part of the plan from the beginning.

Through an exchange with LucasArts, I’ve learned from them that the missions were designed as puzzles to be figured out and solved. This is entirely accurate. The tougher missions have a very specific “solution” that must be executed with heroic precision. Fly to point A, knock out fighters with inhuman accuracy, race to point B, knock out bombers with same, race to point C, to nip off a second bomber squadron at the last possible second. While this is extremely challenging and will make for many hours of play, I’m not convinced that it’s the most effective design possible. It yanks [the player] out of the fiction of the game when he has to play a mission five times just to figure out what his true objective is, and then to play the next dozen times trying to execute the path perfectly.

Often, success requires [the player] to anticipate the arrival of enemy units and unrealistically race out into space to meet a “surprise” attack from the Empire. It’s all a matter of balance, young Jedi, and on the sliding scale of Trivially Easy to Joystick-Flinging Frustration, X-Wing often stumbles awkwardly toward the latter. From the reviewer’s high ground of hindsight, it seems a player-controlled difficulty setting might have been a good solution.

Despite this tragic flaw lurking at its mushy center, X-Wing was greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews and strong sales upon its release in March of 1993. For, if X-Wing left something to be desired as a piece of game design, the timing of its release was simply perfect.

The game hit the scene in tandem with a modest but palpable resurgence of interest in Star Wars as a whole. In 1991 — just as Kenner Products was deciding that the whole Star Wars thing had run its course — Timothy Zahn had published Heir to the Empire, the first of a new trilogy of Star Wars novels. There had been Star Wars books before, of course, but Zahn’s trilogy was unique in that, rather than having to confine himself to side stories so as not to interfere with cinematic canon, its author had been given permission by George Lucas to pick up the main thread of what happened after Return of the Jedi. Everyone who read the trilogy seemed to agree that it represented a very credible continuation indeed, coming complete with an arch-villain, one Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn, who was almost as compelling as Darth Vader. All three books — the last of them came out in 1993, just after X-Wing — topped genre-fiction bestseller lists. Star Wars was suddenly having a moment again, and X-Wing became a part of that, both as beneficiary and benefactor. Many of the kids who had seen the films multiple times each in theaters and carried Star Wars lunchboxes with them to school were now in their early twenties, the sweet spot of the 1993 computer-game demographic, and were now feeling the first bittersweet breaths of nostalgia to blow through their young lives, even as they were newly awakened to the potential of space simulators in general by the Wing Commander games. How could X-Wing not have become a hit?

The people who had made the game weren’t much different from the people who were now buying it in such gratifying numbers. Zahn’s novels were great favorites of Holland and his colleagues as well, so much so that, when the time came to plan the inevitable sequel to X-Wing, they incorporated Admiral Thrawn into the plot. In the vastly superior game known as TIE Fighter, which takes places concurrently with the second Star Wars film, a younger Thrawn appears in the uneasy role of subordinate to Darth Vader.

Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine TIE Fighter, which dares to place you in the role of a pilot for the “evil” Empire, ever coming to exist at all without the Zahn novels. For it was Zahn’s nuanced, even sympathetic portrayal of Thrawn, and with it his articulation of an ideology for the Empire that went beyond doing evil for the sake of it, that first broadened the moral palette of the Star Wars universe to include shades of gray in addition to black and white. Zahn’s version of the Empire is a rather fussily bureaucratic entity that sees itself as tamping down sectarianism and maintaining law and order in the galaxy in the interest of the greater good, even if the methods it is sometimes forced to employ can be regrettably violent. The game took that interpretation and ran with it. Holland:

Our approach is that the propaganda machines are always running full-blast during warfare. So far, the propaganda we’ve been exposed to has been from the Rebels. But in warfare, neither side is always clean, and both sides can take the moral high ground. So we’re trying to blur the moral line a little bit and give the Empire a soapbox to communicate its mission: the restoration of peace and order.

For instance, there’s a lot of civil war going on. The fighting planets are lost in their hate and don’t have the galactic perspective the Empire can provide. In this regard, the Empire feels it can serve to stop these conflicts. Within the Empire there are a lot of people — like the pilot the player portrays — who have an honorable objective.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it: I would hardly be the first Internet scribe to note that the established hegemony of developed Western nations in our own world resembles the Empire far more than the Rebel Alliance, nor that the Rebel freedom fighters bear a distinct similarity to some of the real-world folks we generally prefer to call terrorists.

TIE Fighter casts you as a pilot of good faith who earnestly believes in the Empire’s professed objective of an orderly peace and prosperity that will benefit everyone. In order to capture some of the murderous infighting that marks the highest levels of the Imperial bureaucracy in both the movies and Zahn’s novels, as well as to convey some of the moral rot taking cover beneath the Empire’s professed ideology, the game introduces a mysterious agent of the emperor himself who lurks in the shadows during your mission briefings, to pull you aside afterward and give you secret objectives that hint of machinations and conspiracies that are otherwise beyond your ken. In the end, you find yourself spending almost as much time fighting other factions of the Empire as you do Rebels — which does rather put the lie to the Empire’s claim that only it can provide a harmonious, orderly galaxy, but so be it.

What really makes TIE Fighter so much better than its predecessor is not the switch in perspective, brave and interesting though it may be, but rather the fact that it so comprehensively improves on X-Wing at the level of the nuts and bolts of game design. It’s a fine example of a development team actually listening to players and reviewers, and then going out and methodically addressing their complaints. In the broad strokes, TIE Fighter is the same game as X-Wing: the same linear series of missions to work through, the same basic set of flight controls, a different but similarly varied selection of spacecraft to learn how to employ successfully. It just does everything that both games do that much better than its predecessor.

Take, for example, the question of coordinating your tactics with your wingmen and other allies. On the surface, the presence of friends as well as foes in the battles you fight is a hallmark not just of X-Wing but of the Wing Commander games that came before it, being embedded into the very name of the latter series. Yet your helpmates in all of those games are, as Chris Lombardi put it in his review of X-Wing, “about as useful as a rowboat on Tatooine.” Players can expect to rack up a kill tally ten times that of their nearest comrade-in-arms.

TIE Fighter changes all that. It presents space battles that are far more complex than anything seen in a space simulator before it, battles where everyone else flies and fights with independent agency and intelligence. You can’t do everything all by yourself anymore; you have to issue real, substantive orders to the pilots you command, and obey those orders that are issued to you. Many reviewers of TIE Fighter have pointed out how well this ethos fits into that of a hyper-organized, hyper-disciplined Imperial military, as opposed to the ramshackle individual heroism of the Rebel Alliance. And it’s certainly a fair point, even if I suspect that the thematic resonance may be more a happy accident than a conscious design choice. But whatever the reasons behind it, it lends TIE Fighter a different personality. Instead of being the lone hero who has to get everything done for yourself, you feel like a part of a larger whole.

For the developers, the necessary prerequisites to success with this new philosophy were an improved technical implementation and improved mission design in comparison to those of X-Wing. In addition to the audiovisual evolution that was par for the course during this fast-evolving era of computing — the 3D models are now rendered using Gouraud shading — TIE Fighter gives you a whole range of new views and commands to make keeping track of the overall flow of battle, keeping tabs on your allies, and orienting yourself to your enemies much easier than in X-Wing. Best of all, it abandons the old puzzle-style missions in favor of the unfolding, dynamic battlescapes we were missing so keenly last time. It does you the small but vital kindness of telling you which mission objectives have been completed and which still need to be fulfilled, as well as telling you when a mission is irrevocably failed. It also introduces optional objectives, so that casual players can keep the story going while completists try to collect every last point. And it has three difficulty levels to choose from rather than being permanently stuck on “Hard.”

TIE Fighter was released in July of 1994, five months before the long-awaited Wing Commander III, a four-CD extravaganza featuring a slate of established actors onscreen, among them Mark Hamill, Mr. Luke Skywalker himself. LucasArts’s game might have seemed scanty, even old-fashioned by comparison; it didn’t even ship on the wundermedium of CD at first, but rather on just five ordinary floppy disks. Yet it sold very well, and time has been much kinder to it than it has to Origins’s trendier production, which now seems somehow more dated than the likes of Pong. TIE Fighter, on the other hand, remains what it has always been: bright, pulpy, immersive, exciting, Star Warsy fun. It’s still my favorite space simulator of all time.

TIE Fighter

How could it be Star Wars without that iconic opening text crawl? TIE Fighter and its predecessor succeed brilliantly in feeling like these movies that define the adjective “iconic.” This extends to the sound design: the whoosh of passing spacecraft and closing pneumatic doors, the chatter of droids, the various themes of John Williams’s soundtrack… it’s all captured here with remarkable fidelity to the original. Of course, there are some differences: the sequence above is initially jarring because it’s accompanied by Williams’s ominous Imperial theme rather than the heroic main Rebel theme which we’ve been conditioned to expect.

One of the many places where TIE Fighter borrows from Wing Commander is in its commitment to a diegetic interface. You don’t choose what to do from a conventional menu; you decide whether you want to walk to the training simulator, briefing room, film room, etc.

The staff of LucasArts were big fans of Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy of novels. Thus Grand Admiral Thrawn, the books’ most memorable character, shows up as a younger Imperial officer here.

TIE Fighter’s in-flight graphics weren’t all that spectacular to look at even by the standards of their day, given that they were implemented in standard VGA rather than higher-resolution SVGA. Wing Commander III, which appeared the same year, did embrace SVGA, and looked much better for it. Luckily, TIE Fighter had other things working in its favor…

Having decided to present the most complex battles yet seen in a space simulator, TIE Fighter needed to provide new ways of keeping track of them if it was to remain playable. Thankfully, the developers were up to the task, devising a whole array of clever command-and-control tools for your use.

You wind up spending almost as much time fighting other Imperial factions as “Rebel scum.” Call it a cop-out if you must…

You fly the climactic final mission side by side with Darth Vader. Unable to secure the services of James Earl Jones to voice the role, LucasArts had to settle for a credible soundalike. (Ironically, Jones did agree to provide voice acting for a game in 1994, but it wasn’t this one: it was Access Software’s adventure game Under a Killing Moon. He reportedly took that gig at a discount because his son was a fan of Access’s games.)

Both X-Wing and TIE Fighter later received a “collector’s edition” on CD-ROM, which added voice acting everywhere and support for higher-resolution Super VGA graphics cards, and also bundled in a lot of additional content, in the form of the two expansions that had already been released for X-Wing, the single TIE Fighter expansion, and some brand new missions. These are the versions you’ll find on the digital storefronts of today.

Time has added a unique strain of nostalgia to these and the other early LucasArts Star Wars games. During their era there was still an innocent purity to Star Wars which would be lost forever when George Lucas decided to revive the franchise on the big screen at decade’s end. Those “prequel” films replaced swashbuckling adventure with parliamentary politics, whilst displaying to painful effect Lucas’s limitations as a director and screenwriter. In so thoroughly failing to recapture the magic of what had come before, they have only made memories of the freer, breezier Star Wars of old burn that much brighter in the souls of old-timers like me. LucasArts’s 1990s Star Wars games were among the last great manifestations of that old spirit. The best few of them at least — a group which most certainly includes TIE Fighter — remain well worth savoring today.

(Sources: the books How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution by Michael Rubin, and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter Collector’s Edition strategy guides by Rusel DeMaria, David Wessman, and David Maxwell; Game Developer of February/March 1995 and April/May 1995; Compute! of March 1990; Computer Gaming World of April 1988, November 1988, October 1989, January 1990, September 1990, December 1990, November 1991, February 1992, September 1992, June 1993, October 1993, February 1994, October 1994, and July 1995; PC Zone of April 1993; Retro Gamer 116; LucasArts’s customer newsletter The Adventurer of Fall 1990, Spring 1991, Fall 1991, Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Spring 1993, and Summer 1994; Seattle Times of December 25 2017; Fortune of August 18 1997. Also useful was the Dev Game Club podcast’s interview with Lawrence Holland on January 11, 2017.

X-Wing and TIE Fighter are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.)

Comments
59 Responses

- LeeH

February 5, 2021 at 5:06 pm

> TIE Fighter was released in July of 1994, six months before the long-awaited Wing Commander III…

Small nitpick, but shouldn’t that be five months? I recall WC3 being available at or around Christmas 1994—I was working at the local Babbage’s at the time and it was definitely on the shelves for the holiday season.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2021 at 6:41 pm

I believe that Wing Commander III came out in late November of 1994. Which is… close to six months, but not quite. You got me. Thanks!

- LeeH

February 5, 2021 at 8:21 pm

Fun times. My family got a Gateway 2000 Pentium/66 (with cow-spotted shipping box!) on Christmas Day 1994, and I remember driving up to Babbage’s on my day off the next day to pick up the two CD-ROM games that I’d been lusting after and now suddenly had the computer to play: Wing Commander 3, and the ST:TNG Interactive Technical Manual.

I can still play WC3, with some effort, but the TNG ITM is a Quicktime 2.0-based insanity nightmare to make work these days. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 8:04 am

16-bit Windows software is a real black hole these days. You can’t get it running without Windows, but you can’t make it run natively on modern Windows either. This has made digital distribution through sites like GOG.com impossible.

- Martin

February 6, 2021 at 4:35 pm

Would a copy of Windows 95 running on top of DOS Box get you there? I run some old stuff that way.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 5:21 pm

Sure, but you can’t bundle Windows with a game to sell it.

- Mike Taylor

February 8, 2021 at 11:19 am

“Sure, but you can’t bundle Windows with a game to sell it.”

i wonder if that’s true. Windows 95 licenses obviously have no meaningful commercial value in 2021; Microsoft could either give it away complete to enable such games to be packaged, or ask for some peppercorn rent — maybe ¢10 per copy — to get free money from a long-dead resource.

- Jason Dyer

February 5, 2021 at 5:20 pm

I think the “puzzle” idea with X-Wing is right, but not necessarily the progression — it’s more of an uneven thing where you have a very difficult mission jammed in between two easier ones. Later isn’t always harder. And difficult doesn’t mean there’s necessarily “exactly one” way of doing it, but it certainly sure feels like it after pulling off the mission.

TIE Fighter is one of the best computer games of all time. I would say the inter-imperial fighting really also feels thematic — unlike the rebels they have to crush even mild insubordination with an iron hammer.

- Sarah Walker

February 5, 2021 at 5:44 pm

> Wing Commander III, which appeared the same year, did embrace SVGA, and looked much better for it.

The tradeoff here being that WC3 required an absurd level of hardware to run in 1994 (even if you didn’t want SVGA), whereas TIE Fighter would run on the more modest level of PC that people actually tended to own at the time. That’s something that tends to get forgotten about many of the landmark PC games of the 90s; at the time of release, relatively few people could actually afford to play them.

- Peter Olausson

February 5, 2021 at 9:38 pm

Very good point. It was a real issue at the time, when you could drool over stuff which you couldn’t play despite having the right machine because it lacked the extras. And how would you today find out how big slice of the market that could actually play a certain game, at the required or recommended settings? I have no idea.
I think Jimmy has made comments (like on X-COM) how technologically simpler games could make a real impact quite late on due to them being accessible to many more people, rather than multimedia wonders that required expensive hardware to run at all, never mind experiencing it as was meant to.

- Will

February 5, 2021 at 6:41 pm

I think it deserves mention of:

http://platypuscomix.com/applepalooza/applecassette.html

Unlicensed yes, but being released by Apple in 1978 was thus /the/ first Star Wars computer game, and even clearly pre-imaged (albeit crudely) what we would finally have all those years later with X-Wing.

- Keith Palmer

February 5, 2021 at 11:01 pm

I played an equally unlicensed “X-Wing Fighter” game on my family’s TRS-80 Model I in my youth (I’m towards the younger end of “those who experienced at least a bit of ‘the first theatrical era of Star Wars'”). That might have added its own small weight to X-Wing getting my attention years later (I’d already read “Heir to the Empire,” and liked it well enough at the time). At that point, however, my family had just switched from the Tandy Color Computer 3 to a Macintosh LC II, which seemed to make most computer games just as far from hand… That particular game did wind up being ported to the Macintosh a few years later, though, along with TIE Fighter. For some reason, X-Wing has stuck better in my mind; maybe that had something to do with the “try, try again” strategy described. Most of my other current reactions and opinions to Star Wars are out of step with those of many others, though, and I don’t think I’m deft enough to really articulate why.

- Blown Cartridges

February 5, 2021 at 6:46 pm

For whatever reason I remember finding it much easier to get into and obsessed with X-Wing and its sequels than I had with Wing Commander or Elite before it.

I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it was the Gravis joypad I was using at the time.

- Just RAG

February 5, 2021 at 6:49 pm

> X-Wing and TIE Fighter are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.
And “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe”?

Also, no mention of “Squadrons” at all?

- Jeff M. Thomas

February 5, 2021 at 7:52 pm

I’ll never forget the feeling of flying around on patrol in my X-Wing, the vastness of space all around, when suddenly a Star Destroyer came out of hyperdrive right on top of me and I’m gawking at it’s massive bulk filling my view. The pinging of my raidar snaped me out of it as it starts registering incoming flights of T.I.E. fighters, 8 of them! That was one of the harder battles in the game and it took me probably dozens of tries to get through it, but watching that Star Destroyer drop in never seemed to get old.

The first several missions of T.I.E. Fighter really help set the theme, flying in those little fragile tin cans with no shields and a limited view against the tanks that are X-Wings really makes you feel almost sympathetic to the hapless imperial pilots you see getting popped off by the dozens in the movies. They’ve got speed and maneuverability on their side but it’s really their massive quantity that makes T.I.E. Fighters a threat, and that means every individual pilot is expendable. You get to feel that quite keenly in the opening missions of T.I.E. Fighter, if one of those X-Wings picks you out as a target you had seconds to loose it or you were toast.

What a great game. I may have to boot that one up again soon.

- Jeff M. Thomas

February 5, 2021 at 8:15 pm

And that was the point really, wasn’t it? To start to get you to feel some empathy towards the Empire by making you one of the grunts in the trenches. Another cog in the machine. Starting you in the weakest fighter the empire had rather than putting you in the TIE Advanced at the onset was a shrewed choice. On the one hand it could turn players off, the sense of being outclassed and fighting against odds from the very beginning, but it also upended your assumptions. The Rebels were the underdogs always fighting against the overwhelming might of the Empire, weren’t they?

Not from the viewpoint of a lowly TIE Fighter pilot.

Very clever.

- Mirir

February 5, 2021 at 7:53 pm

A bit of nitpicking. The screenshot of the CD-ROM edition is not from the 1995 Collector’s CD-ROM but from the version included in the 98’s Windows only ‘Collector Series’ that made use of 3D acceleration and Red Book CD audio instead of the dynamic iMuse music.

The 95 version although in SVGA still uses Gouraud shading instead of the texture-mapped graphics of your screenshot.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2021 at 8:08 pm

Thanks!

- David Rugge

February 5, 2021 at 8:21 pm

My high-school friend and I played this as a team when it came out. One person would control the engines and shields and the other person got the joystick. We had a blast even though the game did get very difficult. I suppose teenagers have more patience for that sort of game design than adults.

- Zed Banville

February 5, 2021 at 9:44 pm

Lawrence Holland also composed the music for Interplay’s The Bard’s Tale, although this was an exception from his usual work as a programmer, designer, and project lead.

- Josh Klugman

February 5, 2021 at 10:42 pm

“Lucas publicly excoriated Marc Pevers for a deal that had cost him ‘tens of millions,'”

I like how George Lucas in recent interviews grumbles about the sequel trilogy and paints the prequels as avant garde art, immune to commercial impulses. The reality is Lucas is just as susceptible to commercialism as Disney but the prequels are so weird because he has a distorted perspective of what sells.

But great article on SWoTL, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter!

- gamerindreams

February 7, 2021 at 3:40 pm

Agreed on the article – fantastic as usual, Jimmy – and the prequels.

I watched the OT in theaters with my dad and I loved it so much I even made my wife watch the trilogy as her engagement present to me. I tried watching the prequels and I just couldn’t – I had to stop after about 30 mins because it was making me feel bad about liking star wars.

Now I only experience the prequels through the medium of lego star wars droid tales which does a great job making fun of how boring and nutty the prequels are and r/prequelmemes on reddit which just uses prequel screenshots to make fun of things and I am much happier.

- Adam Pasztory

February 6, 2021 at 1:35 am

Great article! I worked in the QA dungeon at LucasArts in the 90’s, and one of the highlights was testing the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games. You could immerse yourself in the games for hours, and get paid for doing it. I was only so-so, but some of the guys there were incredible. They could beat even the hardest missions without breaking a sweat. I called them “Jedis”.

- mycophobia

February 6, 2021 at 3:42 am

Typo: “You would have to plan you attacks with a degree of care”

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 7:38 am

Thanks!

- Aula

February 6, 2021 at 2:02 pm

“20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the film”

Fox distributed Star Wars, but didn’t produce it, at least in the sense of paying the cost of production; Lucas had to raise the money himself.

“Messerschmidt”

Messerschmitt

“Mark Hammill”

Hamill

- Chris D

February 6, 2021 at 2:28 pm

Not sure that’s true of Star Wars. It was produced by Lucasfilm, but I think Fox (under Alan Ladd Jr) provided the actual funds. Although Lucas himself stumped up a lot of the funds for the sequels.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 5:13 pm

Thanks!

- Carl

February 6, 2021 at 3:44 pm

I think the Commodore PET was the first personal computer released to consumers. I believe it came out in the beginning of 1977, before the Apple II.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 5:16 pm

No, the Apple II was the first that you could actually walk into a store and buy. The PET was *announced* first, but it didn’t ship until almost six months after the Apple II, and a few months after the Radio Shack TRS-80. This was a standard tactic of Jack Tramiel: announce a product, then decide based on the public’s reaction whether to follow through and actually build it or not.

- Martin

February 6, 2021 at 4:46 pm

“If at some point wars do move into outer space, they will definitely not be fought anything like this.” – Care to explain how wars in space will be fought. Or provide a game that shows it.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 5:25 pm

No idea, but the physics of spaceflight will preclude World War II-style dogfighting. ;) Let’s hope we never have to find out.

- John

February 7, 2021 at 3:01 am

Descent: Freespace? At least, in physics terms it tried.

- Destron

February 8, 2021 at 5:33 pm

Not sure about a game, but the show “The Expanse” apparently has some pretty realistic space combat that takes into account things like momentum and the stresses of acceleration on the human body.

- David Wessman

February 8, 2021 at 8:02 pm

I worked on the entire X-Wing series as a mission designer and writer. As much as I loved working on those games, I often wondered what realistic space combat might look like. I am now working on a game that attempts to answer that question. It’s called In The Black and has already earned Atomic Rockets’ Seal of Approval for its strong foundation in real world physics and engineering. Please check it out: https://intheblack.gg/

- dmdr

February 10, 2021 at 10:01 pm

haven’t played, but by reputation, this one

http://childrenofadeadearth.com/

- Alex Smith

February 6, 2021 at 6:06 pm

I think you use Kenner and Parker Brothers a bit too interchangeably at the top of the article and also don’t quite properly characterize their relationship, as evidenced by calling Parker Brothers an “imprint.”

Kenner and Parker Brothers were completely separate companies with their own management that made their own decisions virtually completely independently of each other. They were both part of the General Mills Toy Group by the time Parker Brothers entered the video game industry, before that they were just in a much broader group of non-foodstuffs companies. The head of the Toy Group oversaw both companies, but the executive teams of Parker Brothers in Massachusetts and Kenner in Ohio did not interact much at all.

When the Toy Group decided to enter the video game business, three competing proposals were advanced by Kenner, Parker Brothers, and a recently established R&D group not attached to either company. The Parker Brothers proposal of entering the VCS market won out. All video game decisions were made by Parker Brothers staff, which had an electronic games division. Other than providing the license, Kenner had nothing to do with any Star Wars video game product, or any Parker Brothers video game product for that matter. Parker had its own R&D, its own marketing, and its own sales force, all of which were not intermingled with Kenner in any way. Therefore calling these products Kenner Star Wars video games is not accurate.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2021 at 8:46 pm

Fair enough. Edits made. Thanks!

- Mark Cartwright

February 6, 2021 at 9:52 pm

“In so thoroughly failing to recapture the magic of what had come before, they have only made memories of the freer, breezier Star Wars of old burn that much brighter in the souls of old-timers like me.”

Spot on comment.

I think it might be worth mentioning that the The Collector’s CD-ROM Edition of X-Wing and I think Tie-Fighter had some difficulty adjustments over the original floppy release. making the very hard missions less difficult and fairer.

Would just like to add I play this version on dosbox with Roland MT-32 emulation and a really good CRT filter, this makes it a real deluxe experience

https://youtu.be/GDkDMQvQgjA

Great article many thanks!

- Nils

February 7, 2021 at 8:39 am

In X-Wing CD you could choose between new (easier) or “classic” missions, which only affects certain missions. Personally I’ve only ever played the classic ones, so I don’t know how much of a difference it makes.

Not sur about TIE, at least I think there’s no such option there.

- Ahab

February 6, 2021 at 10:42 pm

“But with X-Wing, the company famous for “no deaths and no dead ends” delivered a game where you could lock yourself out of victory in the first five minutes of a mission, then fly and fight for an hour before you got an inkling of that harsh reality.”

I don’t think that scenario can happen. Missions had time limits, and IIRC most of them were 15-20 minutes. The always-on flight recorder made this a hard limit of the engine.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2021 at 7:26 am

My bad memory must have made it worse than it was. ;) Thanks!

- Andrew Alles

February 23, 2021 at 11:38 pm

I have a pretty strong memory of this happening a few times in the Collectors’ CD-ROM version – missions taking in excess of 40+ minutes while waiting for some craft to finish its scripts & jump to light speed. When the mission clock ticks down to 0, nothing happens – I figured it must have penalized my score, but it probably was just the flight recorder hitting its memory limit and stopping.
Also, for the record, avoid the releases that use Red Book audio for their soundtracks like the plague, before you go insane from hearing the same three tracks over and over.

- Rowan Lipkovits

February 7, 2021 at 6:38 am

I never played X-Wing back in the day, but I’ll never forget downloading its demo from a BBS to check out the first Lucasarts foray into its own SW property, only to be greeted by… an embedded ad for the new Volkswagon Beetle! An incredible move of commercial shrewdness on Lucasarts’ part, generating profit through the distribution of a free demo!

- David Wessman

February 8, 2021 at 7:57 pm

I don’t recall there being a demo for X-Wing but there was one for TIE Fighter (I authored the mission on that demo). The ad on the demo disk was for the Dodge Neon. Why they chose that little car was always a mystery to me. LucasArts Marketing made a much better Star Wars tie-in with the 1996 Impala SS: https://i.imgur.com/OHUfh8q.jpg

- Laertes

February 7, 2021 at 7:20 am

“it was in turned followed by 1991’s Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe”
Shouldn’t it be “in turn”?

What great games these were! I loved SWOTL, it had great immersion. You could even change the names of the pilots in your squadron. With time you started caring and feeling sad when they died.
I don’t remember X-wing being so hard and I think I was able to finish it at the time. But my memory might not be accurate in this. Anyway, I also enjoyed countless hours with it and TIE fighter.

On a side note, for sure the real wars in space will not be fought as in these games, but I would add that not even second world war dogfights are even close to how an X-wing flies in the game. For starters there are no acceleraton effects on the pilot (blackouts or redouts) and the way it turns is totally unrealistic and confusing, not in any way similar to how a real plane turns. Luckily, you get the hang of it eventually.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2021 at 7:28 am

Thanks!

- Aula

February 7, 2021 at 1:22 pm

“You could even change the names of the pilots in your squadron.”

More importantly, when you got promotions, you could copy your pilot’s file over the files of your wingmen to increase their ranks in order to make them perform better. This also works in X-Wing.

- Klaus

February 7, 2021 at 7:56 am

As far as I’m aware, TIE Fighter only received a single expansion disk, the second expansion was bundled into the CD version but never available as a stand-alone.

And maybe it’s a bit out of the purview of the article, but it’s worth mentioning that West End Games’ Star Wars RPG was keeping the flame burning in the late 80s and laid a lot of the groundwork and lore that both Timothy Zahn and Larry Holland drew from when the time came to revive the franchise.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2021 at 8:27 am

Thanks! Point taken on the West End Star Wars stuff, but it’s a little hard to work into the article.

- Sam Bass

February 8, 2021 at 1:00 am

Fascinating read, thanks for writing! Ed Kilham was my first real mentor in the games industry, way back in ‘95 when he’d just left Lucas, and was way ahead of his time in terms of development tool design.It’s been a long time, but I believe the “mission builder” tool shipped with SWOTL was primarily his baby, as were the subsequent tools used to build the X-Wing and Tie Fighter campaigns. He really empowered designers to make cool stuff :)

- David Wessman

February 8, 2021 at 7:46 pm

Ed Kilham worked with Larry on the mission builder for X-Wing and for TIE Fighter, but had no involvement with SWotL. The only programmers on SWotL were Larry and Peter Lincroft.

- Michael

February 8, 2021 at 7:33 am

“When that didn’t do well, the field wasn’t abandoned until 1982” – the way the rest of this sentence reads, I think that should be “the field was abandoned”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 8, 2021 at 8:12 am

Yes. The dangers of making corrections from the sofa…

Thanks!

- Gnoman

February 9, 2021 at 6:02 am

The first X-Wing novel by Michael Stackpole, Rouge Squadron, begins with an extended training sequence. This sequence, quite naturally, involves several instances of simulated combat. One such simulator scenario is explained in exhaustive detail, and is described as being universally hated by Rebel Alliance fighter pilots.

This scenario is Mission 4 of the X-Wing game. Given that Stackpole is well-known to be active in the gaming industry and hobby, I suspect that he was bitter about it.

- Josh Martin

February 10, 2021 at 12:00 am

For me the single biggest improvement in TIE Fighter was the simple but game-changing addition of the ability to automatically match your speed to that of a target, which (combined with the improved interface that displayed the actual orientation of the target) made dogfights a lot less frustrating for a more casual flight sim player like myself. The fact that these tweaks weren’t brought over to the CD-ROM edition of the original X-Wing was a missed opportunity—the later Windows 95/98 port running under the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter engine added the “match target speed” function, but it also dropped the fantastic dynamic score of the earlier versions, plus I prefer the cleaner flat-/Gourard-shaded look to the texture-mapped graphics of the Windows update.

- Captain Kal

February 10, 2021 at 11:08 am

The CD version of X-Wing was a remastered version of the original game. It was transferred into to the more graphically capable engine of TIE Fighter.
Both games were later ported to Windows 95/98 and remastered a second time with the “X-Wing vs TIE Fighter” engine. It was really a work of love!!

In all versions of TIE Fighter there is an official cheat mode. You can activate infinite health but can also complete the mission.

X-Wing Alliance was the last game of the series. This time you were a member of a family of traders, that was drown in the conflict, after the Empire confiscated all of the family property. In XWA you could also pilot freighters and the Millennium Falcon eventually!! Too bad the story was never completed. There is also a mod that updates the graphics (X-Wing Alliance Upgrade Project https://xwaupgrade.com/)

There were also rumor’s of an Elite/Privateer clone called “Falcon”, but it never materialized, since EA completely focused on multiplayer and console gaming in the early ’00s!!

- Jonathan O

February 28, 2021 at 4:59 pm

In “…the brutality being inflected upon players by other adventure developers…”, I think you meant “inflicted”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2021 at 8:54 am

Thanks!

Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step)
February 19, 2021

In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the familiar but ever-evolving and ever-welcoming world of Britannia in which most of the games took place; for a merry group of recurring boon companions with whom the Avatar, the player-defined protagonist of the games, adventured each time; for complex rules systems and knotty central mysteries that required brainpower and lots of notepaper rather than reflexes to work through.

But then, for the eighth game in the mainline Ultima series, Origin decided to try something just a little bit different. They made a game in which you played a thoughtless jerk moving on rails through a linear series of events; in which you never went to Britannia at all, but stayed instead on a miserable hellhole of a world called Pagan; in which you spent the whole game adventuring alone (after all, who would want to adventure with a jerk like you?); in which the core mechanics were jumping between pedestals like Super Mario and pounding your enemies over the head with your big old hammer.

Tens of thousands of eager Ultima fans, some of whom had been buying every installment of the series for ten years or more, rushed home from their local software stores with Ultima VIII: Pagan in their hot little hands. An hour later, they were one and all sitting there scratching their heads and asking themselves what the hell had happened. Had they bought the wrong game entirely? No, it said “Ultima” right there on the box!

For the past quarter century, Ultima fans have continued to ask themselves that same question: what the hell happened with Ultima VIII? It stands today as one of the most bizarre would-be series continuations in gaming history, such a colossal failure to meet its players’ expectations that, alone and unaided, it killed dead at a stroke the most venerable franchise in computer gaming. No, really: Origin couldn’t have shot Ultima in the head more efficiently if they’d tried. And so we ask ourselves again: what the hell happened? What the hell was Origin thinking?

In seeking to explain the seemingly unexplainable, Ultima fans have tended to hew to a simple, naturally appealing narrative that paints Electronic Arts — gaming’s very own Evil Empire — as the unmitigated villain. After acquiring Origin in late 1992, so the story goes, EA forced them to abandon all of the long-established principles of Ultima in order to reach the mass market of lowest-common-denominator players to which EA aspired. Richard Garriot — a.k.a. “Lord British,” the father of Ultima and co-founder of Origin — has embraced this explanation with gusto, part and parcel of a perhaps too prevalent tendency with His Lordship to lay his failures at the feet of others. From Garriott’s 2017 memoir:

The reality is that EA earns most of its revenue with terrific games like Madden Football. Every year they publish a new edition, which reflects the changes in the NFL. They don’t have to create much that’s new — they just tweak their football-game engine and update the rosters. The rules of football change slowly. At the deadline they wrap it up and release it. The audience is pre-sold.

Conversely, the games we were making could easily take two years or more to create. We released them when we were done. That was not EA’s way of doing business. “Richard,” they told me, “your release of games is incredibly unreliable.” They wanted us to change our development process to meet their deadlines. The game we were developing when we sold Origin was Ultima VIII; EA wanted it on the shelves in time for the following Christmas. This was the first time in my life that the realities of business became more important than the quality of a product. They were adamant: “Richard, you need to cut whatever needs to be cut to get this game done.” So I cut it; I cut it and I cut it and I cut it, and as a result I shipped the most incomplete, dumb, buggy game I’ve ever shipped. I still believe that if we had waited until it was complete, Ultima VIII would have been a great game. We would have been the first to market with a variety of features that eventually proved very popular in other games. But we didn’t wait, and that was my fault. I bowed to the outside pressure.

Most distressing was seeing the results of making those cuts on both the game and my team. The team saw past the warts, knew what we were up against, and loved the game for what it was; they appreciated the innovations in it rather than bemoaning what it could have been. But the press, as well as a number of players, didn’t like it at all. The reviews were terrible. All the money I’d been paid had no meaning. I felt awful that I had let down so many people in my effort to be loyal and learn from EA.

And a lot of people had made serious sacrifices to meet EA’s schedule. Many of our programmers had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week for ten months. We would bring dinner in for them because we were afraid if they left, they might not come back. The last month or so we gave them every other Sunday off so, as one of them pointed out, they could see their family or do some laundry. The creative joy we’d once shared in developing a game had been replaced by the prosaic demands of running a business. It was hard to believe how much had changed; only a few years earlier our people would happily work all night and love every minute of it, and now we had become a sweatshop.

At least partially as a consequence of that disappointment, management told me, basically, that they didn’t want me making big games like Ultima anymore.

This classic passive-aggressive apology — “I felt awful that I had let down so many people in my effort to be loyal and learn from EA” doesn’t exactly ring out with contrition — isn’t even internally consistent; if the development team loved their game so much, why was Origin’s management forced to devise stratagems to keep them from going home out of the fear that they wouldn’t come back? Nevertheless, it does contain a fair amount of truth alongside its self-serving omissions; one would be foolish to deny that the EA acquisition played a major role in the Ultima VIII debacle. And yet the discussion should perhaps be framed rather differently. It might be more accurate to see Origin’s acquisition by EA and the eventual Ultima VIII as mutual symptoms rather than cause and effect, both being the result of Origin trying to negotiate trends that seemed to leave Ultima with less and less space to be what it had always been.

Let’s start by looking more closely at the timeline than Garriott deigns to do above. EA and Origin signed the acquisition contract in September of 1992, just five months after Ultima VII: The Black Gate had shipped. Ultima VIII would still have been in the early-concept phase at best at that point. When he refers to “the following Christmas” above, Garriott thus presumably means the Christmas of 1993. While this release date may have been a stated aspiration, it’s hard to believe it was a serious one; it would have marked the swiftest turnaround time between two mainline Ultima games since the first three of them in the early 1980s. As it was, Ultima VIII wouldn’t ship until March of 1994, still in a woefully unfinished state.

Yet the story of Ultima VIII is more than that of just one more game that was released before its time. Even had all of Origin’s plans for it come off perfectly, it would still have been a radical, seemingly nonsensical departure from everything Ultima had been in the past. Multiple sources confirm that it was in fact Richard Garriott himself rather than any soulless suit from EA who decided that the latest installment in Origin’s epic CRPG series ought to become a… platformer. He was inspired in this not by Super Mario Bros., as many fans would later suspect, but rather by Prince of Persia, Broderbund Software’s hugely popular, widely ported, elegantly minimalist, intensely cinematic linear action game. Prince of Persia was and is a more than worthy game in its own right, but it seems a strange choice indeed to use as inspiration for the latest Ultima. We should try to understand where the choice came from in the context of the times.

Garriott has often joked that he spent the first twelve years of his career making essentially the same game over and over — merely making said game that much bigger and better each time out. If so, then Ultima VII was the ultimate, if you will, version of that game. Today its reputation is as hallowed as that of any game of its era; it remains a perennial on lists of the best CRPGs of all time. Yet its mixed reception in 1992 rather belies its modern reputation. Many reviewers expressed a certain ennui about the series as a whole, and ordinary gamers seemed less excited by its arrival than they had been by that of Ultima IV, V, or VI. Ultima Underworld, a more action-oriented spinoff which was created by the outside studio Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin just a month before Ultima VII, collected more critical praise and, likely most frustratingly of all for the hyper-competitive Garriott, continued to outsell its supposed big brother even after the latter’s release. A survey in the March 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World magazine is particularly telling: Ultima VII is rated as the 30th favorite game of the magazine’s readers, while Ultima Underworld is in a tie for third favorite. Meanwhile Origin’s eighteen-month-old Wing Commander II, a cinematic action game of Star Wars-style space combat, still sits at number six.

Indeed, the role of Wing Commander in all of this should not be neglected. The brainchild of an enthusiastic young Englishman named Chris Roberts, the first game in that series had upon its release in 1990 surprised everyone by handily outselling that same year’s Ultima VI. The Wing Commander franchise had kept on outselling Ultima ever since, whilst being faster and easier to make on an installment-by-installment basis.This too could hardly have sat well with Garriott. The House That Ultima Built had become The Home of Wing Commander, and Chris Roberts was now more in demand for interviews than Lord British. The harsh truth was that EA had been far more excited about Wing Commander than Ultima when they decided to acquire Origin.

Taken as a whole, all of this must have seemed intensely symbolic of a changing industry. As computers got faster and came to sport higher-fidelity audiovisual capabilities, visceral action titles were taking a bigger and bigger slice of computer-game sales, as evinced not only by the success of Ultima Underworld and Wing Commander but by other big hits like id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. Onscreen text was out of fashion, as was sprawl and complexity and most of the other traditional markers of an Ultima. Shorter, more focused games of the sort that one could pick up and play quickly were in. Origin had to keep up with the trends if they hoped to survive.

In fact, Origin was in an extremely perilous financial state just before the EA acquisition. EA’s deep pockets would allow them to keep pace with spiraling development costs for the time being. But in return, the games they made had to have enough mass-market appeal to recoup their larger budgets.

This, then, was the calculus that went into Ultima VIII, which begins to make the inexplicable at least somewhat more comprehensible. At this juncture in time, epic CRPGs were at literally their lowest ebb in the entire history of computer games. Therefore Ultima, the series that was virtually synonymous with the epic CRPG in the minds of most gamers, needed to become something else. It needed to become simpler and faster-paced, and if it could also jump on the trend toward grittier, more violent ludic aesthetics — I point again to the rise of id Software — so much the better. It may not have been a coincidence that, when Ultima VIII eventually shipped, it did so in a box sporting garish orange flames and a huge pentagram — the same general graphics style and even iconography as was seen in DOOM, id’s latest ultra-violent hit.

Of course, the flaws in the thought process that led to Ultima VIII aren’t hard to identify in retrospect. Games which lack the courage of their own convictions seldom make for good company, any more than do people of the same stripe. The insecure child of a nervous creator who feared the world of gaming was passing him by, Ultima VIII could likely never have aspired to be more than competent in a derivative sort of way.

The biggest blunder was the decision to slap the Ultima name on the thing at all, thereby raising expectations on the part of the franchise’s preexisting fan base which the game was never designed to meet. Ironically, the audience for an Ultima was every bit as “pre-sold,” as Garriott puts it above, as the audience for the latest Madden. And yet one game that fails to meet fan expectations can destroy just such a pre-sold audience really, really quickly, as Garriott was about to prove. (An analogy to the radical change in course of Ultima VIII might be a Madden installment that suddenly decided to become a cerebral stat-based game of football management and strategy instead of an exercise in fast-paced on-the-field action…) It would have been better to announce that Ultima was taking a break while Lord British tried something new. But it seems that Garriott identified so strongly with the only line of games he had ever seriously worked on that he couldn’t imagine not calling his latest one Ultima VIII.

So much for the conceptual flaws in the project. Alas, its execution would prove even more of a disaster.

Richard Garriott’s involvement in the day-to-day work of game development had been decreasing almost year by year, ever since he had first agreed to let other programmers help him with Ultima V back in 1986. The Ultima VIII project was set up in the same way that the last couple had been: Garriott provided a set of general design goals and approaches along with a plot outline, then dropped in occasionally on the Origin staff who were assigned to the project while they made it all happen. This time the role of project director fell to one Mike McShaffry, who had come to Origin in 1990 to work as a programmer on Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams, then held the same role on Ultima VII. Meanwhile the nuts-and-bolts designers of Ultima VIII became John Watson and Andrew Morris.

None of these people were incompetent; all would continue to pursue fruitful careers in the games industry after Ultima VIII was behind them. But on this occasion they found themselves in an untenable situation, given neither the time nor the support they needed to make a competent game even of the dubious type for which Garriott was asking. Ultima VIII would not employ the talents of Raymond Benson, the accomplished wordsmith who had made Ultima VII’s script so exceptionally rich and subtle; he was now gone from the company, driven away like many of his peers by the insanely long hours Origin demanded of their employees. Rather than replacing him with another proper writer, Origin cobbled together a collection of programmers, artists, and designers to provide all of its comparatively scant text, most of them doing double duty with their other roles on the project. After all, it was now the age of multimedia action. How much did mere words really matter anymore?

As 1993 wore on, external events heaped more and more pressure on the team. Chris Roberts’s latest game Strike Commander appeared in the spring of 1993; it moved his patented Wing Commander approach into the milieu of a near-future techno-thriller. Everyone confidently expected it to become Roberts’s latest blockbuster hit, EA’s first great dividend on the price of the Origin acquisition. But instead it under-performed relative to expectations; gamers seemed nonplussed by the change in setting, and their computers struggled to meet its high system requirements. Origin would manage to score some successes on a more modest scale in 1993 with other, cheaper Wing Commander spinoffs and an Ultima VII Part Two, but their big cannon for the year had shot a dud. It was now up to Ultima VIII to put smiles on the faces of EA’s management.

For all that the EA acquisition certainly was a major factor in the story of Ultima VIII, it’s difficult to say for sure how much of the pressure Origin felt was brought directly to bear by their new corporate parent and how much was merely perceived. As we’ve seen, Richard Garriott hasn’t hesitated to chalk the failure of Ultima VIII up to EA’s interference, full stop. Yet the actual EA executives in question have vociferously denied micromanaging the project, insisting on the contrary that it was conceived, created, and finally shipped on terms dictated by no one outside of Origin. Even some Origin employees have admitted that EA handled their new charge with a fairly light touch for the first couple of years; it was only after such disappointments as Strike Commander and Ultima VIII had convinced them that adult supervision was sorely needed down in Austin that they took a more hands-on approach. In the end, then, we can say for sure only that the appalling state in which Ultima VIII was released was down to some gradation in between an earnest desire on Origin’s behalf to please their parent and a stern dictate from said parent to ship it now, or else!

It must be said as well that the reality of crunch time at Origin prior to Ultima VIII was somewhat different from the rosy picture which Garriott paints above. The bad-cop counterpart to Garriot the lunch-providing good cop was Dallas Snell, Origin’s hard-driving production manager. The company’s internal newsletters from the early 1990s are littered with complaints about the stresses of crunch time, sometimes accompanied by Snell’s strident but unconvincing attempts to defend the practice on the basis of passion, dedication, and esprit de corps. As a result, Raymond Benson was only one of a steady stream of talented people who came to Origin, stayed there a relatively brief period of time, and then moved on to other parts of the games industry or to other industries entirely, having made the perfectly sensible decision that no job is worth sacrificing one’s health and general well-being for.

Still, the crunch that produced Ultima VIII was extreme even by Origin’s usual standards, and the stress was undoubtedly compounded by the bad vibe of compromise and trend-chasing that had clung to the project from the start. It didn’t help that Mike McShaffry had never attempted to manage a software-development project of any sort before; he was completely unequipped to bring any semblance of order to all of the frantic effort, as he freely admits today:

To a lot of people on the development team, Ultima VIII unfortunately was a very negative development experience. Most of the team who were managing Ultima VIII — myself especially — you know, it was our first really big management task, and so…to say I really screwed it up doesn’t really come close, I don’t think, to the truth.

You can’t just put anybody at the helm of an oil tanker and say, “Take it through the strait!” and not expect something really horrible to happen. And Ultima’s a big ship to steer, and it was unfortunate that I never had the chance to figure out how to manage a team that large. It took me another ten years to really get better at it.

All of these factors led to Ultima VIII shipping in a state that almost defies critical description; seldom has a game so blatantly unfinished been allowed onto store shelves. The writing is so sparse and unrefined that it often seems like placeholder text, and yet still manages to leave threads dangling and plot holes yawning everywhere; the cloth map that is included in the box bears almost no relation to the world in the game itself, what with so much of the latter having gone missing in action; what’s left of the CRPG mechanics are so broken that it’s possible to max out your character in less than an hour of play; every place in the game looks the same, being all too clearly built from the same handful of pre-rendered graphics (giant mushrooms everywhere for the win!); every single chest in the game explodes, even if it doesn’t contain anything, as if the developers didn’t have time to address each one individually and so just set a global flag somewhere; your unresponsive lunk of a character drowns instantly if he falls into two feet of water. Tellingly, the one part of Ultima VII that is painstakingly preserved in Ultima VIII is its most annoying: an impossible inventory-management system that forces you to spend minutes at a time dragging around tiny overlapping icons just to find anything.

But none of that was quite enough to make the original version of Ultima VIII worthy of the adjective “unplayable.” What served for that was the absurdly broken jumping system. Super Mario Bros. and Prince of Persia had been designed for joypads and joysticks. Seeking to translate those paradigms to a moused-based computer, Origin came up with a relativistic jumping system whereby the length of your leap would be determined by the distance the cursor was from your character when you clicked the mouse, rather than opting for the more intuitive solution whereby you simply pointed at and clicked on a would-be destination to attempt to jump there. McShaffry:

I think, for us, it was such a departure from what we were used to. And honestly, a jumping mechanic like what we were trying to do… I think that we just didn’t have enough people on the team who were really hardcore platformer players. Something like Mario, where you have an intuitive feel for what works in a jumping system and what doesn’t work in a jumping system. I certainly hadn’t played a lot of those games until then, and so I honestly didn’t know what I was looking for.

Honestly, that’s a case where we should have listened a whole lot more to QA. They were platformers! They played every Nintendo console [game] out there, and they came back to us and said, “Hey, this jumping is kind of busted.”

I think sometimes in product development we’d get on the high horse and go, “It’s not busted; we know what we’re doing.” And in that case… that was a horrible mistake on our part to not listen to them. But hey, we were in our twenties; when you’re in your twenties, you think you’ve got god-like powers and you’re immortal.

In truth, jumping in Ultima VIII wasn’t “kind of busted” at all; it was completely, comprehensively busted. Figuring out where any given jump would land you was a black art, thanks to the sloppy mouse cursor and the impossibility of accurately judging depths in the game’s canted isometric view. The only way to get anywhere was to save before each jump and give it a try, then reload and adjust until you got it right. After four or five attempts, you might just manage it if you were lucky. Then you got to rinse and repeat for the next jump, out of what might be a dozen or more in all to get across a single obstacle. In order to fully appreciate the horror of all this, you have to remember that every single save or restore would have taken on the order of 30 seconds back in 1994. And now imagine trying to work through this process when some of the platforms you need to jump from and to are moving. On release day, Ultima VIII really was perilously close to being literally unplayable.

Oh, my… I’m afraid we’re going to be here a while…

In keeping with a tradition dating back to the early 1980s, Richard Garriott, Mike McShaffry, and several other members of the development team turned up on CompuServe for an online conference with fans just a couple of weeks after the game’s release. These affairs were heavily moderated, and this prevented the outrage that was already percolating through the fan community from being expressed too aggressively. Nevertheless, the developers quickly learned that this meetup was not to be the usual love fest. Instead they got an earful from the fans:

Let me say that I have been playing Ultimas since I was charmed and amazed by Ultima IV on my Commodore 64. One of the best things about Ultimas was the rich, detailed world and intricate, lengthy storylines. I could look forward to easily over 100 hours with each new Ultima, an excellent value for the money. Ultima VIII, on the other hand, is way too short…

It seems like there were a lot of bugs in Ultima VIII…

I thought the game was a little rough around the edges, especially the jumping. Since many Ultima players don’t like the heavy arcade element, are you set on keeping Ultima a CRPG/action game?…

My favorite part of Ultima VII was the large world. I was a little disappointed when I found that the world in Ultima VIII was actually smaller. Will Ultima IX have a larger world and more puzzles that require thinking, as opposed to jumping and running?…

I note with some trepidation your interest/fascination with “action” and “digital speech.” I think that too many game companies are spending too many resources on the latest graphics, sounds, etc., and nowhere near enough on character development and story and interaction. Is the swing to action/arcade a marketing-driven decision, your personal [decision], or [down to] some other reason?…

I have noticed a trend toward a single-threaded story line. Any hopes of returning to the original roots with the Ultima IX story line?…

What I and a lot of other old Ultima fans saw disappear after Ultima VII was the great ability to interact. Like baking bread, etc., and I would like to know if you plan for this to return in Ultima IX. And will you pay more attention to the plot?…

I’m concerned about the decline in the Avatar’s principles. I spent two days trying to solve Bane and Vordion without breaking my oath…

I am disappointed about the length of Ultima VIII, as others have said. There’s too much running around, and the clues to locations are far too vague…

I’m disappointed in Ultima VIII. I’ve played every single Ultima, and I feel Ultima VIII is a serious step back from previous Ultimas. I hope you realize that it takes more than glitz and sound to make a good CRPG. Lastly, I really do hope you’ll fix more bugs. I had to reformat my whole hard drive because of Ultima VIII…

Are we ever going to get various sexes and races of Avatars to choose from again?…

If they didn’t know it before, Origin must have realized by the time this conference ended that they had a big, big problem on their hands. The subsequent fan reactions to Ultima VIII were and remain far more entertaining than the game itself; few games have inspired as many unhinged, poetically profane rants as this one. Writing in the fannish newsletter Questbusters, Charles Don Hall struggled to reconcile this awful game with the Lord British cult of personality that so much of hardcore Ultima fandom had always been: “My best guess is that Lord British had nothing at all to do with it, and turned development over to soulless drones who were capable of playing the earlier Ultimas but incapable of understanding what made them such great games.”

The glossier magazines weren’t quite sure what to do about Ultima VIII. Torn between the need to serve their readerships and Origin’s advertising dollars, they equivocated like crazy, often settling on an “it’s not the game, it’s me” approach: i.e., I didn’t much enjoy Ultima VIII, but you might.

The big exception was Computer Gaming World, the most long-lived and respected of all the journals, whose status gave it a degree of insulation from the need to chase advertisers. Scorpia, the magazine’s influential adventure-gaming columnist, ripped the game to shreds in her review. I’ll share just a few highlights here:

Pagan, the purported Ultima VIII, is unlike any other Ultima you may have played. If you were expecting characterization, rich story, role-playing — you’re expecting it from the wrong game…

The game might easily have been called, as a friend of mine put it, “Mario: The Avatar.” If the name “Ultima” wasn’t on the box, you might think you’d picked up the latest Sega or Nintendo game by mistake…

Pagan could well be subtitled “School Daze,” as a good 75 percent of it is having the Avatar prove he is worthy to belong to a particular magic organization. “You want to be a Necromancer? First, you must be tested!” “You want to be a Theurgist? First, you must be tested!” “You want to be a Sorcerer? First you must be tested!”…

The story, such as it is, can be summed up as “Homeward-Bound Avatar Wrecks World…”

[The Avatar] lies to become a Necromancer; joins the Theurgists solely to steal an item (thereby negating their spell-casting abilities); betrays a Sorcerer who trusted him (thereby becoming an accessory to murder); kills (in supposed self-defense) the Master of Sorcerers to obtain another needed item; and frees the two bound Titans, so the world is wracked by continual violent storms and lava rain…

Overall, Pagan is a disaster, and an embarrassment to Origin, Lord British, and Ultima fans everywhere. It tries to go in two directions at once, and succeeds only in tearing itself apart, failing dismally on all fronts…

Instead of giving a smattering of hints and tips for Ultima VIII, as was her wont with the games she reviewed, Scorpia published an outright walkthrough, in order to “help anyone playing it to finish quickly and move on to better things.” For the following issue, she wrote a detailed retrospective of Ultima IV, her avowed favorite game of all time, pointing out all the ways in which it was the archetypal Ultima — and, by pointed implication, all of the ways in which Ultima VIII had failed to live up to its legacy.

In that very same issue, Origin offered an unprecedented mea culpa for Ultima VIII. Having clearly decided that this installment was beyond hope, they tried to save the franchise’s future by throwing it, and to at least some extent its project leader Mike McShaffry, under the bus. Richard Garriott had, he said, “heard the cry of his fans”; he admitted that “the latest game design had moved too close to action gaming and strayed too far from the strengths of the series.” Origin would, they promised, place the rock-steady Warren Spector — the man who had helmed Ultima VI, Martian Dreams, and the two Ultima Underworld games — in charge of Ultima IX. “If,” Spector pleaded, “we can get some of our followers who were disappointed in Pagan to try Ultima IX, we don’t think they’ll be disappointed.” In the meantime, an all-but-complete Ultima VIII expansion disk was axed as part of a general desire to forget that the game had ever happened.

One man, however, could not possibly forget. Mike McShaffry says today that he “felt like persona non grata at Origin because I personally felt like I was being blamed for the mistakes.” After months of ineffectual bad feelings, he finally decided to do something about it. He took all of the Ultima VIII code home with him over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1994 and, as he puts it, “fixed the jumping myself,” replacing the weird system of relative leaps with a simple click-here-to-jump-here approach. Despite their wish to flush the whole thing down the memory hole, Origin agreed to put out a patch incorporating this change and a number of other desperately needed quality-of-life improvements.

It’s this version of Ultima VIII that you’ll find hosted on digital storefronts today. It’s definitely a vast improvement over the original, even taking into account the philosophical objection that it turns the jumping — intended to be a major part of the experience — into a triviality. Much respect to Mike McShaffry for making it; if he hadn’t done so, the game’s reputation would be even worse today. Even Scorpia took note of the patch in her column, and was prompted to soften her stance toward the game ever so slightly. (“I can’t guarantee the game will be more fun, but it will certainly be less frustrating.”)

Indeed, it’s quite common to hear today that Ultima VIII really wasn’t a bad game at all — that it was merely a bad Ultima, in departing way too radically from that series’s established traditions. Some fuel for this argument is provided by Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret, a pair of science-fiction action games that used the engine developed for Ultima VIII, but were able to do so without the baggage which the Ultima name brought with it. Both were well-received upon their release in 1995 and 1996 respectively, and are still fondly remembered in some circles today. Some have gone so far as to claim that the engine influenced Diablo, Blizzard Entertainment’s 1997 mega-hit of a streamlined, story-light action-CRPG.

Still, to say that McShaffry’s patch makes a good game out of Ultima VIII strikes me as a leap too far (pun intended). At best, it moves it from unplayable to the lower end of mediocre: the boring environments, uninteresting and/or broken mechanics, poor and sometimes nonexistent writing, and general air of unpleasantness remain unpatched. Ultima VIII is not the misunderstood classic that a few thoroughgoing contrarians would have it be.

Ultima VIII is best studied not as an exercise in game design in the abstract but as an endlessly illustrative sign of its times, showing what happened when the changes being wrought upon the culture of computer gaming by the likes of Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM — not to mention Wing Commander! — collided head-on with one of that culture’s traditional standard bearers. In this case, the standard bearer in question would never be the same again. The Ultima IX which certain factions inside Origin were so eager to make as a way of spitting out the bad taste of Ultima VIII would keep getting pushed down in the priority queue after Wing Commander III appeared in late 1994 and finally provided the big hit which Origin had been looking for ever since the EA acquisition. With that event, Wing Commander’s takeover of Origin was complete. It would be over two and a half years before gamers would hear the name of Ultima from Origin again.

(Sources: the books Explore Create by Richard Garriott with David Fisher and Dungeons and Dreamers by Brad King and John Borland; Computer Gaming World of March 1994, July 1994, August 1994, and May 1995; Electronic Entertainment of April 1994; Questbusters 111; PC Gamer of May/June 1994; PC Zone of June 1994; Dragon of August 1994; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of December 1993, March 1994, and May 5 1995. Online sources include Sheri Graner Ray’s memories of her time at Origin Systems, “The Conquest of Origin” at The Escapist, and the Ultima Codex interviews with Mike McShaffry and Jason Ely. My huge thanks to Judith Pintar for digging up the online CompuServe conference that followed Ultima VIII’s release. Note that I’ve heavily edited the excerpts that are included here for grammar, clarity, and brevity; feel free to download the full, unedited transcript.

Ultima VIII is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
90 Responses

- Ishkur

February 19, 2021 at 6:06 pm

Ultima VIII was a mess.

A big, fat stupid god damn mess. I liked the premise, the music was fantastic and chilling, the plot was alright, and I didn’t even mind the graphics that much. The problem was the functionality and gameplay made it utterly unplayable. And the platform jumping (it’s pejoratively called Super Avatar Bros. for a reason) didn’t even bother me that much although to be fair I bought the patched version back in the day. It was the maddening pixel-hunts demanded of many of the magic schools just to make spells. I wasted way too much stupid time trying to make sorcery spells because one of my candles wasn’t placed on the pentagram’s point correctly.

Pagan had promise. It was effectively a (sad attempt at being a) single person dungeon crawler and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it adds to the sense of loneliness and desolation to have the Avatar spend the bulk of the game crawling through similar-looking catacombs on inane fetch quests. No party, no friends, no familiar locations or settings and no NPCs who revered him as their savior. He was all alone, and the game’s moody, gothic music (its only redeeming quality) really captured that sense of despair and anxiety.

But if you’re going to make a Diablo-esque dungeon romp, at least make the dungeon fun to explore instead of a crazy death trap where one wrong step (and you’ll make many given the game’s wonky controls) meant a sudden end via any number of invisible caltrops, wall darts, exploding mushrooms, fumaroles, falling stalactites, electric forcefields, loose floor, lava/water, moving platforms, or rolling spike balls. And oh yeah, exploding chests. The god damn stupid exploding chests, every time. This game needed to stop punishing your curiosity so much. It reminded me of the million ways to die in Sierra adventure games. Should’ve been called Avatar Quest.

But buried underneath the crappy functionality and “exploration == suicide” themes, however, was a great premise.

Here you are, the Avatar, on an alien world where abiding by the virtues will not help you. You have to lie, cheat, steal, and yes, kill innocent children (optional) to progress ahead. It’s nothing you haven’t done before (the first three Ultimas were all about laying waste to whole towns to advance in level), but it is a very morose take on the Avatar in the Age of Virtue.

Richard Garriott invented a system of ethics, and then each game challenged or threatened that system:

Ultima IV – The Virtues are Confronted
Ultima V – The Virtues are Corrupted
Ultima VI – The Virtues are Attacked
Ultima VII – The Virtues are Ignored
Ultima VIII – The Virtues are Abandoned
Ultima IX – The Virtues are Inverted

Pagan was the darkest of the series because it was the only one that gave the Avatar no moral compass whatsoever. There were no karma points to earn or friendly relations to maintain with any of Pagan’s denizens. The game was utterly and inhumanly amoral. All the other games routinely punished you for making the wrong moral choice through a bevvy of tantalizing options — from stealing from shopkeepers to casting the Armageddon spell. Not the case with Pagan. It was a broken, defeated land inhabited by sullen, oppressed people, and the only way the Avatar could leave it was to make everyone’s miserable lives even worse. When they’ve already hit rock bottom. It’s really quite tragic.

The Avatar betrayed Bane/Vardion (causing the death of either), he overturned the royal court of Tenebrae (which technically may have been a good thing), he assisted in ritual sacrifice to move up in the Necromancer pecking order, he stole the Breath of Wind which robbed Stellos of his youthful mortality (which killed him) and the healing power of Theurgists everywhere, and worst of all: He freed Hydros and Pyros, dooming Pagan to an eternity of torment and, most likely, a second Titan War.

The Avatar left Pagan in worse shape than when he arrived — a first for an Ultima game. You can see some genuine headgames from the Guardian at play here. He didn’t just choose some random planet to drop the Avatar. The very purpose of this quest was to force the Avatar to reject the values that made him the Avatar. To forsake the virtues. And he did. He had to. For the first time, the Avatar encountered a world — and a quest — that was quite simply beyond saving.

If only the game was designed better. Great premise, terrible execution. I think a remake in the could earn it some much-needed redemption.

Very much a bittersweet ending, and I was really hoping Ultima IX would have some sort of aftershock/post-trauma excess from this adventure. But nope — it was a whole ‘nother level of fail.

- Fronzel

February 20, 2021 at 5:21 pm

This framing concept for Ultimas IV onward is interesting but I’m not sure your notion of VIII’s place in it has any wisdom; it just sounds like a dreary exercise in nihilism without offering any choice to the player. Who wants to play an entire game that’s a moral defeat for the hero? Having the “hero of virtue” become an amoral survivor is too simple. There’s no sophistication in merely being gloomy.

- Destron

February 23, 2021 at 2:34 am

I’d also argue that forcing the character to do evil somewhat negates the dramatic tension. The tension, after all, comes from the struggle to do the right thing (and can be just as interesting if the character fails to do the right thing).

Something more interesting might have been a situation in which the Avatar must do evil things in order to get back to Britannia… but also has the option of abandoning (or at least substantially delaying his return to) Britannia in order to make Pagan a more bearable place. Which, of course, means that you’re hurting (through inaction) all the people on Britannia you know and care about. That’s a decision that has some moral weight.

Another option might be to have all your good works inverted by how horrible Pagan is–maybe in showing mercy on a local criminal, you end up giving them a chance to commit worse crimes. Though this also ends up lacking tension (and could easily veer into unintentional dark comedy).

I do think there’s some value in the concept. But the execution, again, was lacking.

- Robbie

June 17, 2021 at 6:29 am

I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. U8 isn’t meant to be a self-contained story about a hero’s descent to villainy; it’s just a chapter in a story about a hero who was forced to do actions that challenge his morals and everything he stands for. U9 was supposed to directly continue the story and show us where the Avatar went from there. We would have learned by playing it whether he finds his way back to the path of virtue or abandons it in the end. Of course, U9’s concept was retooled after U8’s reception, and even after said retool, major scenes were cut from the final story, resulting in the plot point being unceremoniously dropped.

- Bomb Bloke

February 23, 2021 at 11:50 am

The finale of U8 had the Avatar take the Titan’s power, destroying them in order to open a Black Gate. This left the world with a hope that it hadn’t seen in a long, long time: the ruling Titans, as the Guardian’s puppets, literally hadn’t allowed the sun to shine on the land in centuries. Breaking that hold was kind of a big deal.

Sure, many of the Avatar’s actions in Pagan had tragic consequences. However, it’s not fair to question his morality over results he couldn’t’ve foreseen, and he definitely ended up changing things for the better.

- Sol_HSA

February 19, 2021 at 6:15 pm

“Yet the story of Ultima VIIII is more than that” – one I too many

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2021 at 7:18 pm

Thanks!

- Ed

February 19, 2021 at 6:28 pm

Good book

- arthurdawg

February 19, 2021 at 7:22 pm

I loved the Ultima series… played 3 many years ago on my trusty Tandy 1000 and made it up to the 7s and the back to 1 before real life intervened and I stopped playing CRPGs. But the reviews and hatred for 8 and 9 have turned me off to the point that I doubt I’ll ever bother to get one running.

- LeeH

February 19, 2021 at 7:34 pm

Jimmy, the thing I most admire about your writing (and there are many!) is your willingness to confront the fact that history has nuance, and real life never unfolds along a narrative. Real life is just a whole bunch of shit all happening at once. Acknowledging the fact that Ultima VIII’s crappiness is a thing of nuance is admirable. Thanks for writing this—I enjoyed the hell out of it.

- TheHat

February 19, 2021 at 7:43 pm

This was a fantastic read & a very necessary corrective to some of the hagiography typical of Origin retrospectives. I’m pretty amused that I knew that was Spoony’s Ultima 8 review before I even followed the link.
Thanks!

- Markus

February 19, 2021 at 7:47 pm

I found Pagan at my local public library back then, so I took it home and gave it a try. I’m not really an RPG person, making this the only Ultima game I ever actually played. But playing it through to the end I did (not sure what got into me there). Indeed though, it was only bearable after applying the patch that fixed this “Super Avatar Bros.” mess of a jumping system. I’ve never touched the game since then, but lo and behold, the Ultima8 engine is one that nowadays sees quite a bit of continuous development in the ScummVM project (an integration of the earlier “Pentagram” engine remake project; including support for the Crusader games, obviously), so there’s a chance I might give it another try if that ever gets finished.

As for Strike Commander, I always feel its more-or-less failure was caused to a significant degree by its copy protection. IIRC, the game featured one of those protections that doesn’t indicate a breach or failure in the sense that it refuses to run; instead it started the game in all its glossy glory, but then made your plane damn near impossible to fly at some point thus rendering the game unplayable, without telling you what’s going on. Of course this bad idea makes the word of mouth advertising on the streets sound not so much “oh my gosh, it is copy protected, you will have to go and by the original!” but rather more like “dude, this game stinks, the stupid game doesn’t even fly properly, don’t buy this”…

- Vyron

February 19, 2021 at 8:13 pm

So, as a young (25) player of video games, I have not been exposed to the whole Lord British cult or whatever it is. So I am asking this straight question : how was he respected ? Why ? I cannot comprehend how such a silly, ravenously egoistic and quite patheticaly jealous little man could have any kind of “fan” clout or respect. What made him such an icon ? Did nobody know of the flaws then ? Or did everyone know and ignore it because he made great games ? Like, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to flame or be extra mean, but that’s really how he comes across if every retrospective about him that I see today.

- Martin

February 19, 2021 at 9:52 pm

We didn’t have the internet back then and a*holes could live their lives without others creating a collective opinion about them.

- Jimmy Maher

February 19, 2021 at 9:59 pm

That’s a very complicated question. Richard Garriott was very important to the development of the CRPG form, and made at least one genuinely brilliant conceptual leap in the form of Ultima IV; this latter is still the bedrock of his reputation, and, indeed, makes him more than worthy of remembrance in the annals of digital-game design. Unfortunately, he has less admirable qualities as well which have tended to stand out more as time goes on: one of these is a tendency to take all of the credit for things that go well, and none of the blame for things that go poorly. This too stretches all the way to the beginning of his career: it was Al Remmers, the head of his first publisher California Pacific, who first created the Lord British cult of personality that has served him so well, yet Garriott persists in dismissing him as a drug addict and a thief rather than acknowledging his service and perhaps even thanking him for it.

If you really want the full story with all of its complexity and nuance, I can only suggest that you start at the beginning: https://www.filfre.net/tag/ultima/?order=ASC. Just remember as you read that people are never all one thing. In the end, Garriott is neither a hero nor a villain. He’s just a human being.

- Vyron

February 20, 2021 at 11:03 am

Thanks ! I will absolutely check it out. I suppose I came on as judgemental and extreme, but in the end I just want to understand and know more. Thinking back on it, I suppose the fans and press reactions to the earlier Ultima games did a number on him, as it would for anyone that gathers massive success and attention. From what I know, he also was one of the first “game” personnalities, before such thing were more common, like nowadays where great industry names are more widely known. I understand that it is more complicated than a single article could convey.
And I won’t forget that people are complicated, I promise.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2021 at 12:12 pm

The sort of extreme adulation which Garriott received — and to some extent still does — would affect the psychology of almost anyone. It’s very, very difficult in those situations not to start to believe that you really are the thoroughgoing genius your most zealous fans claim you to be.

My impression is that Garriott really isn’t all that personally interested in games at all today, and hasn’t been for quite some time. This is no crime; people change, and, as several other commenters have noted, he remains a very charming, personable fellow, no small gift in itself. (Plenty of careers have been built around just being someone other people enjoy being around…) His problem is that he continues to allow his name to be attached to dubious gaming projects on which he can’t really be bothered to play any role other than figurehead, and which tend not to attract a lot of ethical, first-rate talent. And then, in an effort to prove he’s still with it, he winds up making ill-considered statements in the press which only advertise how out of touch he is. It’s entirely fair to say that these things have done his legacy no favors — but that shouldn’t detract from the genuine contributions he made in the past.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s much guile or ill-intent about the fellow — just a sort of endemic carelessness, and a desire to *play* the great game designer without being willing put in the work of actually *being* one. One can see these tendencies starting to emerge even long before Ultima VIII. Chalk it up to what has been by any standard a very privileged life. There but for the grace of God…

- Gordon Cameron

February 20, 2021 at 8:06 pm

>My impression is that Garriott really isn’t all that personally interested in games at all today, and hasn’t been for quite some time.

I agree with this. I think he’s more interested in expensive adventures (space, volcanoes, etc.). In this respect he reminds me of James Cameron, but he probably has a lot less cash than that fellow, and hasn’t had a hit as recently.

- Gordon Cameron

February 19, 2021 at 11:25 pm

Then as now, it’s possible to separate the person from the work. In my opinion, Garriott is responsible for a streak of five straight-up CRPG classics: Ultimas III through VII. Couched in there is what I consider to be the best CRPG of the 1980s, Ultima V. You can throw onto the pile the fact that the first Ultima game established (with Wizardry) one of the two primary CRPG templates for years to come.

All Joe Gamer knew about Garriott in the ’80s and early ’90s was that he had a big ego, liked to throw lavish parties, lived in a weird mansion, and wore funny clothes. It would take a lot more than that to override the positive effects of so many glorious gaming hours.

I also feel obligated to point out that in my few journalistic and Twitter interactions with Garriott, he has been unfailingly pleasant and quite free with his time. Of course, you’re supposed to be pleasant to journalists who are about to write about your next game, so I view that as him doing his job rather than being a swell guy. But nothing in my interactions with him indicated, as you say, a “silly, ravenously egoistic and quite pathetically jealous little man.”

On the other side, I think in retrospect it’s hard to view Shroud of the Avatar as anything other than a debacle. Garriott basically ceased to be relevant in cutting edge videogame design after Ultima Online, but that’s still a hell of a better career than most people can boast of.

Long story short, he was – is – respected because he did excellent work. The unattractive parts of his personality weren’t/aren’t most people’s problem, any more than those of (say) John Lennon.

None of this is to say he should have a cult of personality around him. (Nobody should, IMO.) But respect? Absolutely.

- Vyron

February 20, 2021 at 11:08 am

People change, I suppose. My rather extreme view of it comes from all of the, how to say… modern eras papers that speak about him on other points than just his games. So who speak about the past. He obviously changed at least a bit now, it has been so long. I own and have played Shroud of the Avatar, and there are great ideas in there, but it sure could use some deep QOL changes. I wonder how much of it did he decide and design, how much his team did, and how much modern gaming landscape has affected the whole process.
And in the end, because I didn’t play those games back then, what with not being born and all, and not having heard about it until I started growing interested in the past of videogames, I suppose I am and will always be a complete outsider to all of this. So the respect part is harder to have. But I will try to be more open.

- Gordon Cameron

February 20, 2021 at 8:10 pm

I would say there is no particular reason to respect Garriott without having understood what he achieved in game design in the ’80s, which really means having played them. (You don’t have to have played them in the ’80s; in my opinion several of them hold up very well, allowing for obvious graphical limitations etc.) But also, without having understood what he achieved in game design in the ’80s, there’s considerably less reason to talk about him at all! It would be like evaluating Paul McCartney’s music career without mentioning the 1960s. (The analogy breaks down a bit since McCartney has done more good work post-Beatles than Garriot has post-Origin, but I hope the point stands.)

- Ice Cream Jonsey

February 20, 2021 at 4:11 am

“but that’s really how he comes across if every retrospective about him that I see today.”

I met him in Atlanta for E3 in 1998. E3 had this a loose requirement at the time where you had to somehow be involved with the gaming industry to attend. My friends and I got in anyway but we were just enthusiasts. Ya know… GAMERS. During the show I met Richard Garriott.

He was the *nicest* guy in the world. He was well-aware that people who were not peers were in the show and was really pleasant to talk to. I’m trying to think of a way to phrase the next line that doesn’t sound weird: he asked me about myself, which is not one of those things that you’d think would be notable for the most part, but really down to earth for someone who had lived a crazy, accomplished life. I talked to him for just five minutes and I would have ran through a wall for him or done some of that crazy development crunch if he was my manager.

I can only go off my own experiences, but he was an incredibly nice guy who made games – Ultima 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 for me, personally – that were really fun.

- Vyron

February 20, 2021 at 11:11 am

I can’t help but be cynical when you put it like that, thinking “He was at an event so he was just being nice.” But maybe he wasn’t. He loved his fans, from what you are saying. I forgot that people are multi-faceted, and he might have been both really egoistic and ready to shift the blame, all the whilst still being really nice and liking to meet people. I can’t speak of experience of course, but if everyone at Origin was working super long hours and super hard, it would probably warp your view of everything you do…

- Jonathan Badger

February 20, 2021 at 7:57 am

Garriot was maybe a bit self-serious, but he in no way was a bad person as far as we know, not taking advantage of women or other underprivileged people as many people of his era did, so I hardly think his adulation was unwarranted, given the great games he produced.

- Vyron

February 20, 2021 at 11:00 am

I suppose I was a bit extreme in how I expressed it. It is just really how it came across to me when I read about his reactions or behaviour in this article or other articles one his less successful games. I was being judgemental. I suppose it would come down to what you perceive are personality flaws for oneself.

- R-man

February 19, 2021 at 8:18 pm

I had only played a little of the earlier Ultima games at friends places, so I was quite open-minded when I started playing U8. To be honest, even though the jumping bit and the fact that the general best strategy was to just run past all monsters, I really enjoyed the game. Something in how they captured the mood in Tenebre (was it?) and as someone else said, the complete loneliness and creepniess, really spoke to me. Also, by 1990:s standards the story was not bad at all.

In addition to this, it had some semi-novel game mechanics, such as the ability to move vertically in a sense through ladders and heaving, which I found very exiting.

- Kai

February 19, 2021 at 9:34 pm

After the fabulous Ultima VII, Pagan obviously had been quite the disappointment. I only managed to complete it with cheats enabled. I even replayed it after it was finally patched, it was a very short game after all.

But terrible execution and unfinished state aside, I actually liked the direction the game had taken. Making the environment more interactive with all the invisible caltrops, wall darts, exploding mushrooms, fumaroles, falling stalactites, electric forcefields, loose floor, lava/water, moving platforms, or rolling spike balls actually made traversing what little world there was a much more interesting affair than simply going from A to B in the fastest way possible. A lot of those potential deaths could be avoided by being cautious and observant, and I thought this added a welcome new dimension to RPG gameplay.

If all of that had been part of a more fully realized world, with more and diverse locations, NPCs and quests, and with sane controls from the start, I probably would have been content. I was actually disappointed when the expansion did not materialize, as I had hoped it would fill in at least some of the many obvious blanks. And that’s really the biggest issue for me, the lack of content and the linearity. Ultima VII had this vast open world, with so much going on, how could anyone think that following up with this empty husk of a game would go down well?

- Martin

February 19, 2021 at 9:49 pm

While the games sounds a mess, yours, Scorpia’s and some of the other commenter’s comments about the moral bankrupt-ness of the game seem intriguing. Are there any games that take those themes and produce a game worth playing?

- David Simon

February 19, 2021 at 11:13 pm

(Someone wants game opinions? Oh boy, I’ve got plenty to spare! Apologies if this is long winded.)

There are plenty of games about amoral or immoral worlds and characters, which generally take a perspective of dark humor and/or grim sternness. Messiah stands out to me as a good contemporary example of this. The Last of Us Part 2 is a much more recent one, which tries to add some nuance without really letting up on the “everything sucks and so do you” theme. And a good indie approach to this is Lisa, content warning for really graphic stuff in that one though, nevermind the pixelated visuals. All three of those are (imo) well-designed and inventive, though rather depressing.

Then there are games take a wider or outside perspective on morality. The main gimmick of Undertale explores this pretty well by responding thoroughly to everything between saving literally everyone to murdering literally everyone. And Pyre takes the opposite approach, where you cannot protect everyone or everything you might want to, even with the benefits of save scumming or outside information.

- Jonathan Badger

February 20, 2021 at 12:02 am

One such game is 2012’s SpecOps: The Line, which on the surface is a typical Americans in the Middle East shooter game like the Modern Warfare series, but which (without giving away too much) turns into a reflection on what the player is doing and in a larger sense American involvement in the Middle East in general.

- Captain Obvious

February 20, 2021 at 10:18 pm

Maybe this is too obvious, but Grand Theft Auto V absolutely fits the bill.

- Rowan Lipkovits

February 19, 2021 at 10:53 pm

Not even a faint glimmer of Ultima Online on the horizon at article’s end?

- Gordon Cameron

February 19, 2021 at 11:32 pm

Yes, it seems that the ‘glory days’ part of Garriott’s career should at least be bumped up to 1997, when UO released.

It’s been hard going since then, no question. But the single-player CRPG torch has been passed to other capable developers, and there’s also a thriving indie scene. I prefer to be grateful for what Garriott did back in the day, rather than worry about what he’s done for me lately.

- Awl

February 20, 2021 at 12:14 am

I wonder if any of the Ultima VIII code made it into UO. The graphic style and even the font looks very similar.

If that’s the case, UO was such a huge success it would easily make up for any failure here.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2021 at 8:53 am

It had been my understanding that Ultima Online was primarily the brainchild of Ralph Koster. But, from doing the cursory research that I should have done before publishing this article, I see that Richard Garriott’s involvement would appear to have been more substantial than I gave him credit for. I’ve deleted the last couple of sentences of the article, which were a bit unfair and perhaps even mean-spirited to boot. Mea culpa.

- Gordon Cameron

February 20, 2021 at 8:12 pm

This is overall a fantastic article. I inhaled it with relish!

- Jeff M. Thomas

February 20, 2021 at 2:37 am

I’m surprised no one’s mentioned the ending. After you’ve done all these terrible things to these already suffering people you can finally escape back to the happy world of Britannia where you were a paragon of virtue… you enter the the foreboding screaming crystal and… the game kicks you right in the giblets. There’s no happy ending here, and it’s left unresolved because the next game didn’t come out for years (when it did it pretty much ignored the ending anyway).

I remember finishing the game and thinking, “Well, that was a terrible Ultima game, but I kinda had fun anyway.” True that even with the patch it’s quite broken, with quests that can’t be finished and ways to lock yourself out of finishing not to mention a number of areas that can’t be accessed without cheating. I hated being forced into doing evil acts, and yet I still remember having fun exploring the world. Maybe it was because I played it years later so the save/die/reload cycle was faster, I had access to a good walkthrough for when I got stuck and I wasn’t very emotionally attached to the Ultima universe anymore.

But then I also enjoyed Ultima 9, so maybe I’m not a very good reference :D

- whomever

February 20, 2021 at 3:42 am

Heh, I’ve been waiting for this review for some time. The opening paragraph describes me to a T, and yes, I DO want to know what went wrong. I’m still sort of grumpy that I spent my allowance $$$ on this. I bought it at it’s release, because it’s the next Ultima! For those who think Jimmy is exaggerating, nope, he’s if anything being kind. In particular, let’s not forget the bugs, my god it was buggy. I also had a fairly decent machine for the time, no problems with Wing Commander or Ultima VII but Ultima VIII performed like an absolute dog. I mean, I didn’t even get to the point of complaining about the chests because even basic playing was so painful.

I can’t be the only person who was so burned by this that I didn’t even bother with Ultima IX. I’m kind of hoping that the review will say “actually it wasn’t that bad” so I can go get it on GOG, but sounds like it’s not :-(

The only other nuance is Strike Commander, what this article doesn’t mention is that Strike Commander famously super late even by Origin standards, to the point people were mocking it long before release. I’d be curious about an article one that as well (I never did play it, though I get the impression that once it was finally released and bugs fixed it was a decent game).

- Roger

February 20, 2021 at 4:56 am

I know it was a disappointment, but what a mean way to end your article considering his great accomplishments.

- Pystopheles

February 20, 2021 at 5:06 am

No UO eh? Probably got PK’d. =P

- bayoublue

February 20, 2021 at 6:50 am

I first played Ultima 3 on my c64 in middle school, and fell in love.
I felt 4 was life-changing as high school freshman and 5 was amazing follow-up.
I played 6 on my step-dad’s luggable EGA PC, and enjoyed the two “Worlds” on my VGA 286 in college.
I had to wait until graduation to afford a computer that could handle 7 and Serpent Isle, but they were worth the wait (even with Serpent Isle being basically unfinished).

Of course I bought Ultima 8, when it came out.
I will admit being a bit apprehensive when an advertising blurb on the box mentioned some technical spec of how the Avatar was animated. I was not sure what that had to do with the role playing series I had grown up with and spent countless hours on.

The beginning seemed somewhat off, but I figured it would get better.
I made it past the fist jumping torture by save scumming, figuring what was beyond would be worth it.
Then…… I had to admit that I was playing the game because I wanted it to be good, not because it was good. I went online (probably AOL) looking to see what others thought about the game, and saw I was not alone.
I put it aside and never finished it.

- Gordon Cameron

February 20, 2021 at 8:13 pm

3, 4, and 5 were among the very most important texts I encountered in late childhood/early adolescence. It would be difficult to overstate their impact on me.

- Jaakko Seppälä

February 20, 2021 at 8:29 am

I’m in the definite minority here, but I loved Ultima VIII.

To me, the graphics felt sympathetic and colorful, the music had tons of atmosphere and I even liked organizing all those various little objects and devices into a neat order in my backpack. (Boy, was I elated to discover that you can make your inventory even tidier by utilizing pouches to categorize your belongings within your main inventory :D).

I was 12 at the time I got my hands on Ultima VIII, so the writing did not feel derivative or low-quality to me. It was all new and exciting! (Spoilers ahead) Even today, a quarter of a century later, the idea of the Guardian, presenting him-/her-/itself as the good guy, fighting an invented Destroyer and reducing the world into sad ruins in the process, and still making the people of said world worship him (or rather, the evil elemental titans installed in his place) is a neat plot line, and quite a chilling one, too.

I do admit I had not played the previous installments of the series by then. I had tried Ultima III on my C64 briefly, but it was just too slow for me to enjoy (The 1541 disk drive didn’t do it any favors) even though I liked retrogaming with my Commodore otherwise.

I guess that frantic playing Impossible Mission and other platformers of its ilk had rendered me kind of immune to the frustration of Ultima VIII’s platforming aspects. Hey, in this game you could actually SAVE your progress! Unlike in, say C64’s Gateway to Apshai, in which an unlucky encounter with a dragon would wipe out hours of progress forever. But I digress.

As for the moral/amoral/immoral qualities of Ultima VIII’s quest: I always viewed it as you were freeing the people of the island from the yoke of the enslaving elementals. Great gods that bunch was: Lithos took your deceased loved ones and made them into undead zombies to fulfill his bidding. Hydros did the same for people that drowned. Pyros was bound by the sorcerers, yes, but the people wielding his power used this power to terrorize their fellow citizens under the guise of mob-like protection, thus not eliminating the malevolent influence of Pyros, only toning it down. Even Stratos, the seemingly benevolent titan of air was like an overpossessive mother, stifling her “children”, not shy to eliminate them if they didn’t play by her rules (as seen in the end fights, when she shows her true colors).

Yes, you do free Hydros to cause storms and torrential rains, but only because she duped you into doing so. And you do cause the Theurgist healers to lose their power by severing their link to Stratos. (You also MAY free Pyros to cause volcanic eruptions all around, but you don’t have to do it – nobody forces you to walk into that great pentagram while carrying the tongue of flame.)

But I saw the end fights in the ethereal plane as your redemption: You subdue the elementals and constrain them inside the blackrock fragments. No more Hydros to storm the shit out of Tenebrae. No more Pyros to turn the place into a lava field. The only true loss is that as Stratos is gone, the Theurgists are no longer able to heal others using the powers of the Air.

Ultimately, even that will be a triumph to the people on the island. They will have to devise their own ways of healing and doctoring, and it shall not be easy. But they are going to make it, on their own, not tied to the will and whims of malevolent gods. They are finally free from the yoke of the titans and the Guardian, and can begin making their world and lives better.

- Bomb Bloke

February 27, 2021 at 12:56 am

Stratos isn’t as much of a “loss” as you might think; the Titan of Air would’ve been the main reason as to why the sun no longer shone on Pagan. Sure the healing powers of Theurgy were nice, but they were only available to those Stratos deemed “worthy” – whereas Thaumaturgy remained available to anyone who wished to study it.

- Jaakko Seppälä

March 5, 2021 at 3:45 pm

Oh my gawd. All these years, and I never saw it. You are right!

I had always thought that the disappearance of sun was the making of a) The Guardian himself (most likely), b) the whole bunch of the titans together, c) Pyros, since Pyros = fire = kinda like sun – and because Malchir asks him about the mystical Sun.

But of course it has to be Stratos. She can obscure the sky with clouds or otherwise perform some optical illusions or other hijinx with the heavens since the sky is her domain.

This really made my day :D

- Brendan Vance

March 1, 2021 at 6:12 am

Your experience sounds very similar to mine! I encountered this game as a small kid and it served as my introduction to the wider Ultima series. Tenebrae certainly has what people today would identify as a VIBE, haha, and I think that’s something worth celebrating.

I’ve actually been working just recently on some YoutTube vids yacking about these kinds of details I enjoy from the game! Maybe working towards an essay about it someday. These vids will include a lot of the same things you mention, such as me meticulously organizing my inventory into bags! (As well as generally shouting ‘bag!’ every time I notice one in the game world, as they are such high value items in this weird-ass videogame.)

My fav part of the game involves looting every house in Tenebrae, which includes the gleeful absurdity of this game’s secret doors (like how the player can CLEARLY SEE secret rooms on the far side of walls, so the avatar knows to hunt for those little switches… but how could he know!? Why does everybody in this city have goofily-hidden hideaways in the first place? Are they panic rooms?? Do the peasants from outside ever secretly live in the panic rooms!?)

One of those vids: https://youtu.be/8qtzyc412Rs

I loved this essay! It’s incredibly informative, and I think it does a great job getting beneath that veneer of business fiction surrounding ‘Lord British’ and the bigwigs at EA et cetera (instead revealing the DUBIOUS circumstances surrounding this game’s production). Certainly I feel persuaded that U8 should exist more as a debacle than an underloved classic.

My thing about this game is, I think it’s interesting to see it as a weird piece of connective tissue joining the 1980s lineage of ‘Games Containing Beholders’ to a plethora of genres that’d only be recognized later. Ultima 8 is a lot like survival horror games! The creeping through houses thing in some ways is looking forward to ‘stealth fiction’ e.g.: Thief. It’s definitely one of those games that has a strong claim to being ‘antecedent to Dark Souls’ (I couldn’t stop calling him “Gravelord Lithos”, lol).

- Beast British

February 20, 2021 at 10:46 am

Ultima VIII’s lead programmer Tony Zurovec was not very pleased with the direction Ultima VIII was taking the Ultima series

“I really liked working on the Ultima series, but I found it frustrating and constraining at times – far more so towards the latter half of Ultima VIII. It’s very difficult to sacrifice two years of your life and see a game that you played for hundreds of hours in your youth veer off into what you think is completely the wrong direction, and to have no ability to change it.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160314060948/http://www.superluminal.us/Blog.asp

Later on, Tony Zurovec directed Crusader: No Remorse, Crusader: No Regret and unfinished Loose Cannon. I’d be curious about an article about Loose Cannon, which could have become GTA III before GTA III.

- Mike Taylor

February 21, 2021 at 3:13 pm

Jimmy, I found this fascinating and I’d love to know the end of the Ultima saga. Would you consider skipping ahead to Ultima IX, out of sequence, so we can know how it all ends?

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2021 at 3:59 pm

I don’t think that would be a great idea. There’s also the story of Ultima Online, which, in addition to being at least as important to gaming history as that of any single-player Ultima, is quite intertwined with the story of Ultima IX. One of the reasons I follow a chronology fairly strictly is because it lets me inject a lot of context through my research of multiple events from the same time. I’d be kind of out there on an island if I jumped to Ultima IX now. And you know what happens when you start to make exceptions… ;)

Sorry!

- whomever

February 21, 2021 at 5:23 pm

Hi Mike! Hey, it’ll happen eventually. I too am looking forward, especially to see if I should bother playing it now (though it sounds like the answer is NO). Since Jimmy is too modest, I’ll just mention he has a Patreon which will help bring it on!

- Beast British

February 21, 2021 at 5:36 pm

Maybe Origin’s memos and e-mails, which Ben Lesnick mentioned at WCNews forum, could be useful for your research: “Honestly, from looking at the memos and e-mails donated by Garriott at UT, it was the ‘B’ producers who kept the famous projects sane. I get the distinct impression that the actual project management was done by Warren Spector, Dallas Snell and the like. Roberts and Garriott went in with real vision, but also wanted the impossible and didn’t separate that from reality… I think teaming the two things up was what made the games great.”
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/lord-british-lays-out-future-vision-december-10-2011.25851/#post-372660

- Jimmy Maher

February 22, 2021 at 7:00 am

Yes, this jibes with my impressions. Neither Garriott nor Roberts did much if any nitty-gritty game design after Ultima V in the case of the former, Wing Commander I in the case of the latter. Both men’s lack of discipline was rather painfully exposed in the post-Origin years — whereas Warren Spector in particular went on to ever greater heights. Sometimes you’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and do the work if you want to make a great game…

- Mike Taylor

February 21, 2021 at 5:41 pm

Not to worry, Jimmy, everything you say makes perfect sense. And I will still be here, reading every article, when you do get around to it.

- jsn

February 22, 2021 at 6:33 pm

> It’s definitely a vast improvement over the original, even taking into account the philosophical objection that it turns into a triviality the jumping that was intended to be a major part of the experience.

This thudded me out of the flow. I had to back up and reread four times before I got the intended meaning. Maybe consider a rewrite? I’m a native AmEng speaker, FWIW.

Idea:

“…that it turns the jumping–intended to be a major part of the experience–into a triviality.”

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2021 at 8:27 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

February 23, 2021 at 4:18 am

It’s interesting in retrospect seeing how many people were complaining about the “arcade” qualities of Ultima VIII, or comparing it to Super Mario Bros. (If only it had been anything like that, it would have been a better game!) It’s not like Ultima VII had a finely tuned tactical combat system or mind-bending puzzles. Even the vaunted bread baking is pretty much just a fun easter egg. (Ultima Online would eventually follow through on some of this promise.)

It’s certainly possible that an U8 that hadn’t added those action mechanics would have had a richer world, better writing, and so on, but I’m skeptical. I suspect that an alternate universe U8 that took a more “traditional” approach would have been a mediocre, near-forgotten mess rather than a broken, infamous mess. In any case, I don’t think the mainline series would have lasted any longer, anyway. UO was too successful and would have cannibalized the U9 staff no matter how U8 did. The market for single-player CRPGs was entering a slump, and I don’t think there was any real capacity at Origin for the kind of late-’90s renaissance that New World Computing pulled off.

- Jugistoteles

February 23, 2021 at 8:39 am

I pretty much agree with what you say. But your comment towards the end that the market for single-player rpgs was entering a slump – I wonder if that was more because of lack of demand, or a lack of supply? Intuitively, given that Baldur’s Gate was received so enthusiastically not that many years later, I’d reckon it was more of a supply issue. I’m sure someone must have written about this somewhere.

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2021 at 8:58 am

I have. ;) There was in fact a glut of CRPGs during the very early 1990s. Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, SSI Gold Box and Eye of the Beholder series, Lands of Lore, plus countless one-off and/or less remembered titles (and probably some bigger ones which I’m forgetting). To the hardcore aficionado, all of them are unique entities with countless subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions. To everyone else, they just seem like the same wonky game of generic fantasy monster-killing, over and over again. They were also greatly at odds with full-motion video, the trendy technology of the day, which lent itself to shorter-form, tightly plotted adventure games rather than expansive, open-ended CRPGs.

So, CRPGs all but disappeared due to poor sales and a general lack of sexiness. And then, inevitably, people started to miss them, creating the perfect atmosphere for a revival in a somewhat updated form. Once Blizzard had a massive hit with the CRPG-lite Diablo in 1996, the potential was clear. Interplay was soon wise enough to release Fallout and then Baldur’s Gate, both excellent games that were accessible in ways that their ancestors mostly were not. They cemented the form’s resurrection.

- Jugistoteles

February 24, 2021 at 8:46 am

Interesting. Thanks for that. May I ask where I could find your writing on the subject? That’s an interesting time in computer gaming history.

- Jimmy Maher

February 24, 2021 at 8:51 pm

I’m afraid it’s a bit scattered rather than contained in one neat article. You can learn about Ultima VII’s somewhat lukewarm reception here: https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/. And SSI’s travails with the Dungeons & Dragons license here: https://www.filfre.net/2019/09/opening-the-gold-box-part-6-a-troubled-marriage/.

- Gordon Cameron

February 23, 2021 at 6:39 pm

It was a rather short slump, though, considering the success of Fallout in 1997 and Baldur’s Gate in 1998.

I’m just not sure there was really much further to go with the series and the whole ‘Avatar’ concept. One notable thing about more long-lived franchises like D&D and The Elder Scrolls is that they are fundamentally about the world, not a particular character in that world. Britannia – despite being head and shoulders above most CRPG world-building in the mid-80s – maybe didn’t have the depth/breadth to sustain that.

Or maybe it was just bad luck/circumstance and in an alternate universe, Ultimas are still thriving the way Elder Scrolls and Zelda are…

- Martin

February 23, 2021 at 8:13 pm

Or there was a one person bottleneck that content had to go through? And that is a question.

- stepped pyramids

February 25, 2021 at 1:34 am

It was about 4-5 years. Ultima VII, Wizardry VII, and Might & Magic IV came out in ’92, as did the last “real” Gold Box game. Fallout came out in late ’97. It’s not like there were no popular RPGs in the interim (Daggerfall was ’96), but Fallout (and Ultima Online, which came out around the same time) seems to have been the signal that it was OK to make RPGs again.

In comparison, the great video game crash started in ’83 and was definitely over by ’87. So in market terms it wasn’t a short slump at all — the whole market for home computer games hadn’t even existed two decades by that point. (And it certainly had some permanent effects; the party-based CRPG never really came back, for instance.)

- Gordon Cameron

February 28, 2021 at 1:41 am

Using 1992 as a cutoff is a bit arbitrary, when you consider the release of UU2, Betrayal at Krondor, and Lands of Lore in 1993; ES: Arena in 1994; Daggerfall in ’96 which you mention; and Diablo in 1996 which, while not an according-to-Hoyle CRPG, didn’t really fit into any other box and harked back to some earlier ARPGs (Times of Lore, Faery Tale Adventure, etc.). I’m just mentioning the hits, not e.g. the huge glut of early ’90s CRPGs that SSI put out while it was flailing to survive. Such releases don’t indicate the genre was thriving necessarily, but it was puttering along.

I agree that the rise of the FPS in the mid ’90s, and the struggle of all genres to reconciles themselves to more advanced graphics and bigger budgets, meant that the landscape was changing, but whatever slump there was, I don’t think it was long enough to kill really robust franchises. Elder Scrolls survived it; so did Might & Magic. I suppose Ultima might have if VIII had been a better game. (Or if IX had!) I think it would be harder to keep Ultimas fresh because you don’t just have a big world into which you can plop a fresh adventure. You have to tie it into the ethical framework and the Avatar saga. In a way, Garriott’s 1985 stroke of genius also may have made it harder to keep the series interesting over the long term.

- Jugistotles

February 23, 2021 at 8:46 am

Thanks, I thoroughly enjoyed this. Ultima VIII was pretty much the first CRPG I ever played; the computer package my dad bought in 1995 included a bundle CD including Wing Commander 2, Strike Commander, Syndicate, and yes, Ultima VIII (the patched version – or at least I dl’d the patch asap because I never played the unpatched version). The game was maddeningly frustrating, and I employed cheats with many of the sorcery spells due to the pixel-hunting, but I enjoyed exploring the world. The bleakness, accentuated by the music, was appealing to me then. I mostly have reasonably fond memories of the game…but as said, my expectations were tempered by virtue of my experience with Ultima games having been limited at a few glimpses of Ultima VIII. Furthermore, I was 11 at the time and not a native speaker, so I wasn’t much of a judge for penmanship, heh.

I still wish the expansion would turn up somehow (but obviously realize it really won’t).

- Jaakko Seppälä

February 23, 2021 at 10:07 am

I had the very same CD with those games!

Ultima VIII on it was most definitely unpatched. I know that because I played it all the way up until getting the ethereal travel spell from Mythran. But he never sold it to me, because the darn unpatched game was buggy. So I had to download the patch and start all over again.

After I had gotten over the initial disappointment, it became actually intriguing to compare the differences between the original and the patched version.

I was happy about the fact that you could now decide if you want to jump twenty centimeters or two meters, or anything in between. But what struck me as stupid was that you could now suddenly jump to the very edge of the screen without running. You could basically hop ten meters from your standing feet. It looked stupid and broke the game in some places.

It was great that the patch fixed the names of various places and items, making them consistent with stories and books hinting at them.

It was not so great that they introduced a slew of new tomes into the Theurgist monastery that recited word-to-word the questions from the entrance exam to Theurgist order. This part was much more intriguing in the original version: you had to infer what the healers appreciated from books that told about the subject matter, but did not explicitly lay out the answers verbatim. (Plus, the new additions look ugly, using the same graphics of a single book over and over again).

From Jimmy’s story, I now understand that this patch was made in a horrible rush over a couple of days. This makes its rough edges more understandable. It’s a shame they didn’t have more time to hone it properly…

- Jugistoteles

February 24, 2021 at 7:46 pm

Hah, may have been a CD commonly sold in Finland then.

And actually I did have the unpatched version because the agonizing trip to Mythran’s house through that horrible platformer cave came back to me. Initially I wasn’t sure it was possible to get through it without some sort of a spell. One random thing in the game was that executioner lady hanging out at Mythran’s house, by the way. Also, I remember I was running out of patience reading all those tomes at the theurgist monastery for that test. I still remember their favored pastime, the right answer to that question that is, was enjoying “a breezy evening on the porch.”

- Andreas

February 23, 2021 at 2:14 pm

I’d like to chime in on the side of the people who had a lot of fun with U8: Pagan

Sure it was frustrating – but all the bugs were funny as hell. Drop a mug and it would fly around for 2 minutes before settling down? No mushrooms needed.

To me, the absurd – but funny – thing about the (unpatched) jumping was that short distances were as challenging as long distances: the trick was to move as far away from the edge as possible so as not to go long ;-).

It was great fun to mess with the game, even though it more often than not resulted in (your own) body parts overlaid on more (of your own) body parts behind and in front of your tombstone with a memory allocation error message on top ;-)

Though I admit I stand in awe of what these guys did to the game – i.e. complete all the necromancy trials without learning any necromancy, have the Avatar drop a piece of cloth on a river of magma, jump on it, and have him sleep for hours, etc. Check out:

“How to be a complete bastard in Pagan”
http://www.it-he.org/ultima8.htm

It underscores the amoral atmosphere of the game (I second the music being central) compared to previous installments. E.g. in U6 messing with the game was more of an homage.

“Things your mother never told you about Ultima 6”
http://www.it-he.org/ultima6.htm
(check out “cloning things for fun and profit”; yes, that’s going from mineral to animal to more animals back to more minerals!)

- Lhexa

March 10, 2021 at 10:01 pm

I’m happy to see someone cite It-he.org! Its “Hacker’s Guide to Sin” and “Ocean Travel Without a Boat” (so-called antiwalkthroughs covering System Shock and Ultima IX respectively) are classics of early Internet humor.

- Adam Pasztory

February 24, 2021 at 6:00 pm

Great article. I’m looking forward to your history of Ultima IX now.

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- William Leonard

February 25, 2021 at 3:53 am

For me and many of my peer group, what actually turned us off the Ultima series was #7. The game was not bad, but was quite buggy and slow on the computers available at that time. Getting to the ending and realizing it wasn’t even a satisfying story as a standalone was enough to turn me off of the series. The memory management was particularly agonizing just to get the game to run on a PC at all. I probably would have bought and played VIII if the reviews had been good, but seeing CGW slam VIII was enough to make me stay away.

Still have very fond memories of playing III through VI at the times they came out, though. CRPGs at the time were often a group experience in the 80s. If your friends were all playing and raving about a game, you wanted to play too. You didn’t have to solve all of the mysteries on your own, as you would likely be comparing notes at school regularly. The Ultima series had a lot of cachet in the 80s. By the time of VII and VIII, that was gone, or maybe we were too old.

- Svein-Frode

February 25, 2021 at 8:26 am

Wow! Great piece of writing. You made me read every word in a story about a game and game franchise that I’ve never had any interest in!

Keep up the good work. This website is a treasure!

- Mikko

February 25, 2021 at 4:22 pm

I would say Ultima VIII wounded the franchise badly, but the Ultima IX development hell is what buried it. Looking forward to any future article about it, but if I have understood, it went through numerous concepts and game engines before finally arriving very late and extremely bad.

In some way, the Ultima universe was somewhat on its way to becoming a mini-Marvel Universe (or even a second-rate Middle Earth) with a fair bit of internal consistency with its themes, characters, cities, and world map. It was also long-lived enough already that plain gamer nostalgia would allow for the survival of the franchise despite technological missteps – as long as the stories remained on a reasonable level.

But this was not understood by the company at the time, I think – for Ultima IX, wrecking the gameplay was less important that wrecking the old, familiar Britannia. The continuity errors, personality changes, and overall style were so completely different to the recent Ultimas that it felt alien and offputting – I never finished the game.

- Ross

February 26, 2021 at 3:07 am

A thing that always struck me is that despite the uncontested fact that Ultima IX was full of continuity errors and personality changes and things to make internet reviewers scream profanity, there’s still far more continuity in the worldbuilding between Ultima IX and the rest of the series than among practically any other video game franchise.

- stepped pyramids

February 28, 2021 at 8:28 pm

The continuity problems with IX aren’t really much worse than earlier games in the series, which freely altered the layout of Britannia, redesigned dungeons from scratch, ignored or retconned previous events, and even altered how the Shrines, Moongates, Codex, and other important setting details work. It’s not like the setting of Ultima really stands up to much scrutiny — VI and VII have a major “why is Lord British so bad at his job” problem that neither of them really properly address. (Heck, at least IX actually has a part where Lord British takes matters into his own hands!)

I think the biggest single problem with Ultima IX is the Avatar himself. Ultima VI had started the trend away from “the Avatar is you, the player” to “the Avatar is a particular person who you control”, which disappointed some fans but does make certain types of stories easier to tell. But Ultima IX took that one step further into “the Avatar is this particular guy, who sounds and looks like this, and also that guy is a meathead.” Having the Avatar’s dialogue be specific voice-acted lines after a long history of keyword-based dialogue just feels fundamentally non-Ultima.

Ironically, the biggest problem with the Avatar’s dialogue is that they took the “Avatar is the player” concept too seriously. They thought new players might wonder “who are the gargoyles?” or “what’s a paladin?”, so they added those as lines, heedless of how incredibly stupid they made the character seem. A better-written game would have used the Avatar’s dialogue to inform the player.

- Infinitron

March 5, 2021 at 6:58 pm

Actually, the problem with Ultima IX is that it’s shallow and juvenile across the board. What the people who complain about “continuity” really mean is “You had access to this vast corpus of lore that you could have used to add depth to this game, but you didn’t”.

- Nate

February 25, 2021 at 7:09 pm

Good article. I’m realizing that retiring from gaming in 1994 (corresponded to being too busy with college and exploring Unix) matched a shift in the industry as well.

This is hard to parse:
“The bad-cop counterpart to Garriot the lunch-providing good cop was Dallas Snell”

I think the problem is the dependent clause “the lunch-providing good cop” should be set off with commas. My grammar teacher always said, “if you can remove the phrase and still have a complete sentence, it’s a dependent clause.”

- Jimmy Maher

February 25, 2021 at 8:00 pm

Thanks, but that would spoil the rhythm of the sentence.

- Leo Vellés

February 26, 2021 at 12:13 pm

“Super Mario Bros. and Prince of Persia had been designed for joypads and joysticks. ”
Gotta say, i played Prince of Persia with a keyboard on my PC and the movement and jumping was very smooth and user friendly. I even think that it is even better to play it that way than with a joystick

- Josh Martin

March 3, 2021 at 4:36 pm

I believe Prince of Persia speedrunners typically use the keyboard as well; certainly the current world record-holder does. Mechner’s development diaries don’t indicate a preference, but he does mention the game getting all the way through QA before discovering joystick support didn’t work on the Apple IIc because nobody (including himself) had bothered to test it.

- whomever

March 3, 2021 at 6:10 pm

Some of this is that Apple joysticks (And IBM ones by extension because they used the same style), honestly, tended to suck. Unlike the C64/Atari stye which were basically just switches (ie ,”Up is on”) they were based on potentiaometers and read a variable resistance depending on where they were, and needed lots of calibration and were quite fiddly. They tended not to support the hard core usage that, say, Summer Games would need.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2021 at 8:11 am

It really depended on the application. The analog joysticks used by Apple and IBM were indeed less than ideal for the likes of Summer Games, but were vastly superior for flight simulators.

- Tim Kaiser

February 28, 2021 at 6:38 pm

It feels like Origin didn’t know how to make a good Ultima game that didn’t follow the formula set up in Ultima III and used for every subsequent Ultima until #8. Ultima 3 was the first truly great Ultima and it is essentially an open world scavenger hunt, focusing on exploration and discovery and later with deeper lore and characters. And every subsequent Ultima through #8 followed this formula to a T and consistently iterated on it to make the graphics better, the world more interactive, the characters more interesting, etc.

It feels like Richard Garriott has deluded himself into thinking he’s a great game designer. He came up with one great game design and rehashed it over and over, though in his defense these are some of the greatest CRPGs in history. But if you look at his subsequent games, most of which were flops, he was never really able to come up with anything great that wasn’t derivative of Ultima III.

- gokudo

March 5, 2021 at 12:36 pm

I’ve never before and never again felt myself hating a game so much as I did Ultima VIII back then. Granted I was still quite immature, but still. It felt like a big time betrayal, and what maybe made it extra bitter is that it was a final prove that the first golden age of crpg’s was really over. We didn’t know that Fallout and Baldur’s Gate were still to come, we only that the days of Wizardry, Might & Magic and Gold Box and now also Ultima were gone…at least for quite a while. And still today I’m waiting for Ultima to make its fabulous return someday, as other series did. Maybe this is only a hopeless dream but who knows what (revival or remake games) the future has in store for us.

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- Lhexa

March 14, 2021 at 3:25 pm

Just three entries prior Garriott still did most of the coding and game design, and here we are. One of my fantasy counterfactuals involves what might have happened had Garriott been nearly as good at management as he was at design and code, or if his burnout had managed to survive the move to PC architecture. After the Apple era, he stopped playing games for fun, until much later when he fell in love with Koster’s Ultima Online; and in Ultima VI he went from coding most of the game to coding none of it. Oh well. To modify what you said in a comment above, we should be grateful for the creator we got, not disappointed about the one we didn’t.

Another counterfactual involves what might have happened if Spector was nearly as good at game design as he is at management, but we’re still at the start of that story… and on this site we’re still in an era where leadership is worth more than creativity.

- John Henry McMills Warrington

May 16, 2021 at 5:47 pm

You could have put a click-counter onto the link to Ultima VIII, or even in addition, made it a warez link.
Signed G

- Robbie

June 16, 2021 at 5:30 pm

It doesn’t sound to me like Garriott is shifting the blame in that quote, it sounds more like he genuinely believes that the reason U8 failed was its rushed-ness and lack of polish, and since it was EA that coaxed him into rushing the game, he sincerely sees them as the cause. At no point did he blame EA for U8’s direction.

And if you look at it objectively, can you say he’s wrong? Ultima fans might have felt betrayed by the gameplay shift, but U8 was designed to bring new audiences, and it actually sold better than previous entries. As you brought up, the Crusader games used the game engine and were well received. And as Garriott and various people stated, U8 was basically the predecessor to Diablo, which was a massive success. It looks to me like Garriott was on spot regarding where the industry was heading.

You may argue that Garriott was betraying fans by designing U8 differently from previous games, but I’m not so sure he believed U8 was going against their wishes. I remember reading a chat log between Garriott and some fans. At one point, one of them said to him (paraphrased):

“I’ve played both Ultima Underworld and U7, and I loved the former, but hated the latter, with all the bugs and slowness. My question is, how could Origin simultaneously create such a godly game and such a terrible game?”

I don’t know how prevalent that view was among fans back then, but I know if I were Garriott, hearing that would hurt. I honestly don’t blame him if people like that really made him believe that fans wanted the games to be more like Underworld and less like previous titles. And indeed, U8 feels designed to be closer to UW, with a lesser focus on NPC interaction and a greater focus on action and dungeons.

Wing Commander III
March 5, 2021

Movies and computer games are my two favorite things. If I weren’t doing one I’d be doing the other.

— Chris Roberts

Prior to the release of DOOM in late 1993, Wing Commander I and II and their assorted spinoffs and expansion packs constituted not just the most popular collection of outer-space shoot-em-ups since the heyday of Elite but the most popular computer-gaming franchise of the new decade in any genre.

Upon its release in September of 1990, the first Wing Commander had taken the world by storm by combining spectacular graphics with a secret weapon whose potency surprised even Origin Systems, its Austin, Texas-based developer and publisher: a thin thread of story connected its missions together, being conveyed through the adventure-game style interface that was employed for the scenes taking place on the Tiger’s Claw, the outer-space “aircraft” carrier from which you and your fellow fighter pilots flew in a life-or-death struggle against the Kilrathi, a race of genocidal space cats who regarded humans the same way that Earthbound cats do mice. Having seen what their customers wanted, Origin doubled down on the drama in Wing Commander II, which was released in August of 1991; it told a much more elaborate and ambitious story of betrayal and redemption, complete with plenty of intrigue of both the political and the romantic stripe.

After that, the spinoffs and expansion packs had to carry the franchise’s water for quite some time, while Chris Roberts, its father and mastermind, brought its trademark approach to a near-future techno-thriller called Strike Commander, which was released after considerable delay in the spring of 1993. It was only when gamers proved less receptive to the change in milieu than Roberts and Origin had hoped that the former turned his full attention at last to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Robin Todd was living as Chris Todd at the time, and is credited under that name in the game’s manual.Wing Commander franchise that his car bore the personalized license plate “WNGCMDR.” Had the group completed the game according to the original plan, it would likely have been released as yet another spinoff rather than the next numbered title in the series.

As it was, though, the project was about to take on a whole new dimension: Chris Roberts stepped in to become the “director” of what was now to be Wing Commander III. Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts, Origin felt keenly the need to prove themselves to their new owners by delivering an unequivocal, out-of-the-ballpark home run, and the third major iteration of their biggest franchise seemed as close to a guaranteed commercial winner as one could hope to find in the fickle world of computer gaming.

Roberts had built his reputation on cutting-edge games that pushed the state of the art in personal-computer technology to its absolute limit; the first Wing Commander had been one of the first games to require an 80386 processor to run at all well, while Compaq had used Strike Commander as an advertisement for their latest Pentium-based computer models. Now, he decided that Wing Commander III ought to employ the latest technological development to take the industry by storm: not a new processor but rather the inclusion of live human actors on the monitor screen — as captured on videotape, digitized, overlaid onto conventional computer graphics, and delivered on the magical new storage medium of CD-ROM. From a contemporary interview with Roberts:

If you wanted to show your hot machine off back in 1990, Wing I was the game to do it. I think that right now we are in a phase where CD-ROM is becoming standard and everyone is getting a multimedia machine, but I don’t really think the software is out there yet that truly shows it off. That’s what I think Wing III is going to do.

Everyone’s been talking about interactive movies, but we hadn’t heard of anyone doing it right, so we wanted to go out and do it properly. With Wing III, we tried to apply the production values to an interactive movie that we’d applied on the computer side with the previous Wing Commanders. The goal was, if someone said, “What’s an interactive movie?” we’d just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say, “Here, check this out.”

In keeping with his determination to make his interactive movie “right,” Roberts wanted to involve real film professionals in the production. Through the good offices of the California-based Electronic Arts, Hollywood screenwriters Frank DePalma and Terry Borst were hired; they were a well-established team who had demonstrated their ability to deliver competent work on time on several earlier projects, among them a low-budget feature film entitled Private War. Their assignment now was to turn Roberts’s plot outline into a proper screenplay, with the addition of occasional branch points where the player could make a choice to affect the flow of the narrative. After they did so, a Hollywood-based artist turned their script into a storyboard, the traditional next step in conventional film-making.

The thoroughgoing goal was to make Wing Commander III in just the same way that “real” movies were made. Thus a director of photography, assistant director, and art director as well were brought over from the film industry. And then came the hair and makeup people, the caterers, the Hollywood sound stage itself. Origin even spent some $15,000 trying to figure out how to digitize 35-millimeter film prints before being forced to acknowledge that humdrum videotape was vastly more practical.

The one great exception to the rule of film professionals doing what they did best was Chris Roberts himself, a 25-year-old programmer and game designer who knew precisely nothing about making movies, but who nevertheless sat in the time-honored canvas-backed director’s chair throughout the shoot with a huge how-did-I-get-here grin on his face. And why not? For a kid who had grown up on Star Wars, making his own science-fiction film was a dream come true.

That said, Wing Commander III was dramatically different from Star Wars when it came to the very important question of its budget: Origin anticipated that it would cost $2.8 million in all. This was an astronomical budget for a computer game at the time — the budgets of the most expensive, most high-profile games had begun to break the $1 million barrier only in the last year or two — but a bad joke by the standards of even the cheapest Hollywood production. Origin made up the difference by not building any sets whatsoever; their actors would perform on an empty sound stage in front of an expansive green screen, with all of the scenery to be inserted behind them after the fact by Origin’s computer artists.

Truly sought-after actors would cost far more than Origin had to spend, so they settled for a collection of hopeful up-and-comers mixed with older names whose careers were not exactly going gangbusters at the time, all spiced up with a certain amount of stunt casting designed to appeal to the typical computer-gaming demographic of slightly nerdy young men. At the head of the list, a real catch by this standard, was Mark Hamill — none other than Luke Skywalker himself. If some of his snobby Hollywood peers might have judged his appearance in a computer game as another sign of just how much his post-Star Wars career had failed to live up to popular expectations, Hamill himself, a good egg with both feet planted firmly on the ground, seemed to have long since made peace with that same failure and adopted a “just happy to have work” attitude toward his professional life. Wing Commander III wasn’t even his first computer game; he had previously voice-acted one of the roles in the adventure game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. He was originally recruited to Wing Commander III for the supporting role of Maniac, one of the player’s fellow pilots, who lives up to his name with a rather, shall we say, rambunctious flying style; only late in negotiations did he agree to take the role of Colonel Blair, the player-controlled protagonist of the story.

Joining him were other veteran actors who had lost some of their mojo in recent years, but who likewise preferred working to sitting at home: Malcolm McDowell, best known for his starring roles in the controversial A Clockwork Orange and the even more controversial Caligula during the 1970s; John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films); Jason Bernard, a perennial supporting actor on 1970s and 1980s television; Tom Wilson, who had played the cretinous bully Biff Tannen in the three Back to the Future movies. (He replaced Hamill in the role of Maniac — a role not that far removed from his most famous one, come to think of it.)

A more eyebrow-raising casting choice was Ginger Lynn Allen, a once and future porn star whose oeuvre may perhaps have been more familiar to more of Origin’s customers than might have admitted that fact to their mothers. (She played Blair’s sexy mechanic, delivering her innuendo with enthusiastic abandon: “Are we going to kick in the afterburners here?”; “There’s a lot more thrust in those jets than I imagined…”)

On the Set with Wing Commander III

Jason Bernard, who played the captain of the Victory, the spaceborne aircraft carrier where Colonel Blair is stationed, is seen here with Mark Hamill, who played Blair himself.

Chris Roberts and Malcolm McDowell. The latter played Admiral Tolwyn, a human who is almost as much of an enemy of Colonel Blair as the Kilrathi.

Chris Roberts and John Rhys-Davies. The latter played Paladin, an old comrade-at-arms of Blair — he appears in the very first Wing Commander as a fellow pilot — whom age has now forced out of the cockpit.

Tom Wilson chats with a member of the film crew. He was by all accounts the life of the party on-set, and brought some of that same exuberance to Maniac, a rambunctious fighter jock. Computer Gaming World magazine gave him an award for “Best Male Onscreen Performance in Multimedia” for 1994 (a sign of the times if ever there was one). And indeed, a few more performances like his would have made for a more entertaining movie…

The actor inside a Kilrathi costume get some much-needed fresh air, courtesy of a portable air-conditioning unit. Just about everyone present at the shoot — even those not ensconced in heavy costumes — has remarked on how hot it was on-set.

Shooting a scene with a Kilrathi. The costumes were provided by a Hollywood special-effects house. Their faces were animatronic creations, complex amalgamations of latex and machinery which could be programmed to run through a sequence of movements and expressions while the cameras rolled.

The 50-year-old John Rhys-Davies was the only cast member who showed any interest in actually playing Wing Commander III. Here he is at a press event, sitting next to the game’s media director Jenni Evans, whose herculean efforts helped to win the project an unprecedented amount of mainstream attention. Behind them stand Chris Roberts and Frank Savage; the latter managed development of the space simulator back in Austin while the former was off in Hollywood chasing his dream of directing his very own science-fiction film.

Computer Gaming World magazine would later reveal how much some of these folks were paid for their performances. As the star, Mark Hamill got $153,000 up-front and a guaranteed 1.75 percent of the game’s net earnings after the first 175,000 copies were sold; Jason Bernard got a lump sum of $60,000; Malcolm McDowell earned $50,000; Ginger Lynn Allen received just $10,000. (The same article reveals that Origin sought Charlton Heston for the game, but balked at his agent’s asking price of $100,000.)

Principal photography lasted most of the month of May 1994, although not all of the actors were present through the whole of filming. “More than 80 experienced film professionals worked up to eighteen-hour days in order to realize Chris Roberts’s vision of the final chapter of the Terran-Kilrathi struggle,” wrote Origin excitedly in their in-house newsletter to commemorate the shoot’s conclusion. “Although always intense and frequently frustrating, the shoot progressed without any major complications, thanks in part to a close monitoring of contracts, budgets, and schedules by resident ‘suits’ in both Austin and San Mateo.” (The latter city was the home of Electronic Arts.) Few to none of the actors and other Hollywood hands understood what the words “interactive movie” actually meant, but they all did their jobs like the professionals they were. In all, some 200 hours of footage was shot, to eventually be edited down to around three hours in the finished game.

The presence of so many recognizable actors on the set, combined with the broader mass-media excitement over multimedia and CD-ROM, brought a parade of mainstream press to the shoot. The Today show, VH-1, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere magazine, the Associated Press, USA Today, Newsweek, Forbes, and Fortune were just some of the media entities that stopped in to take some pictures, shoot some video, and conduct a few interviews. At a time when the likes of DOOM was still well off the mainstream radar, Wing Commander III was widely accepted as the prototype for gaming’s inevitable future. Even many of the industry’s insiders accepted this conventional wisdom about “Siliwood” — a union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, as described by Alex Dunne that year in Game Developer magazine:

Ninety years after it first burst onto the scene, cinema is undergoing a renaissance. More than just a rebirth actually, it’s really a fusion with computer and video games that’s resulting in some cool entertainment: a new breed of interactive, “live-action” games featuring Hollywood movie stars. Such games, like Hell, Under a Killing Moon, and Wing Commander III, are coming out with more frequency, and they’re boosting the acting careers of some people in Tinseltown.

As Siliwood comes into its own, the line between games and movies will rapidly fade. Ads in game magazines already look like blockbuster movie ads, and we’ve begun to see stars’ mug shots alongside blurbs detailing the minimum system requirements. Interactive game drama is here, so forget the theater and renting movies — fire up the Intel nickelodeon.

Amidst all the hype, peculiarly little attention was paid to the other part of Wing Commander III, the ostensible heart of the experience: the actual missions you flew behind the controls of an outer-space fighter plane. This applied perhaps as much inside Origin as it did anywhere else. Chris Roberts was a talented game designer and programmer — he had, after all, been responsible for the original Wing Commander engine which had so wowed gamers back in 1990 — but his attention was now given over almost entirely to script consultations, film shoots, and virtual set design. Tellingly, Origin devoted far more resources to the technology needed to make the full-motion video go than they did to that behind the space simulator.

On the other hand, that choice may have been a perfectly reasonable one, given that they already had what they considered to be a perfectly reasonable 3D-simulation engine, a legacy of Strike Commander. Although that game had used VGA graphics only, at a resolution of 320 X 200, its engine had been designed from the start with the necessary hooks to enable Super VGA graphics, at a resolution of 640 X 480, when the time came. And that time was now. No one would be able to say that Wing Commander III’s spaceflight sequences didn’t look very nice indeed. For its was a full-fledged 3D engine, complete with texture mapping and all the other bells and whistles. As such, it was a major upgrade over the one found in Wing Commander I and II, which had been forced by the hardware limitations of its time to substitute scaled sprites for real 3D models. With Roberts so busy scripting and filming his interactive movie, most of the responsibility for what happened in the cockpit continued to rest on the shoulders of Frank Savage, whose official title was now “game development director.”

Wing Commander III was a high-risk project for Origin. Since being acquired by Electronic Arts in September of 1992, they had yet to come up with a really big hit: Strike Commander had, as already noted, under-performed relative to expectations upon its release in the spring of 1993, while the launch of Ultima VIII a year later had been an unmitigated disaster. Under the assumption that you have to swing for the fences to hit a home run — or simply that you have to spend money to make money — Origin and their nervous corporate parent didn’t object even when Wing Commander III’s budget crept up to $4 million, making it the most expensive computer game ever made by a factor of more than two. Their one inflexible requirement was that the game had to ship in time for the Christmas of 1994. And this it did, thanks to the absurdly long hours put in by everyone; not for nothing would Origin go down in history as the company that largely invented crunch time as the industry knows it today. Programmer Robin Todd:

In retrospect the crunch was vicious, but at the time I had nothing else to compare it to. Everything was a blur during the months before we shipped. At whatever time I was too tired to go on programming, I’d go back to my apartment to sleep. And when I woke up, I’d go back to the office. And that was it. What time of day it was didn’t matter. I remember the apartment manager knocking on my door one morning because I was so spaced from working that I’d forgotten to pay my rent for weeks. Sleeping under our desks started as something of a joke, but it quickly became true. There was one designer who wanted to take the evening off for his mom’s birthday, and was told that if he did, then he shouldn’t bother coming back.

I shared an office with two designers, and during a particularly late evening, one of the them turned to me and said, “If I’m still here when the sun comes up, I quit.” And sure enough, we were still there at dawn. He got up and turned in his resignation.

The day the project went gold I tendered my resignation.

At the last minute, it was discovered that the four CDs which were required to contain the game were packed a little too full; some CD-ROM drives were refusing to read them. A hasty round of cuts resulted in a serious plot hole. But so be it; the show went on.

This wall inside Origin’s offices tracked Wing Commander III’s progress from genesis to completion for the benefit of employees and visitors alike.

Publicly at least, Chris Roberts himself expressed no concern whatsoever about the game’s commercial prospects. “I have a name brand,” he said, adopting something of the tone of the Hollywood executives with whom he’d recently been spending so much time. “I am not going to lose money on it.” He predicted that Wing Commander III would sell 500,000 copies easily at a suggested list price of $70, enough to bank a tidy profit for everyone — this despite the fact that it required a pricey Pentium-based computer with a fast SVGA graphics card to run optimally, a double-speed CD-ROM drive to run at all.

His confidence was not misplaced. Three major American gaming magazines put Wing Commander III on their covers to commemorate its release in November of 1994, even as features appeared across mainstream media as well to greet the event. Ginger Lynn Allen appeared on Howard Stern’s nationally syndicated radio show, while Malcolm McDowell turned up on MTV’s The Jon Stewart Show. Segments appeared on Entertainment Tonight and CNN; even Japan’s Fuji TV aired a feature story. In short, Wing Commander III married its title of most expensive game ever to that of the most widely covered, most widely hyped computer-game debut in the history of the industry. Within ten months of its release, Next Generation magazine could report that its sales had surpassed Roberts’s predicted half a million copies. Once ported to the Apple Macintosh computer and the 3DO and Sony PlayStation consoles, its total sales likely approached 1 million copies.

It doubtless would have sold even better in its original MS-DOS incarnation if not for those high system requirements and its high price. As it was, though, Origin and Electronic Arts were satisfied. The Hollywood experiment had proved a roaring success; Wing Commander IV was quickly green-lit.

One of my briefs in articles like this one is to place the game in question into its historical context; another is to examine it outside of that context, to ask how it holds up today, what other designers might learn from it, and whether some of you readers might find it worth playing. This is the point in the article where I would normally transition from the one brief to the other. In this case, though, it strikes me as unfair to do so without at least a little bit of preamble.

For, if it’s self-evident that all games are products of their time, it’s also true that some seem more like products of their time than others — and Wing Commander III most definitely belongs in this group. There is a very short window of years, stretching from about 1993 to 1996, from which this game could possibly have sprung; I mean that not so much in terms of technology as in terms of concept. This was the instant when the “Siliwood” approach, as articulated by Alex Dunne above, was considered the necessary, well-nigh inevitable future of gaming writ large. But of course that particular version of the future did not come to pass, and this has left Wing Commander III in an awkward position indeed.

Seen from the perspective of today, a project like this one seems almost surreal. At what other moment in history could a complete neophyte like Chris Roberts have found himself behind the camera directing veteran Hollywood talent who had previously worked under the likes of George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick? It was truly a strange time.

The foregoing is meant to soften the blow of what I have to say next. Because, if you ask me whether Wing Commander III is a good game in the abstract, my answer has to be no, it really is not. It’s best reserved today for those who come to it for nostalgia’s sake, or who are motivated by a deep — not to say morbid! — curiosity about the era which it so thoroughly embodies.

I can hardly emphasize enough the extent to which gaming during the 1990s was a technological arms race. Developers and publishers rushed to take advantage of all the latest affordances of personal computers that were improving with bewildering speed; every year brought faster processors and CD-ROM drives, bigger memories and hard drives, graphics and sound cards of yet higher fidelity. The games that exploited these things to raise the audiovisual bar that much higher dazzled the impressionable young journalists who were assigned to review them so utterly that these earnest scribes often described and evaluated their actual gameplay as little more than an afterthought. Computer Gaming World was the most mature and thoughtful of the major American magazines, and thus less prone to this syndrome than most of its peers. By no means, however, was it entirely immune to it, as Martin E. Cirulis’s five-stars-out-of-five review of Wing Commander III illustrates.

They say that every successful person carries within her the seeds of her own destruction. In the same spirit, many a positive review contains the makings of a negative one. After expounding at length on how “simply incredible” the game is, Cirulis has this to say:

I’m afraid I’ve come to the conclusion that the space-combat aspect of Wing Commander III is almost incidental to playing the thing. The story you are moving through is so interesting and the characters so well-detailed that you almost wish you didn’t have to strap into the fighter just to see what happens next. The story line of a Wing Commander game used to be a gimmick to make what was basically a space-combat game seem more interesting, especially to people who weren’t dedicated sim pilots; but things have come full circle now, and it’s the story that is the point and the flight sim that is the gimmick.

I realize that there will be those who think that I have been blinded by chrome and taken in by pretty pictures and have failed to “critique the game.” Well, more power to them.

Another writer — perhaps even one named Martin E. Cirulis at another moment in time — might frame a review of a game whose cut scenes are its most entertaining part rather differently. Sadly, I’m afraid that I have to become that writer now.

By the standards of most productions of this nature, the game’s cinematic sequences don’t acquit themselves too horribly. If you can look past the inherent cheesiness of pixelated human actors overlaid upon computer-generated backgrounds, you can see some competent directing and acting going on. The game’s eleven-minute opening sequence in particular shows a familiarity with the language of cinema that eludes most other interactive movies. Throughout the game, there is a notable lack of the endless pregnant pauses, the painful periods where the director seems to have no idea where to point the camera, the aura of intense discomfort and vague embarrassment radiating from the actors that was such par for the course during the full-motion-video era. Likewise, the script shows an awareness of how to set up dialog and use it to convey information clearly and concisely.

I give the film-making professionals who helped Chris Roberts to “direct” his first feature film more credit for all of this than I do that young man himself. (Anyone who has seen the later, non-interactive Wing Commander movie knows that Roberts is no natural-born cinematic auteur.) Rather credit him and the rest of Origin for realizing that they needed help and going out and getting it. This unusual degree of self-awareness alone placed them well ahead of most of their peers.

At the same time, though, the production’s competence never translates into goodness. There’s a sort of fecklessness that clings to the thing, of professionals doing a professional job out of professional pride, but never really putting their hearts into it. It’s hard to blame them; the plot outline provided by Roberts was formulaic, derivative stuff, right down to climaxing with a breakneck flight down a long trench. (Star Wars much, Mr. Roberts?) And the less said the better about the inevitable love triangle, in which you must choose between a good girl and a bad girl who both have the hots for you; it’s just awful, on multiple levels.

In cinematic terms, the whole thing is hopelessly stretched in length to boot, a result of the need to give customers their $70 worth. One extended blind alley, involving a secret weapon that’s supposed to end the war with the Kilrathi at a stroke, ends up consuming more than a quarter of the script before it’s on to the next secret weapon and the next last remaining hope for humanity… no, for real this time. The screenwriters noted that their movie wound up having seventeen or eighteen acts instead of the typical three. Putting the best spin they could on things, they said said that scripting Wing Commander III was like scripting “a little miniseries.”

The acting as well is a study in competence without much heart. The actors do their jobs, but never appear to invest much of themselves into their roles; Mark Hamill seems to have had much more fun playing the slovenly Detective Moseley in Gabriel Knight that he did playing the straight-laced Colonel Blair here. Again, though, the script gives the actors so little to work with that it’s hard to blame them. The parade of walking, talking war-movie clichés which they’re forced to play are all surface on the page, so that’s how the actors portray them on the screen. Only Tom Wilson and Ginger Lynn Allen bring any real gusto to their roles. Tellingly, they do so by not taking things very seriously, chewing the (virtual) scenery with a B-movie relish. I don’t know whether more of that sort of thing from the others would have made Wing Commander III a better film under the criteria Chris Roberts was aiming for, but it certainly would have made it a more knowing, entertaining one in my eyes.

Instead, and as usual for a Chris Roberts production, the painful earnestness of the whole affair just drags it down. For all its indebtedness to Star Wars, Wing Commander III lacks those movies’ sense of extravagant fun. Roberts wants us to take all of this seriously, but that’s just impossible to do. The villains are giant cats, for heaven’s sake, who look even more ridiculous here than they do in the earlier games, like some overgrown conglomeration of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh and the anthropomorphic chimpanzees from Planet of the Apes.

I’m sorry, but it’s just really, really hard for me to take the Kilrathi seriously.

As is the norm in games of this style, your degree of actual plot agency in all of this is considerably less than advertised. Yes, you can pick the good girl or the bad girl, or reject them both; you can pick your wingman for each mission; you can choose your character’s attitude in dialog, which sometimes has some effect on others’ attitudes toward you later on. But your agency is sharply circumscribed by the inherent limitations of pre-shot, static snippets of video and the amount of storage space said video requires; it was enough of a challenge for Origin to pack one movie onto four CDs, thank you very much. These limitations mean you can’t steer the story in genuinely new directions during the movie segments. The “interactive” script is, in other words, a string of pearls rather than a branching tree; when you make a choice, the developers’ priority is to acknowledge it more or less perfunctorily and then to get you back into the main flow of their pre-ordained plot.

The developers did design a branching mission tree into the game, but your progression down it is dictated by your performance in the cockpit rather than by any conscious choices you make outside your spacecraft. Nevertheless, there are some generous touches here, including a heroic but doomed last stand of a mission if the war goes really badly. But Origin knew well by this point that most players preferred to replay failed missions instead of taking their lumps and continuing down the story’s “losing” branch, and this knowledge understandably influenced the amount of work they were willing to put into crafting missions which most players would never see; the alleged mission tree in this game is really a linear stream with just a few branching tributaries which either end or rejoin the main flow as quickly as possible. Certainly the most obvious problem with the approach — the fact that the branching mission tree gives less skilled players harder missions so that they can fail even worse after failing the first time, while it gives more skilled players easier missions that might well bore them — is not solved by Wing Commander III.

When it comes to its nuts and bolts as a space simulator, Wing Commander III surprises mostly by how little it’s progressed in comparison to the first two games. The 3D engine looks much better than what came before, is smoother and more consistent, and boasts the welcome addition of user-selectable difficulty levels. At bottom, though, the experience in space remains the same; neither the ships you fly nor their weapons load-outs have changed all that much. The engine’s one genuinely new trick is an ability to simulate flight over a terrestrial landscape, a legacy of its origins with the twentieth-century techno-thriller Strike Commander. Yet even this new capability isn’t utilized until quite late in the game.

Wing Commander III runs at a much higher resolution than the first Wing Commander, but the general look of the game is surprisingly little changed, as this direct comparison shows. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course — there’s something to be said for a franchise holding onto its look and feel, as Origin learned all too well when they attempted to foist the misbegotten Ultima VIII upon the world — but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is.

Each of the 50 or so missions which you have to fly before you get to that bravura climax breaks down into one of just a few types — patrol these waypoints, destroy that target, or protect this vessel — that play out in very similar ways each time. There’s never much sense of a larger unfolding battle, just a shooting gallery of Kilrathi coming at you. The artificial triggers of the mission designs are seldom well-concealed: reaching this waypoint magically spawns a Kilrathi fighter squadron from out of nowhere, reaching that one spawns a corvette. Meanwhile the need to turn on the auto-pilot and slew your way between the widely separated waypoints within most missions does little for your sense of immersion. Wing Commander III isn’t a complete failure as an arcadey space shooter; some players might even prefer its gung-ho, run-and-gun personality to more nuanced approaches. But I would venture to say that even some of them might find that it gets a little samey well before the 50 missions are complete. (Personally, I maintain that the first Wing Commander, which didn’t stretch itself so thin over so many missions and which was developed first and foremost as a compelling action game rather than an interactive movie, remains the best of the series from the standpoint of excitement in the cockpit.)

Looking back on 1994 from the rarefied heights of 2021, I find that Wing Commander III’s weaknesses as both interactive movie and space simulator are highlighted by the strengths of a contemporary competitor in both categories.

In the former category, we have Access Software’s Under a Killing Moon, which was released almost simultaneously with Wing Commander III; the two games were often mentioned in the same breath by the trade press because each packed four CDs to the bursting point, giving each an equal claim to the title of largest game ever in terms of sheer number of bytes. Under a Killing Moon was a more typical early full-motion-video production than Wing Commander III in many ways, being a home-grown project that utilized the talents of only a few hired guns from Hollywood. But, for all that the actors’ performances and the camera work often betray this, the whole combines infectious enthusiasm — “We’re making a movie, people!” — with that edge of irony and humor that Chris Roberts’s work always seems to lack. If Wing Commander III is the glossy mainstream take on interactive cinema, Under a Killing Moon is the upstart indie version. It remains as endearing as ever today, one of the relatively few games of its ilk that I can unreservedly recommend. But then, I do tend to prefer the ditch to the middle of the road…

In the realm of space simulators, we have LucasArts’s Star Wars: TIE Fighter, which shipped about six months before Wing Commander III. Ironically given its own cinematic pedigree, TIE Fighter had no interest in Hollywood actors, love triangles, or even branching mission trees, but was rather content merely to be the best pure space simulator to date. Here you can’t hope to succeed as the lone hero charging in with guns blazing; instead you have to coordinate with your comrades-in-arms to carry out missions whose goals are far more complex than hitting a set sequence of waypoints, missions where dozens of ships might be pursuing individual agendas at any given time in dynamic unfolding battles of awesome scale. It’s true that TIE Fighter and its slightly less impressive predecessor X-Wing would probably never have come to exist without the example of the Wing Commander franchise — but it’s also true that LucasArts had well and truly bettered their mentors by the time of TIE Fighter, just their second attempt at the genre.

And now, reading back over what I’ve written, I see that I’ve been as unkind to Wing Commander III as I’d feared I would. Therefore let me say clearly now that neither half of the game is irredeemably bad; I’ve enjoyed action and simulation games with much more hackneyed storytelling, just as I’ve enjoyed narrative-oriented games whose writing and aesthetics are more interesting than their mechanics. The problem with Wing Commander III is that neither side of it is strong enough to make up for the failings of the other. Seen in the cold, hard light of 2021, it’s a poorly written low-budget movie without any vim and vinegar, married to an unambitious retread of a space shooter.

But in the context of 1994, of course, it was a very different story. The nerdy kitsch that most of us see when we look at the game today in no way invalidates the contemporary experiences of those who, like Computer Gaming World’s Martin E. Cirulis, looked at it and decided that “we are witnessing the birth of something new.” The mid-1990s were a period of tremendous ferment in the world of computing, with new possibilities seeming to open up by the month. Wing Commander III is, whatever else it may be, a reflection of that optimistic time, as it is of the spirit of its wide-eyed creator and its hundreds of thousands of players who were not all that different from him, who came to it ready and willing to be wowed by it. Its unprecedented budget alone made a powerful statement, being tangible proof that computer gaming was becoming a big business that everyone in media had to take seriously.

Created in the best of faith and with the noblest of intentions to move gaming forward, Wing Commander III seemed like a dispatch from the future for a brief window of time. In the long run, though, the possible future it came from was not the one that its medium would wind up embracing, leaving it stranded today on an island of its own making. Such is sometimes the fate of pioneers.

Some Scenes from the Film

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1.mp4

Malcolm McDowell plays Admiral Tolwyn. With commanding officers like these, who needs Kilrathi?

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2.mp4

Courtney Gains plays Lieutenant “Radio” Rollins; imagine Radar from M*A*S*H with an attitude problem.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/3.mp4

Tom Wilson, the only comic actor in the troupe, plays Maniac with a weirdly endearing mixture of bravura and insecurity.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/4.mp4

Jason Bernard plays Captain Eisen. Like many of the performances, his is neither really good nor really bad. It’s just kind of there.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/5.mp4

Ginger Lynn Allen plays Rachel, Blair’s mechanic and potential love interest. The scriptwriters love to sprinkle her dialog with not-so-subtle innuendo, and the actress loves to deliver it.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/6.mp4

B.J. Jefferson plays Cobra, a character who’s even more one-note than most of them. She really, really hates Kilrathi. (The Hobbes who’s being discussed is a Kilrathi defector who now flies for the human side.)

(Sources: The books Origin’s Official Guide to Wing Commander III and Wing Commander III: Authorized Combat Guide; Computer Gaming World of September 1994, December 1994, and February 1995; Game Developer of February/March 1005 and June/July 1995; CD-ROM Today of August/September 1994; Next Generation of November 1995; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of May 6 1994, June 3 1994, July 15 1994, September 9 1994, October 7 1994, November 23 1994, January 13 1995, February 10 1995, March 14 1995, April 7 1995, and May 3 1995. Online sources include the Wing Commander Combat Information Center’s treasure trove of information on the game. And thank you to Robin Todd for sharing with me her memories of working on Wing Commander III, crunch time included.

Wing Commander III is available today as a digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

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Robin Todd was living as Chris Todd at the time, and is credited under that name in the game’s manual.

Comments
66 Responses

- Sean Barrett

March 5, 2021 at 6:14 pm

I remember one striking technical innovation in WC3–while the cutscenes played out in a standard for-the-time resolution (320×200-ish), the scenes moving around the ship were in a much higher resolution like 640×480, and seeing the characters (static, or maybe they had two frames?) at that resolution was a novelty and quite compelling. (Under a Killing Moon also used a resolution like 640×480 for its gameplay segments and I assume a lower resolution for its movies). Of course this seems laughable now, but after only seeing cutscenes at 320×200 (or lower!) at the time, this was pretty significant.

On the other hand, I remember spending like an hour in that final trench run, and I never figured out why. I guess the targeting indicator broke or something, so instead of leading me to the target it just kept leading me in circles (why was the trench a circle?). Eventually I gave up and flew over the mountains and finished the game (or lost the game, I honestly don’t remember now).

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2021 at 9:01 pm

I believe the movies ran at 640 X 480, while the flight simulator could run in either VGA or SVGA resolutions, depending on how much computing horsepower you had to hand. Regardless, the sort of intra-game resolution hopping you describe wasn’t at all uncommon during the industry’s period of transition between VGA and SVGA. The CD-ROM editions of X-Wing and TIE Fighter had cut scenes and menu screens in VGA, while the flight sequences themselves could optionally run in SVGA. Even the Legend adventure game Death Gate had pre-rendered 3D movies running at 320 X 200, while the main game ran in SVGA.

- Josh Martin

March 6, 2021 at 11:12 pm

The movies in WC3 are actually a meager 320×165, displayed at 320×200 via the addition of black bars on the top and bottom. The frame rate is also limited to 15fps. You can check out some raw video from the game (as well as WC4 and Crusader: No Regret) here; they play fine under VLC, though you may have to let it to a quick repair process first.

Higher-res video with smoother frame rates wasn’t really an option at the time, due to both the capacity of CD-ROMs and the fact that CPUs at the the time didn’t have the horsepower to decode it. MPEG cards (first for MPEG-1, then later for MPEG-2) were supposed to help with that, but they never got widespread adoption or publisher support—the makers of the ReelMagic card (the most prominent such example) promised a whopping 61 titles would eventually ship with ReelMagic support, but so far nobody’s been able to prove the existence of more than ten.

The original DOS CD-ROM version of Wing Commander IV used a slightly improved video codec that still operated at 320×165 at 15fps, but with added “scanlines” (meaning a black line inserted every other line) to create the illusion of a higher resolution. A patch for Windows 95 machines allowed you to remove the scanlines, but this just duplicated every line and didn’t give you true high-res video. The subsequent DVD-ROM version had MPEG-2 video at 640×480 and (mostly) 30fps, but at the time you needed a decoder card to play it. Early DVD-ROM drives were usually bundled with these so that wasn’t an issue at the time, but eventually CPUs became fast enough to handle MPEG-2 without a dedicated card and some enterprising community members went in and hacked the game to allow this. I believe this is the version you can buy on GOG now.

- Josh Martin

March 6, 2021 at 11:12 pm

Apologies for the broken italics tag.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2021 at 8:55 am

I stand corrected. (I seem to have been doing a lot of that lately…) Thanks!

- Tom

March 5, 2021 at 9:40 pm

Yeah, I had the same issue with the trench run the first time I tried it; kept going and going, but never resolved.

I must have restarted the mission at some point and finished it, as I did win the game eventually.

- lee

March 5, 2021 at 7:02 pm

> Because, if you ask me whether Wing Commander III is a good game in the abstract, my answer has to be no, it really is not.

I started to get all huffy and angry and I came down here to comment, but after starting and then deleting like four different posts…I have to agree.

What tips the scales for me is how I actually reacted to the game when it came out. WC3 was the first CD-ROM game I ever bought, the day after Christmas 1994, and while I absolutely insufflated it once I got it home and installed, my memories of the game mostly involve being in love with the idea of having a movie playing on my computer screen.

Sure, there were some amazing moments—Jason Bernard’s reaction to Blair ejecting during a mission is possibly one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen (“You know those ships are expensive, right? You think I got elves in the back making more of them??!”)—but all of those amazing moments were on the FMV side, not the gameplay side. The actual gameplay was a chore—it was the thing I had to get through in order to get back to the part of the game I was really there for.

It’s hard facing the fact that a game I remember so fondly was just objectively a crappy game, but here we are.

- Peter Olausson

March 5, 2021 at 8:04 pm

Just realised there was only seven years between John Rhys-Davies in Wing Commander III and Lord of the Rings, which was released 20 years ago. Time sure isn’t what it used to be.

- Lt. Nitpicker

March 5, 2021 at 8:07 pm

There are some erroneous statements of the game costing 90 dollars, and a claim of Intel showing off Strike Commander as an example of the Pentium’s power when the earlier “Origin Sells Out” article claims its Compaq.

- ChrisReid

March 6, 2021 at 12:14 am

The base game MSRP was $69.95, but they did also sell a premiere edition for $99.95: https://cdn.wcnews.com/newestshots/full/origin_holiday_cd_mailer_side_1.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 7:58 am

The Computer Gaming World review gives the price as $80 (or rather $79.95). It looks like there must have been a last-minute price adjustment after the magazine went to print. Thanks!

- Firehawke

March 5, 2021 at 8:36 pm

I think the question that I come out of this with is…

“If there were 200 hours of footage originally, what happened to that footage?”

I wonder if Chris Roberts might still have some of that. It’d be really interesting to see that material get put up on Internet Archive for preservation, and I think that footage might explain some of the weird plot hole problems WC3 had.

As for gameplay, I felt WC3 wasn’t worse than WC2– it was certainly more of the same, but I felt (at the time, and equally still today) that more of the same was fine. It’s not like they really could do that much more for the genre outside of maybe fixing the branching missions concept. That is, of course, something you comment on.

I’d be interested in hearing how you’d compare 4 and Prophecy with 3.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2021 at 9:14 pm

I don’t know whether the footage was preserved, but regardless, it’s probably far less exciting than you might be imagining. At a Hollywood-style shoot like this one, multiple cameras are rolling to capture the action from different angles, and are generally doing so more or less constantly: “Action!” and “Cut!” are more signals to the actors than to the camera operators in the film productions of recent decades. So, what you’ll have is hours and hours of people milling around on-set, mixed with multiple takes of the same scenes from multiple angles. The best you might hope to put together is a few choice blooper reels, many of them perhaps involving Tom Wilson, the life of the party on-set.

- Gordon Cameron

March 6, 2021 at 5:32 am

I don’t think even with video you’d typically film people milling around on set, unless you’re specifically making a behind-the-scenes documentary.

I’ve only worked on lower budget productions, but as recently as 2008 the standard slating technique, plus “Roll sound – speed – action – cut!” were the norm. Cameras were not rolling most of the time; they’d just catch grips fiddling with lights and C-stands and such. Obviously since video is less expensive to roll than film, there’s a tendency to be a bit more casual about it – the Coen brothers noted that when shooting on digital, actors want to try multiple line readings in a single take, for example – but the idea of making each shot a discrete, labeled entity has purposes other than saving money. It also is important for logging and categorizing all the footage so that the editors can make sense of it later.

As to using multiple cameras to film actual onscreen action that’s supposed to be in the movie – well, I think that depends on the director. Kurosawa is supposed to have made use of multiple cameras in some of his films, although I’m not sure whether he reserved that for big stunts and action scenes rather than for simple dialogue setups. Sitcoms of course usually would go multi-camera but that’s because they were performed live. When you have an expensive stunt or explosion or effects shot that you can only do once or that costs a ton of money each time you do it, you will of course want lots of cameras rolling on it.

In my background in film school and in the productions I was on, it was not the norm to shoot multiple angles simultaneously for typical dialogue scenes. Shooting a master and then subsequently shooting the rest of the coverage (closeups, inserts, etc.) was the normal approach we were taught. Often actors reserve their best stuff for when they know it’s their closeup, obviously, though I suppose they’d have to alter that if they knew all angles were being shot at the same time.

I imagine that some high-level directors like to use multiple cameras more frequently and some don’t, and the technique might have become more common in the age of digital shooting; but you have to factor in that it’s harder for the cinematographer to control the lighting when worrying about multiple angles simultaneously, and also the more angles you have, the more you have to worry about keeping production gear/lights/etc. out of the shot. A director might also prefer in dramatic scenes to be able to focus on one performance at a time during closeups, reserving the master shot for just setting up the initial geography of the scene and providing a safety net if the editor can’t otherwise cut out of the closer shots.

If I had to guess I’d imagine some of the WC3 extra footage would have been deleted scenes, and a lot would just have been takes they didn’t use, or coverage they shot to be safe that didn’t end up being needed in the editing room. Apparently a 10-1 ratio of shot-to-used footage was pretty common in Golden Age Hollywood. (See here: https://nofilmschool.com/2016/03/shooting-ratios-mad-max-fury-road-primer-hitchcock) The ratio on Wing Commander III sounds like it was closer to 60-1, which is indeed pretty extreme. Maybe it was a function of Roberts’s inexperience/lack of confidence as a filmmaker and a desire to make sure all the bases were covered, and/or a lot of little story branches they shot but then didn’t implement?

Either way I doubt there was much footage of people milling around on set. At any rate, when I edited a low budget feature shot on digital in ’08, I’d have been tearing my hair out if I’d had to sift through all that instead of properly slated and labeled takes.

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 8:04 am

I was describing my understanding of these things from some casual conversations I’ve had with people involved in professional film production. But obviously I misunderstood them to some extent; you clearly know far more about these things than I do. Thanks so much for your detailed explanation. The only additional wrinkle might be the need to superimpose computer graphics on the scenes during post-production. I don’t know whether this would make running multiple cameras more desirable — i.e., so that everyone is always standing in the same place.

The claimed 200 hours of footage showed up in Origin’s internal newsletter. It’s possible that the writer was simply mistaken, or even inserted a zero too many. I agree that it does seem extreme. Shooting that much in a month would require shooting about six and a half hours per day if you never took a day off. You would almost have to have just let the cameras roll.

- Michael

March 8, 2021 at 11:28 pm

Indeed, “the need to superimpose computer graphics on the scenes during post-production” can be taken as reasonable proof that there were not multiple cameras rolling. The green screen would need to be behind the actors, not off to one side, for this to work. Hence, you could only shoot from one angle at a time.

- F

March 5, 2021 at 9:15 pm

The original Wing Commander wasn’t so terrible on my 16mhz 286 at the time. Slow, but doable. In a strange twist that would become commonplace only much later, extra expanded memory (requiring a 386 with the EMM386 extension) would allow for improved graphical effects such as seeing your own hand and yoke in the cockpit and fancier explosions. Oh, the memories …

Also, “voiced-acted”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2021 at 9:17 pm

Thanks!

- Tom

March 5, 2021 at 9:46 pm

A fair assessment. WC3 was certainly a product of it’s time. And at the time, it was pretty heady stuff. Maybe not for the game itself, but the promise of what might be done with that technology in the future.

One thing that made an impact on me was the sheer size of the Behemoth, taking minutes to fly all the way around it (and even inside it). It provided a sense of scope for an in-game object that I had never experienced before – even the star destroyers in X-Wing/TIE Fighter seemed somehow small and constrained in comparison.

- Kevin Christman

March 6, 2021 at 12:24 am

So, I’ve barely played the DOS version, but I’ve played a ton of the 3DO version and it’s probably my favorite space sim next to TIE Fighter. I’ve never seen anyone document the changes, but they changed quite a bit- mostly simplifications, especially combat with capital ships. This kind of thing could of course go either way depending on your tastes/expectations, but in practice I feel like it’s just more fun.

One big obvious drawback is the lack of buttons, meaning you have to memorize certain button combos. Once you scale that wall- and realistically you only need to regularly use a couple of them so this isn’t as daunting as it sounds- it’s a plenty good time.

- Bobby

March 6, 2021 at 2:51 am

Given how hyped this was, I think a lot of people bought it who hadn’t played the previous entries. That’s why it could get away with gameplay that didn’t improve on them

- John

March 6, 2021 at 3:18 am

I never played Wing Commander III–I was more of a Privateer man–but a friend of mine was a real evangelist for the game. Once, when we were gathered at another friend’s house to watch a movie on their big screen TV, he forced us to watch a VHS tape with a bunch of captured Wing Commander III cutscenes first. I wish I could have shared his enthusiasm for the game. It’s true that the cutscenes were impressive . . . for a computer game of the time. Unfortunately for my enthusiastic friend, however, the movie we were there to watch was Star Wars, which of course made Wing Commander III look amateurish by comparison. I sometimes wonder if the cutscenes would have impressed me more if I’d seen them in their proper context on a computer screen and perhaps had the chance to play a bit of the game along with them.

- Gordon Cameron

March 6, 2021 at 5:35 am

The quote snippet about crunch at Origin was tough to read. I never realized that the situation was that bad, and it takes some of the bloom off my glowy nostalgic feeling about early-90s Origin.

- Aula

March 6, 2021 at 3:09 pm

“you must chose between”

choose

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 6:20 pm

Thanks!

- Juan G

March 6, 2021 at 3:58 pm

Somehow, I never got to actually play much of Wing Commander III for myself, despite being anxious to do so because of my love for the second entry in the series, but it’s still very interesting to learn about its production history from a modern perspective.

That said, I distinctly remember finding its sequel Wing Commander IV to work quite well as a movie, presumably because they had higher ambitions in mind thanks to creating at least two significantly different branching story paths (which involved the threat of civil war between human enemies, while the space cats are no longer a concern) and they almost certainly spent more money on the cinematic side after the success of III.

Can’t say I had any real issues with the actual gaming aspect of it either. I’d want to argue IV played about as well as you’d expect from a Wing Commander title, but that may just be me. Again, I’d assume they tweaked the engine after III and ironed out any remaining oddities.

At the same time, I think it’s inevitably bittersweet to read about even the more or less controversial entries from the classic WC series, in retrospect, considering what Christ Roberts has been attempting with Star Citizen and the whole bloody mess behind that particular ongoing project’s endless milking (or perhaps calling it a gig would be more appropriate).

- Juan G

March 6, 2021 at 4:01 pm

It should be Chris, not Christ, but then again that particular mistake seems oddly fitting too.

- Nils

March 6, 2021 at 10:44 pm

I remember WC4 being touted as the most expensive game ever produced around the time of its release, so I’m sure they did use more money. They used actual sets that time, after all.

IV plays quite similar to III, but the enemies are more dangerous (missiles this time!) and the missions tend to be shorter and a bit more varied, with at least some kind of twist to the ”search every waypoint, shoot everyone” formula. I guess it’s an improvement, but Wing Commander just isn’t Wing Commander without the Kilrathi…

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2021 at 8:58 am

Yes, Wing Commander IV got a banner cover in Computer Gaming World as the first $10 million computer game — a demonstration of how quickly budgets were escalating, given that it appeared just two years after the $4 million Wing Commander III became the most expensive computer game ever.

- Josh Martin

March 7, 2021 at 8:01 pm

WC4 was also shot on 35mm instead of videotape, which wasn’t a super obvious improvement with the original CD version but was much more evident on the DVD-ROM release with higher-resolution video. (It also means they could create a full HD remake by going back and rescanning the footage, but there’s a less than zero chance that modern EA will bother with that.) As for the actual gameplay, it addressed one of Jimmy’s complaints about part 3 by adding more ground-based missions, but the game uses a one-size-fits-all flight model for both space and planetside areas, so they don’t feel that much from different from space missions with really really really big capital ships.

- Sebastian Gerstl

March 6, 2021 at 4:41 pm

I have a small correction to make:

“In some ways, the series has even regressed; you can no longer jump behind the controls of a rear-facing laser turret, as you could in Wing Commander II.”

That’s not true, you can in both the Thunderbolt-Fighter and the Longbow-Bomber. You don’t have side-facing turrets like in the Broadsword in WC2 any more – but to be fair, hardly anyone ever used those. :P

I was a huge Wing Commander fan growing up and have played the games endlessly over the years (maybe even too much :p ) and I will always defend the shooting mechanics over the X-Wing/Tie Fighter games. Even though WC3 deliberately lifted a few mechanics from those, like redistributing the energy to guns, shields and damage repair, the ability to use pseudo-Newton mechanics (called ‘Shelton gliding’ in-game) for two spaceship models…

So no, while I think the article was well-written and hits the nail on the head on many occasions, I don’t agree with the assessment that the mechanics allegedly regressed in any form or fashion. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 6:21 pm

I inserted that sentence during my final editing pass, always a dangerous thing to do. ;) Thanks!

- Nils

March 6, 2021 at 7:38 pm

There’s also at least one more planetary mission before the showdown at Kilrah, though it too is quite far into the game.

Compared to WC2, I think that the missions in WC3 are a bit of a step back. WC2 uses a lot of in-mission cutscenes, but WC3 has like one? WC2 missions also don’t drag on and on like many later ones in WC3 do, with multiple waves of enemies at every checkpoint who all must be taken down.

It’s too bad that unlike its predecessors, the WC3 engine would allow mixing enemy types, but this rarely happens. On the default difficulty or the onr above it, the Kilrathi never use missiles either, which almost feels like a bug.

What’s that plot hole introduced by the cuts?

BTW, lately my Android Chrome refuses to show the smartphone version of the site, making it hard to read. Is it me, or has sonething broken in the last few weeks or so?

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 8:48 pm

Fair enough. Thanks! The mobile issue should be fixed now.

- Sebastian Gerstl

March 6, 2021 at 9:46 pm

I am also curious what plot hole you’re referring to – it’s been a while since I last played the game, but nothing obvious would spring to mind right now…

- Alex Smith

March 6, 2021 at 10:05 pm

Assuming Jimmy and I are thinking of the same thing, it’s not so much a plot hole as a point of extra clarification. Spoilers ahead for a nearly 30 year old game.

After Hobbes turns trailer, he leaves a holo message in Blair’s locker explaining that he was a deep cover agent created using a personality matrix something or another that made him a completely different person essentially. He was activated by his handlers and did his thing. This holo was cut, so the betrayal is just super random and never explained.

- Sebastian Gerstl

March 7, 2021 at 6:12 am

That’s weird… I have the German version of the game, as it was released in 1994, and the holo is there… It was missable, since it was an optional scene that had to be accessed by clicking on your locker after a certain mission, and you might not realize that was possible at that moment – but the scene is definitely present there. Maybe it was reintroduced for international releases?

- Alex Smith

March 6, 2021 at 10:06 pm

*turns traitor. Stupid typos.

- A. Freed

March 7, 2021 at 5:25 am

For folks interested, the cut Hobbes scene Alex Smith mentions is available (along with various other bits of cut footage) here: https://www.wcnews.com/holovids/lost_wing3.shtml

- Alex Smith

March 7, 2021 at 5:36 pm

That is interesting Sebastian. It was definitely not in the US release, so they must have snuck it back in.

- Darren

March 8, 2021 at 5:04 pm

I had the US PC version and absolutely remember that cutscene. Did they patch it back in or was it updated in later releases?

- Darren

March 8, 2021 at 5:26 pm

Ok, so after doing some digging, it looks like WC3 was re-released with a “Electronic Arts Presents CD-ROM Classics” tag at the bottom. If you bought that version it looks like it had the Hobbes defection explanation cutscene in it.

- John

March 7, 2021 at 10:57 pm

The shooting mechanics in Privateer–and I am forced to assume also in Wing Commander and Wing Commander II–are awful. It is almost impossible to get a gun kill in Privateer if your ship is not equipped with an advanced targeting system. The game’s sprite-based graphics make it difficult to judge your target’s actual distance and heading and leading the target properly is almost impossible. The X-Wing series, having proper 3D graphics, does not suffer from this problem. You don’t need a computer-controlled targeting reticule to hit an enemy ship in X-Wing or Tie Fighter the way you do in Privateer.

It’s possible that the 3D Wing Commanders did it better. It would be hard to do worse. It’s also possible that you always have that advanced targeting system in Wing Commander and Wing Commander II. I wouldn’t know. But as much as I love Privateer for letting me tool around the galaxy and do my own thing in my personally customized space ship I cannot by any stretch of the imagination call the shooting mechanics good.

- Nils

March 8, 2021 at 7:19 pm

Wing Commander doesn’t have a lead indicator at all. I think WC2 does, but only on select ships? It’s not actually that tough though, as the games are pretty lenient about hitting targets, and enemy fighters are not that quick. Now, I myself haven’t played Privateer, but I’d say that shooting is actually more difficult in WCIII and IV, especially against fast-moving enemies like Darkets and Arrows, who are quite agile and change directions erratically. The aiming reticule moves around so quickly that it hardly helps at all. This, of course, is of no consequence when flying the Excalibur superfighter, which features an auto-aiming system…

- Buck

March 8, 2021 at 10:09 pm

I recently played through Privateer with keyboard controls, I had no trouble destroying enemies with guns only and without advanced targeting. It helps having enough energy to fire a few “homing” shots. I think I missed more shots with targeting because it makes you just point at the target indicator and fire, but if the target is maneuvering your shots will just miss.

I’m not sure if playing with the keyboard was still a sensible option with WC 3.

- John

March 9, 2021 at 11:41 am

I don’t know what you mean by “homing shots”. To the best of my recollection, there are no guns whose projectiles track enemy ships. There are a couple of different kinds of homing missiles, however, and these are in my experience the only reliable way to get kills in the early game before you can afford an advanced targeting system for your guns.

- Bryan

March 6, 2021 at 6:29 pm

I’ve never played WCIII (I was also a Privateer fan) but I just want to alert you that the lovely mobile mode on the site seems to have conked out. It’s just showing the full website on my phone as of the past few days.

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2021 at 8:47 pm

It seems my caching plug-in was bumping heads with my mobile plug-in. Should be fixed now.

- Adamantyr

March 7, 2021 at 7:47 pm

Wing Commander III was definitely one of those games that was a huge hit in it’s time, but it doesn’t hold up today at all. It rather reminds me of the movie “Batman Forever”… we all enjoyed it at the time, but now it just makes us cringe for a myriad of reasons.

The best way to play the first three WC games is with the Kilrathi Saga, which had the first three games fully playable in modern Windows. It even gives you “virtual cockpit” options for all of the games, which is really nice. It’s super rare though, only 20,000 copies were made.

Tom Wilson was so fun in this one though, and the sequels. I actually met him at a con a few years ago and had him sign a WC3 poster.

- Svein-Frode

March 8, 2021 at 8:17 am

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with this one as far as I’m concerned. I was never a big fan of space games, but I bought into the hype when this came out. It was a cool idea – on paper. We were a bunch of friends that sat around and played through it together. I remember the cut scenes became old really fast, and there really wasn’t much of a story. I still have the game, but rather than play it again, I just fast forwarded through a “movie” version on youtube. Under a Killing Moon on the other hand is worth a replay.

- BoardGameNut

March 8, 2021 at 5:27 pm

Talk a trip down memory lane. WC was one of my favorite series. I remember enjoying this iteration a lot, and I would have to agree that the first one really was the best. Personally, I was more interested in the space sim side of things and felt like the story got more in the way :) I would much prefer to play 1 & 2 over this and purchased them again. Ever time I see WC3 go on sale at GOG for a buck fifty, I can’t bring myself to buy it. I did finish WC3 and I didn’t have any trouble with the trench run like other people mentioned. WC4 was a rehash in some ways was even less interesting where I can barely remember the storyline with Admiral Tolwyn being the big bad guy. I bought WC5 and never made it very far. It was forgettable.

- Michael

March 8, 2021 at 11:17 pm

“With commanding officiers like these”
–> officers

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2021 at 7:54 am

Thanks!

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- Tim Kaiser

March 10, 2021 at 4:10 am

Oh man, watching those FMV clips put me to sleep. Is it the script? Or the acting? Or both? Or maybe it’s because they are just dialogue scenes with no camera movement, no interesting music and featuring characters and a story that I don’t know and am not interested in.

However, I do have memories of playing one of these FMV Wing Commander games at my cousin’s house decades ago. I think it was WCIV. I also have the memory of generic movie clips followed by generic space combat. Even as a kid at the time, the game did not interest me.

I am a bit nostalgic towards this era of games though. FMV was a big breakthrough and the often cheesy acting by mostly amateur actors could be fun. In this case, it feels like it’s a bunch of bored professionals doing the bare minimum for a paycheck (Tom Wilson excluded).

- CV

March 10, 2021 at 4:07 pm

You looked at WC3’s historical context but seem to have missed an important part of it. In 1993, space opera scifi in pop culture included:

1. The revival of Star Wars with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire (Thrawn) trilogy.
2. Star Trek The Next Generation in its mature phase.
3. Star Trek DS9.
4. Babylon 5.

WC3 comes out in this time period and lets gamers play a badass starfighter pilot, not unlike their favorite characters. And the experience takes place not just in the cockpit, but outside it, and contains other characters to interact with, along with a story whose linearity is easy to ignore with just a bit of suspension of disbelief (at least on first play-through). There’s an immersive role-playing element to WC3 that I don’t think existed before (and I certainly didn’t experience at the time). And the whole thing looks like TV and not just pixelated Blue Hair. And Mark fucking Hamill is the player’s avatar! That works way better than you give it credit for.

I agree that the two individual components of WC3 leave much to be desired, but separating and deconstructing them, and concluding that it’s a bad game “in the abstract” sells it woefully short.

- Comchia

March 11, 2021 at 2:26 am

While I’m a big fan of the Wing Commander franchise, 3 included (got me through a rough period!), nonetheless, I enjoyed reading your perspective of this game, both in the game itself, and what it represented in the wider industry as a whole. This, and 4, probably have my favourite cutscenes of any game. I particularly loved Jason Bernard’s performance, and wish he was still around to deliver more of that kind of energy.

For straight up space combat, X-Wing/TIE Fighter still remain my all time favourites, especially in how military-sim they feel.

- Patryk

March 11, 2021 at 11:30 am

I was definitely in the target group for the WC series and even had an early Pentium PC with CD ROM so I was able to experience WC III and IV at that time. But I definitely agree with Jimmy and virtually everyone else here. WC III was just a simple and boring shooter in comparison with TIE Fighter with its highly complex and immersive mission design. When it comes to the multimedia thing, the TIE Fighter CD ROM edition includes voiceover in mission briefings read by Guy Siner, a British actor that is widely known for most Europeans as Lt. Gruber from the Allo Allo series. It is just so cool to hear Lt. Gruber, with his distinctive slightly feminine voice, bragging about some high-tech Empire weaponry. This voiceover and Mark Hamill/Tim Curry duo in Gabriel Knight are my favorite pieces of multimedia from the mid-1990s.

- Lt. Nitpicker

March 12, 2021 at 6:54 pm

I give the film-making professionals who helped Chris Roberts to “direct” his first feature film more credit for all of this than I do that young man himself. (Anyone who has seen the later, non-interactive Wing Commander movie knows that Roberts is no natural-born cinematic auteur.) Rather credit him and the rest of Origin for realizing that they needed help and going out and getting it.

The second sentence in this block of text kinda feels like it’s missing a word.

- Jimmy Maher

March 12, 2021 at 9:27 pm

As intended, thanks.

- Richard Smith

March 14, 2021 at 3:11 am

I have to thank you. I had this old vivid memory of a bad CGI cat in a movie. I could remember nothing else about the movie, and though I went looking for it occasionally, I could never find it. Turns out it was the Wing Commander movie. Thanks for helping me solve that mystery, lol.

- Max Kowarski

April 15, 2021 at 9:51 am

Typo: Tolywyn should be Tolwyn in the caption for the second image.

> If you can look past the inherent cheesiness of pixelated human actors overlaid upon computer-generated backgrounds, you can see some competent directing and acting going on.

So not unlike the endless MCU, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc stuff that Hollywood did for the past 15-20 years now, eh? So, in a sense, it WAS really a taste of things to come. Though I admit, the degree of cosplay involved got progressively higher over the years.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2021 at 9:57 am

Thanks!

- Lhexa

April 24, 2021 at 1:42 pm

My editor senses just went haywire. Let me suggest a small edit:

“It’s widely known by those who are interested in the history of gaming that the videogame industry was hauled into a United States Senate hearing on December 9, 1993, to address concerns about the violence and sex to be found in its products. Yet the specifics of what was said on that occasion have been less widely disseminated.”

–>

“The videogame industry was hauled into a United States Senate hearing on December 9, 1993, to address concerns about the violence and sex to be found in its products. The specifics of what was said on that crucial occasion have not been widely disseminated.”

- Lhexa

April 26, 2021 at 8:36 pm

Anyway. I’m not the only person who took a slow, nonviolent approach through the world of pagan, and was thus able to experience the interlude in which the previous pantheon talks about what Pagan was before the Guardian came. I know I’m not the only one, because I had to follow a walkthrough in order to uncover the route. :P I’m also one of the few people who seems to remember that after unleashing the Titans on the world, you hunt them down one by one and kill them.

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System Shock
March 19, 2021

We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still had a lot of respect for the simplicity and focus of [the id] games. There was, to my recollection, a vague sense of fatalism about the parallel tracks the two companies were taking, since it was clear early on that id’s approach, which needed much less player education and which ran on adrenaline rather than planning and immersion, was more likely to be commercially successful. But we all believed very strongly in Looking Glass’s direction, and were proud that we were taking games to a more cerebral and story-rich place.

— Dorian Hart

We hope that our toiling now to make things work when it is still very hard to do effectively will mean that when it is easier to do, we can concentrate on the parts of the game that are less ephemeral than polygons per second, and distinguish ourselves by designing detailed and immersive environments which are about more than just the technology.

— Doug Church

In late 1992, two separate studios began working on two separate games whose descriptions sound weirdly identical to one another. Each was to make you the last human survivor on a besieged space station. You would roam its corridors in real time in an embodied first-person view; both studios prided themselves on their cutting-edge 3D graphics technology. As you explored, you would have to kill or be killed by the monsters swarming the complex. Yet wresting back control of the station would demand more than raw firepower: in the end, you would have to outwit the malevolent intelligence behind it all. Both games were envisioned as unprecedentedly rich interactive experiences, as a visceral new way of living through an interactive story.

But in the months that followed, these two projects that had started out so conceptually similar diverged dramatically. The team that was working on DOOM at id Software down in Dallas, Texas, decided that all of the elaborate plotting and puzzles were just getting in the way of the simpler, purer joys of blowing away demons with a shotgun. Lead programmer John Carmack summed up id’s attitude: “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” id discovered that they weren’t really interested in making an immersive virtual world; they were interested in making an exciting game, one whose “gameyness” they felt no shame in foregrounding.

Meanwhile the folks at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based studio Looking Glass Technologies stuck obstinately to their original vision. They made exactly the uncompromising experience they had first discussed, refusing to trade psychological horror in for cheaper thrills. System Shock would demand far more of its players than DOOM, but would prove in its way an even more rewarding game for those willing to follow it down the moody, disturbing path it unfolded.

It was in this moment, then, that the differences between id and Looking Glass, the yin and the yang of 1990s 3D-graphics pioneers, became abundantly clear.

Looking Glass arrived at their crossroads moment just as they were completing their second game, Ultima Underworld II. Both it and its predecessor were first-person fantasy dungeon crawls set in and around Britannia, the venerable world of the Ultima CRPG series to which their games served as spinoffs. And both were very successful, so much so that they almost overshadowed Ultima VII, the latest entry in the mainline series. Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems would have been happy to let them continue making games in this vein for as long as their customers kept buying them.

But Looking Glass, evincing the creative restlessness that would define them throughout their existence, was ready to move on to other challenges. In the months immediately after Ultima Underworld II was completed, the studio’s head Paul Neurath allowed his charges to start three wildly diverse projects on the back of the proceeds from the Underworld games, projects which were unified only by their heavy reliance on 3D graphics. One was a game of squad-level tactical combat called Terra Nova, another a civilian flight simulator called Flight Unlimited. And the third — actually, the first of the trio to be officially initiated — was System Shock.

Doug Church, the driving creative force behind Ultima Underworld, longed to create seamless interactive experiences, where you didn’t so much play a game as enter into its world. The Underworld games had been a big step in that direction within the constraints of the CRPG form, thanks to their first-person, free-scrolling perspective, their real-time gameplay, and, not least, the way they cast you in the role of a single embodied dungeon delver rather than that of the disembodied manager of a whole party of them. But Church believed that there was still too much that pulled you out of their worlds. Although the games were played entirely from a single screen, which itself put them far ahead of most CRPGs in terms of immediacy, you were still switching constantly from mode to mode within that screen. “I felt that Underworld was sort of [four] different games that you played in parallel,” says Church. “There was the stats-based game with the experience points, the inventory-collecting-and-managing game, the 3D-moving-around game, and there was the talking game — the conversation-branch game.” What had seemed so fresh and innovative a couple of years earlier now struck Church as clunky.

Ironically, much of what he was objecting to is inherent to the CRPG form itself. Aficionados of the genre find it endlessly enjoyable to pore over their characters’ statistics at level-up time, to min-max their equipment and skills. And this is fine: the genre is as legitimate as any other. Yet Church himself found its cool intellectual appeal, derived from its antecedents on the tabletop which had no choice but to reveal all of their numbers to their players, to be antithetical to the sort of game that he wanted to make next:

In Underworld, there was all this dice rolling going on off-screen basically, and I’ve always felt it was kind of silly. Dice were invented as a way to simulate swinging your sword to see if you hit or miss. So everyone builds computer games where you move around in 3D and swing your sword and hit or miss, and then if you hit you roll some dice to simulate swinging a sword to decide if you hit or miss. How is anyone supposed to understand unless you print the numbers? Which is why, I think, most of the games that really try to be hardcore RPGs actually print out, “You rolled a 17!” In [the tabletop game of] Warhammer when you get a five-percent increase and the next time you roll your attack you make it by three percent, you’re all excited because you know that five-percent increase is why you hit. In a computer game you have absolutely no idea. And so we really wanted to get rid of all that super opaque, “I have no idea what’s going on” stuff. We wanted to make it so you can watch and play and it’s all happening.

So, there would be no numbers in his next game — no character levels, no character statistics, not even quantifiable hit points. There would just be you, right there in the world, without any intervening layers of abstraction.

Over the course of extensive discussions involving Doug Church himself, Paul Neurath, Looking Glass designer and writer Austin Grossman, and their Origin Systems producer Warren Spector, it was decided to make a first-person science-fiction game with distinct cyberpunk overtones, pitting you against an insane computer known as SHODAN. Cyberpunk was anything but a novelty in the games of the 1990s, a time when authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson all occupied prominent places on the genre-fiction bestseller charts and the game developers who read their novels rushed to bring their visions to life on monitor screens. Still, cyberpunk would suit Looking Glass’s purposes unusually perfectly by presenting a credible explanation for the diegetic interface Church was envisioning. You would play a character with a neural implant that let you “see” a heads-up display sporting a life bar for yourself, an energy bar for your weapons and other hardware, etc. — all of it a part of the virtual world rather than external to it. When you switched between “modes,” such as when bringing up the auto-map or your inventory display, it would be the embodied you who did so in the virtual world, not that other you who sat in front of the computer telling a puppet what to do next.

System Shock’s commitment to its diegetic presentation is complete. As you discover new software and gadgets, they’re added to the heads-up display provided by your in-world neural implant. This serves the same purpose that leveling up did in Ultima Underworld, but in a more natural, realistic way.

Dissatisfied with what he saw as the immersion-killing conversation trees of Ultima Underworld, Church decided to get rid of two-way conversation altogether. When the game began, there would be enticing signs that other humans were still alive somewhere on the space station, but you would be consistently too late to reach them; you would encounter them only as the zombies SHODAN turned them into after death. Of course, all of this too was highly derivative, and on multiple levels at that. Science-fiction fans had been watching their heroes take down out-of-control computers since the original Star Trek television series if not before; “I don’t think if you wrote the novel [of System Shock] it would fly off the shelves,” admits Church. Likewise, computer games had been contriving ways to place you in deserted worlds, or in worlds inhabited only by simple-minded creatures out for your blood, for as long as said games had existed, always in order to avoid the complications of character interaction; the stately isolation of the mega-hit adventure game Myst was only the most recent notable example of the longstanding tradition at the time System Shock was in development.

But often it’s not what you do in any form of media, it’s how well you do it. And System Shock does what it sets out to do very, very well indeed. It tells a story of considerable complexity and nuance through the artifacts you find lying about as you explore the station and the emails you receive from time to time, allowing you to piece it all together for yourself in nonlinear fashion. “We wanted to make the plot and story development of System Shock be an exploration as well,” says Church, “and that’s why it’s all in the logs and data, so then it’s very tied into movement through the spaces.”

Reading a log entry. The story is conveyed entirely through epistolary means like these, along with occasional direct addresses from SHODAN herself that come booming through the station’s public-address system.

Moving through said spaces, picking up bits and pieces of the horrible events which have unfolded there, quickly becomes highly unnerving. The sense of embodied realism that clings to every aspect of the game is key to the sense of genuine, oppressive fear it creates in its player. Tellingly, Looking Glass liked to call System Shock a “simulation,” even though it simulates nothing that has ever existed in the real world. The word is rather shorthand for its absolute commitment to the truth — fictional truth, yes, but truth nevertheless — of the world it drops you into.

Story is very important to System Shock — and yet, in marked contrast to works in the more traditionally narrative-oriented genre of the adventure game, its engine also offers heaps and heaps of emergent possibility as you move through the station discovering what has gone wrong here and, finally, how you might be able to fix it. “It wasn’t just, ‘Go do this sequence of four things,'” says Church. “It was, ‘Well, there are going to be twelve cameras here and you gotta take out eight of them. Figure it out.’ We [also] gave you the option [of saying], ‘I don’t want to fight that guy. Okay, maybe I can find another way…'”

Thus System Shock manages the neat trick of combining a compelling narrative with a completely coherent environment that never reduces you to choosing from a menu of options, one where just about any solution for any given problem that seems like it ought to work really does work. Just how did Looking Glass achieve this when so many others before and since have failed, or been so daunted by the challenges involved that they never even bothered to try? They did so by combining technical excellence with an aesthetic sophistication to which few of their peers could even imagine aspiring.

Just as the 3D engine that powers Ultima Underworld is more advanced than the pseudo-3D of id’s contemporaneous Wolfenstein 3D, the System Shock engine outdoes DOOM in a number of important respects. The enormous environments of System Shock curve over and under and around one another, complete with sloping floors everywhere; lighting is realistically simulated; you can jump and crouch and look up and down and lean around corners; you can take advantage of its surprisingly advanced level of physics simulation in countless ingenious ways. System Shock even boasts perspective-correct texture mapping, a huge advance over Ultima Underworld, and no easy thing to combine with the aforementioned slopes.

Each of the ten “levels” of System Shock is really multiple levels in the physical sense, as the corridors often curve over and under one another. Just as in Ultima Underworld, you can annotate the auto-map for yourself. But even with this aid, just finding your way around in these huge, confusing spaces can be a challenge in itself.

That said, it’s also abundantly true that a more advanced engine doesn’t automatically make for a better game. Any such comparison must always carry an implied addendum: better for whom? Certainly DOOM succeeded beautifully in realizing its makers’ ambitions, even as its more streamlined engine could run well on many more of the typical computers of the mid-1990s than System Shock’s could. By no means do the engines’ respective advantages all run one way: in addition to being much faster than the System Shock engine, the DOOM engine allows rooms of arbitrary sizes and non-orthogonal walls, neither of which is true of its counterpart from Looking Glass.

In the end, System Shock wants to be a very different experience than DOOM, catering to a different style of play, and its own engine is designed to allow it to realize its own ambitions. It demands a more careful approach from its player, where you must constantly use light and shadow, walls and obstacles, to aid you in your desperate struggle. For you are not a superhuman outer-space marine in System Shock; you’re just, well, you, scared and alone in a space station filled with rampaging monsters.

A fine example of the lengths to which Looking Glass’s technologists were willing to go in the service of immersion is provided by the mini-games you can play. Inspired by, of all things, the similarly plot-irrelevant mini-games found in the LucasArts graphic adventure Sam and Max Hit the Road, they contribute much more to the fiction in this case than in that other one. As with everything in System Shock, the mini-games are not external to the world of the main game. It’s rather you playing them through your neural implant right there in the world; it’s you who cowers in a safe corner somewhere, trying to soothe your soul with a quick session of Breakout or Missile Command. You get the chance to collect more and better games as you infiltrate the station’s computer network using the cyberspace jacks you find scattered about — a reward of sorts for a forlorn hacker trying to survive against an all-powerful entity and her horrifying minions.

Taking the edge off with a quick game of Pong (in the window at lower left).

Sean Barret, a programmer who came to Looking Glass and to the System Shock project well into the game’s development, implemented the most elaborate by far of the mini-games, a gentle satire of Origin Systems’s Wing Commander that goes under the name of Wing 0. The story of its creation is a classic tale of Looking Glass, a demonstration both of the employees’ technical brilliance and their insane levels of commitment to the premises of their games. Newly arrived on the team and wishing to make a good impression, Barrett saw a list of mini-game ideas on a whiteboard; a “Wing Commander clone” was among them. So, he set to work, and some days later presented his creation to his colleagues. They were as shocked as they were delighted; it turned out that the Wing Commander clone had been a joke rather than a serious proposal. In the end, however, System Shock got its very own Wing Commander after all.

Still, there were many other technically excellent and crazily dedicated games studios in the 1990s, just as there are today. What truly set Looking Glass apart was their interest in combining the one sort of intelligence with another kind that has not always been in quite so great a supply in the games industry.

As Looking Glass grew, Paul Neurath brought some very atypical characters into the fold. Already in late 1991, he placed an advertisement in the Boston Globe for a writer with an English degree. He eventually hired Austin Grossman, who would do a masterful job of scattering the puzzle pieces of Doug Church’s story outline around the System Shock space station. There soon followed another writer with an English degree, this one by the name of Dorian Hart, who would construct some of the station’s more devious internal spaces using the flair for drama which he had picked up from all of the books he had read. He was, as he puts it, “a liberal-arts nobody with no coding skills or direct industry experience, thrown onto arguably the most accomplished and leading-edge videogame production team ever assembled. It’s hard to explain how unlikely that was, and how fish-out-of-water I felt.” Nevertheless, there he was — and System Shock was all the better for his presence.

Another, even more unlikely set of game developers arrived in the persons of Greg LoPiccolo and Eric and Terri Brosius, all members of a popular Boston rock band known as Tribe, who had been signed to a major label amidst the Nirvana-fueled indie-rock boom of the early 1990s, only to see the two albums they recorded fail to duplicate their local success on a national scale. They were facing a decidedly uncertain future when Doug Church and Dan Schmidt — the latter being another Looking Glass programmer, designer, and writer — showed up in the audience at a Tribe show. They loved the band’s angular, foreboding songs and arrangements, they explained afterward, and wanted to know if they’d be interested in doing the music for a science-fiction computer game that would have much the same atmosphere. Three members of the band quickly agreed, despite knowing next to nothing about computers or the games they played. “Being young, not knowing what would happen next, that was part of the magic,” remembers Eric Brosius. “We were willing to learn because it was just an exciting time.”

Terri Brosius became the voice of SHODAN, a role that fell to her by default: artificial intelligences in science fiction typically spoke in a female voice, and she was the only woman to be found among the Looking Glass creative staff. But however she got the part, she most definitely made it her own. She laughs that “people tend to get freaked out” when they hear her speak today in real life. And small wonder: her glitchy voice ringing through the empty corridors of the station, dripping with sarcastic malice, is one of the indelible memories that every player of System Shock takes away with her. Simply put, SHODAN creeps you the hell out. “You had a recurring, consistent, palpable enemy who mattered to you,” notes Doug Church — all thanks to Austin Grossman’s SHODAN script and Terri Brosius’s unforgettable portrayal of her.

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SS.mp3

As I think about the combination of technical excellence and aesthetic sophistication that was Looking Glass, I find one metaphor all but unavoidable: that of Looking Glass as the Infocom of the 1990s. Certainly Infocom, their predecessors of the previous decade on the Boston-area game-development scene, evinced much the same combination — the same thoroughgoing commitment to excellence and innovation in all of their forms — during their own heyday. If the 3D-graphics engines of Looking Glass seem a long way from the text and parsers of Infocom, let that merely be a sign of just how much gaming itself had changed in a short span of time. Even when we turn to more plebeian matters, there are connections to be found beyond a shared zip code. Both studios were intimately bound up with MIT, sharing in the ideas, personnel, and, perhaps most of all, the culture of the university; both had their offices on the same block of CambridgePark Drive; two of Looking Glass’s programmers, Dan Schmidt and Sean Barrett, later wrote well-received textual interactive fictions of their own. The metaphor isn’t ironclad by any means; Legend Entertainment, founded as it was by former Infocom author Bob Bates and employing the talents of Steve Meretzky, is another, more traditionalist answer to the question of the Infocom of the 1990s. Still, the metaphor does do much to highlight the nature of Looking Glass’s achievements, and their importance to the emerging art form of interactive narrative. Few if any studios were as determined to advance that art form as these two were.

But Looking Glass’s ambitions could occasionally outrun even their impressive abilities to implement them, just as could Infocom’s at times. In System Shock, this overreach comes in the form of the sequences that begin when you utilize one of those aforementioned cyberspace jacks that you find scattered about the station. System Shock’s cyberspace is an unattractive, unwelcoming place — and not in a good way. It’s plagued by clunky controls and graphics that manage to be both too minimalist and too garish, that are in fact almost impossible to make head or tail of. The whole thing is more frustrating than fun, not a patch on the cyberspace sequences to be found in Interplay’s much earlier computer-game adaption of William Gibson’s breakthrough novel Neuromancer. So, it turns out that even the collection of brilliant talent that was assembled at Looking Glass could have one idea too many. Doug Church:

We thought [that] it fit from a conceptual standpoint. You’re a hacker; shouldn’t you hack something? We thought it would be fun to throw in a different movement mode that was more free-form, more action. In retrospect, we probably should have either cut it or spent more time on it. There is some fun stuff in it, but it’s not as polished as it should be. But even so, it was nice because it at least reinforced the idea that you were the hacker, in a totally random, arcadey, broken kind of way. But at least it suggested that you’re something other than a guy with a gun. We were looking at ourselves and saying, “Oh, of course we should have cyberspace! We’re a cyberpunk game, we gotta have cyberspace! Well, what can we do without too much time? What if we do this crazy thing?” Off we went…

By way of compounding the problem, the final confrontation with SHODAN takes place… in cyberspace. This tortuously difficult and thoroughly unfun finale has proven to be too much for many a player, leaving her to walk away on the verge of victory with a terrible last taste of the game lingering in her mouth.

Cyberspace was a nice idea, but its implementation leaves much to be desired.

Luckily, it’s possible to work around even this weakness to a large extent, thanks to another of the generous affordances which Looking Glass built into the game. You can decide for yourself how complex and thus how difficult you wish the game to be along four different axes: Combat (the part of the game that is most like DOOM); Mission (the non-combat tasks you have to accomplish to free the station from SHODAN’s grip); Puzzle (the occasional spatial puzzles that crop up when you try to jigger a lock or the like); and Cyber (the cyberspace implementation). All of these can be set to a value between zero and three, allowing you to play System Shock as anything from a straight-up shooter where all you have to do is run and gun to an unusually immersive and emergent pure adventure game populated only by “feeble” enemies who “never attack first.” The default experience sees all of these values set at two, and this is indeed the optimal choice in my opinion for those who don’t have a complete aversion to any one of the game’s aspects — with one exception: I would recommend setting Cyber to one or even zero in order to save yourself at lot of pain, especially at the very end. (The ultimate challenge for System Shock veterans, on the other hand, comes by setting the Mission value to three; this imposes a time limit on the whole game of about seven hours.)

If you really, really want to play System Shock as a DOOM clone, that’s okay with Looking Glass.

System Shock was released in late 1994, almost two full years after Ultima Underworld II, Looking Glass’s last game. It sold acceptably but not spectacularly well for a studio that was already becoming well-acquainted with the financial worries that would continue to dog them for the rest of their existence. Reviews were quite positive, yet many of the authors of same seemed barely to have noticed the game’s subtler qualities, choosing to lump it in instead with the so-called “DOOM clones” that were beginning to flood the market by this point, almost a year after the original DOOM’s release. (One advantage of id Software’s more limited ambitions for their game was the fact that it was finished much, much quicker than System Shock; in fact, a DOOM II was already on store shelves by the time System Shock made it there.)

Although everyone at Looking Glass took the high road when asked about the DOOM connection, the press and public’s tendency to diminish their own accomplishment in 3D virtual-world-building had to rankle at some level; former employees insist to this day that DOOM had no influence whatsoever on their own creation, that System Shock would have turned out the same even had DOOM never existed. The fact is, Looking Glass’s own claim to the title of 3D-graphics pioneers is every bit as valid as that of id, and their System Shock engine actually was, as we’ve seen, more advanced than that of DOOM in a number of ways. No games studio in history has ever deserved less to be treated as imitators rather than innovators.

Alas, mainstream appreciation would be tough to come by throughout the remaining years of Looking Glass’s existence, just as it had sometimes been for Infocom before them. A market that favored the direct, visceral pleasures of id’s DOOM and, soon, Quake didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Looking Glass’s more nuanced 3D worlds. And so, yet again as with Infocom, it would not be until after Looking Glass was no more that the world of gaming would come to fully appreciate everything they had achieved. When asked pointedly about the sales charts which his games so consistently failed to top, Doug Church showed wisdom beyond his years in insisting that the important thing was just to earn enough back to make the next game.

id did a great job with [DOOM]. And more power to them. I think you want to do things that connect with the market and you want to do things that people like and you want to do things that get seen. But you also want to do things you actually believe in and you personally want to do. Hey, if you’re going to work twenty hours a day and not get paid much money, you might as well do something you like. We were building the games we were interested in; we had that luxury. We didn’t have spectacular success and a huge win, but we had enough success that we got to do some more. And at some level, at least for me, sure, I’d love to have huge, huge success. But if I get to do another game, that’s pretty hard to complain about.

Today, free of the vicissitudes of an inhospitable marketplace, System Shock more than speaks for itself. Few games, past or present, combine so many diverse ideas into such a worthy whole, and few demonstrate such uncompromising commitment to their premise and their fiction. In a catalog filled with remarkable achievements, System Shock still stands out as one of Looking Glass’s most remarkable games of all, an example of what magical things can happen when technical wizardry is placed in the service of real aesthetic sophistication. By all means, go play it now if you haven’t already. Or, perhaps better said, go live it now.

(Sources: the books Game Design Theory and Practice, second edition, by Richard Rouse III and System Shock: Strategies and Secrets by Bernie Yee; Origin’s official System Shock hint book; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from June 3 1994, November 23 1994, January 13 1995, February 10 1995, March 14 1995, and May 5 1995; Electronic Entertainment of December 1994; Computer Gaming World of December 1994; Next Generation of February 1995; Game Developer of April/May 1995. Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: The History of Looking Glass” and “From Looking Glass to Harmonix: The Tribe,” both by Mike Mahardy of Polygon. Most of all, huge thanks to Dorian Hart, Sean Barrett, and Dan Schmidt for talking with me about their time at Looking Glass.

System Shock is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

Comments
52 Responses

- Steve McCrea

March 19, 2021 at 7:30 pm

I loved this game when it came out on floppy disk, even the cyberspace parts!
There are countless insights to be found in these fascinating interviews too:
http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/audio/looking_glass_studios_podcast/
(For example, just how much work it was to make Shodan sound like Shodan)

- Joshua Barrett

March 19, 2021 at 8:08 pm

I love System Shock. But man, it can be hard to go back and replay, even by the standards of the era. The interface is clumsier than it really needs to be, although numerous people have patched in mouselook support in various ways over the years. This is a game that gave you eyes in the back of your head as an upgrade for a reason. Many a time, I looked down and struggled to look back up in time to react to what was going on aroind me. At the time, the speed also leaves much to be desired, and I think that’s a more important factor than you imply here: System Shock, as much as it is the “thinking man’s shooter” counterpart to Doom’s more action-driven gameplay, is still an action game. When you die because your computer isn’t good enough to run the game, the game ceases to be fun. Thankfully, on a modern system this is a non-issue.

Another big obstacle people don’t discuss in System Shock’s way was that Looking Glass were made to launch the floppy disk version of System Shock before the CD version. This seems innocuous enough, but the floppy disk version left notable omissions—most notably, voice acting. If you bought System Shock on launch from your local game store in 1994, you would barely hear SHODAN’s voice. The music was also downgraded. Given how much that adds to the game’s atmosphere, I can imagine it may have effected early evaluations of the game.

I still love it, but I know a few people who have found it utterly unplayable.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2021 at 9:53 pm

System Shock was developed at a time when the world hadn’t yet settled on a standard way of controlling these types of games. I’m not sure to what extent it’s truly clumsy and to what extent it can just *feel* that way to folks who have had the One True Modern Interface ingrained on their brains. I sometimes think I have an easier time with these old FPS-style games because I’ve never spent much time playing newer ones; I’m sure it will surprise exactly no regular readers if I reveal that it’s never been my favorite genre. I played the original System Shock for this article without any mouse-look patches or the like, so I can’t speak to how they change the experience. However, I would be slightly concerned that making such radical changes could wind up breaking the game Looking Glass intended. Again, though, I have no direct experience.

In my opinion, the best way to play the unpatched System Shock is with a flight-style joystick — a rather endangered gaming peripheral these days, I know. Set up your hat control to make you lean left and right and crouch up and down, and you’re getting somewhere. I suspect — I probably should have asked one of interviewees directly, but I never thought of it — that Looking Glass primarily envisioned joystick control.

System Shock definitely moves at a slower pace than DOOM, and to some extent this is due to programming limitations, but I do think there’s an element of design in there as well. I tend to play very slowly and tactically: sneaking my way to advantageous positions, leaning and crouching like crazy, etc., playing like a sniper. I’m not at all good at most action games, but I find that System Shock works pretty well for my play style. I’m certainly better at it than I am at DOOM. (Of course, there’s also the fact that I find the premise and aesthetics of System Shock more interesting and appealing, which could make me more willing to persevere with it…)

- Steve McCrea

March 19, 2021 at 11:22 pm

There’s some discussion of the controls in the podcasts I linked to above. For example, explaining that mouse look only works when the framerate is above a threshold that these games don’t reach on contemporary hardware. Also, that the game auto-levels your view when you start moving to increase the framerate, since the texture mapping is faster when you are looking straight ahead, and mouse look would eliminate that speedup.

- Nate Owens

March 20, 2021 at 1:02 am

The Enhanced Edition from a few years ago has a toggle between mouselook and mouse-interact that, while not exactly what a modern player would want, got the job done for me.

- Joshua Barrett

March 20, 2021 at 3:10 pm

I’m a bit dubious about the game being designed with joystick in mind, simply because of the mouse dependency. However, while the controls are clunky, in that they make common rapid reactions (adjusting view, turning) laborious, I should also note that for 1994 they were actually quite innovative. SZXC functions as System Shock’s wasd, A and D turn, qwe leans, rfv adjusts your view, and tgb adjusts height. This is much, much closer to a modern control scheme than any other game of the time. It’s a clean, logical, memorable set of keyboard bindings which ensures keys for controlling every vital function are within two keys of movement, which is more than I can say for the keyboard controls that would arrive with the Build Engine games (ugh…) that popularized vertical look on the FPS side of things.

But while the interface does have its merits, the fact is that making turning and looking so difficult can make the game much more frustrating, even though the game very deliberately used that fact to build tension. Mouse look patches (which add a mouselook toggle, usually on e or f) don’t ruin the experience, in my opinion (I’ve played both with and without), but they do make thimgs different: The rear camera mod because useless, and combat is a little easier. On the whole, I’m glad it exists, because it makes a game that most modern players would balk at attempting infinitely more accessible.

- wds

June 30, 2021 at 8:08 pm

Settled or not, System Shock had the worst interface of any game I’ve ever played. Looking Glass failed to understand that interface is a fundamental part of game design and gameplay, and that, if push comes to shove, the rest of the game design should be adjusted to fit an efficient and intuitive interface. SS was a pile of great ideas all thrown together with no regard for how the player would interact with any of those ideas, or how they would fit with each other, and the interface seems to have been a half-baked afterthought at best. The result is a downright unplayable mess. The Enhanced Edition is only barely playable.

I think where System Shock failed, though, Marathon succeeded. Unfortunately, those of us who weren’t on Macs had no idea what we were missing at the time.

- minusf

March 19, 2021 at 11:24 pm

i am one of the few that always preferred the “mouse aim” instead of “mouse look” and i wish more companies experimented with this style of controls, after all we move our heads only when “turning”, not when aiming at something in front of us.

but of course having keys to move the head is slow, so maybe by having an “inner region” and an “outer region” of the viewport, where moving the mouse only in the “inner region” wouldn’t move the head only the crosshair and moving the mouse further out into the “outer region” would start turning the head :]

the first game to introduce to modern mouse look AFAIK was bethesda’s Terminator Future Shock one year later.

- TM

April 2, 2021 at 8:06 am

“the first game to introduce to modern mouse look AFAIK was bethesda’s Terminator Future Shock one year later.”

In fact, Marathon already included mouse-look before that (it was released in December 94).
But mouse-look in FPS is even older, since it was found in The Colony in 1988 — however in that game it was only used on the horizontal axis; the vertical axis of the mouse was used to move forward/backward IIRC.
I guess in a way it made sense for mouse-look to first appear in Mac games. :-)

For those who have never heard of The Colony: it was an FPS in which you played a lone marshall exploring a space colony that was invaded (what a surprise!) by alien monsters — I don’t know how many times this idea was used and reused in the FPS world. :-D

- Peter Olausson

March 19, 2021 at 9:22 pm

I love the way the “shock” in the name was resurrected in what’s been called it’s spiritual successor, Bioshock (2007). Especially because it was way more successful. Guess that story will be told here, eventually. :-)

- Cheshire Noir

March 20, 2021 at 1:46 am

The game that made me fall in love with PC gaming. I’d had an Amiga up to this point (And quite a kickass one at that) so the PC was always a “work” system for me. Then I got System Shock on a system more than capable of playing it and that was it for me. Within 6 months I’d packed up the Amiga and gave it away.
I still play it regularly and kickstarted the (not so) recent reboot effort.
Fondest memory was playing it in a darkened room with my brother, creeping through a robot infested level, conserving ammo and being super-careful, when the wind blew the door closed behind us. We both screamed and I burned through a precious clip of slag rounds spraying in a 360 degree arc.

Also a game where the sequel was as good, if not better, but that’s a story for another day.

- Tom

March 28, 2021 at 3:05 am

Yes! One of the scariest moments I experienced in System Shock was very similar. A stupid elevator door closing unexpectedly had me jumping out of my skin.

- Andrew Pam

March 20, 2021 at 3:33 am

“at the every end” is a typo for “at the very end”.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that System Shock is sufficiently well remembered that it is now being remade with release due this year: https://store.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/

See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(upcoming_video_game)

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 8:01 am

Thanks!

- Jon

March 20, 2021 at 3:56 am

“the System Shock engine outdoes DOOM in every sense but the admittedly important one of raw speed … None of this is true of DOOM; it’s peculiarly flat and regular spaces were designed to avoid many of the complications which System Shock tackles head-on.”

It’s difficult to take anything you say seriously when you write nonsense like this. Having worked directly with both, I know that System Shock’s environments are far more constrained than Doom’s in significant ways. System Shock’s engine, like Ultima Underworld’s, is based on a tile system, something patently obvious if you look at the map screenshot you’ve included in this article. This limits the levels to arrangements of these 64×64 unit tiles, and means that, unlike in the Doom engine, you cannot have walls at arbitrary angles, or spaces of arbitrary shape and size. Walls can only be perfectly straight or at a 45 degree angle. You cannot, for example, have a curved wall, or a spiked one, or really any kind of the kind of complex, large-scale and dynamic architecture you see in many Doom levels.

That’s not to say that the System Shock engine was primitive. It was not. It was a great technical achievement and did have numerous advantages over the Doom engine. But to claim it outdid id’s engines in every respect except performance is a deliberate, ahistorical lie. Doom, and the rest of Id’s output is not to your taste, that is something you’d made abundantly clear. But to allow that distaste to so warp your presentation of basic technical information is a total betrayal of your claim to be a digital historian.

System Shock was and is a great game. It doesn’t need someone trying to clumsily diminish the achievements of its contemporaries in order to be so.

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 7:59 am

Thanks! My understanding of the DOOM engine from The DOOM Black Book has obviously failed me somewhat, or my memory has. I’ve softened the wording of the comparison and acknowledged some of the affordances of the DOOM engine which I’d neglected. If you have any more suggestions of how to highlight the differences between the engines without getting too far down into the weeds, I would certainly appreciate it. I’m not a 3D-engine programmer, so these things can sometimes be a challenge for me.

- Martin

March 20, 2021 at 6:09 pm

While not an engine design, really just a design feature, did System Shock implement the level files external from the code files (as in WAD files)? That extendability was something that took Doom to another level and the reason there are people still playing it now.

- dmdr

March 23, 2021 at 4:26 am

“non-vertical walls”

presumably by this you mean something like ‘non-orthogonal walls’, since Doom’s walls are always vertical (no slopes, as you noted yourself). ‘Arbitrarily angled walls’ might be better.

Did Shock have lowering/raising floors or anything like that? I honestly don’t remember anymore, might be worth mentioning if it doesn’t (manipulating Doom’s floor actions is how you get the ‘dynamic architecture’ Jon mentioned above).

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2021 at 7:23 am

That is better. Thanks!

System Shock does have raising and lowering floors, assuming I’m understanding you correctly. Within the individual levels, there are freight-style “elevators” where you push a button to move them up and down whilst standing on top.

- Aula

March 20, 2021 at 6:30 am

“but it in a more natural”

but in

“it’s peculiarly flat and regular spaces”

its

“the every end”

very

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 8:03 am

Thanks!

- Mark Williams

March 20, 2021 at 11:23 am

I was never a great fan of the System Shock games, partly because they scared me! However I loved playing Terra Nova, despite its low resolution, and was disappointed it was never upgraded visually.
I also loved the Thief games, which in many ways perfected the approach to environmental problem solving you describe in this article.

- Martin

March 20, 2021 at 2:48 pm

So can someone compare System Shock with Marathon (which only ran on the Mac)? I would have imagined that few would have experienced both together back in the 90’s but now they could be compared side by side.

Sounds like both that exploritory component in uncovering the real story that is taking place around you though I would guess that Marathon has more of a fighting component.

- Owen C.

March 20, 2021 at 4:58 pm

Not sure if you are asking this as someone familiar with System Shock or as someone familiar with Marathon.
It’s true that both System Shock and Marathon have a lot of pieces of story found throughout the environment; mostly audio logs found on corpses in System Shock and computer terminals found throughout the levels in Marathon. Of particular note are the more cryptic terminals in out-of-the-way areas of Marathon whose meanings are still being debated by fans decades after the game’s release. Marathon arguably has a more complicated story than System Shock, especially the later games like Marathon Infinity with its bizarre narrative structure that hops between alternate realities. Also in spite of SHODAN’s memorable voice acting I think that Durandal is a more interesting rogue AI since he’s a bit more morally nuanced and you spend most of the series working for him.
Though outside of the greater emphasis on story and atmosphere, in terms of both game mechanics and engine Marathon is a traditional linear first-person shooter similar to Doom. System Shock was an early attempt at the immersive sim genre so you have a wider range of options like drugs and cyborg implants rather than only guns, and you have more variety in objectives like destroying cameras/computer cores and the hacking and cyberspace minigames. The exploration is also more open-ended where you can move freely between levels of the station rather than a strictly linear series of levels. It also uses a pretty different engine than both Doom and Marathon in terms of being tile based with sloping walls and floors.
While they are both interested in story and atmosphere, Marathon is mechanically similar to Doom so I feel like it’s the same as the System Shock/Doom comparison in the article, where they don’t really belong to the same genre so it’s comparing apples and oranges.
(For the record I was a fan of Marathon growing up but could never really get into System Shock 1 or 2. I love Thief and Deus Ex though)

Also quick correction in the article, it’s Terri Brosius not Terry

- Martin

March 20, 2021 at 6:12 pm

I see Warren Specter was the game producer. So a game leading up to Deus Ex, huh. Interesting. Deus Ex is my favorite game ever BTW.

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 9:22 pm

Thanks!

- Wade Clarke

March 22, 2021 at 1:32 am

The Marathon games are always pretty scary/atmospheric in the visceral sense. But I think what cements their aesthetic for me is the underlying feeling that you’re never entirely sure why you’re doing what you’re doing. Which is really interesting for a game with lots of intense action (interspersed with wandering creepy abandoned spaceships) and where, mechanically, you have concrete goals on each level. And this uneasiness is all down to the pure text dispensed by the AIs through the terminals. In feeling, it’s actually a pretty similar to how parser adventure games create unease with unreliable narrators, which is what the AIs are.

Durandal doesn’t present as rogue straight off, so you start in a relationship of trust, and potentially think of him along the lines of: ‘This is just the game telling me what to do on this level’. When he does start getting strange, you still have no choice but to fulfil his goals, and feel uneasy. Then other AIs start stepping in and saying ‘This AI is rogue, do what we say instead.’ At first this is experienced as a relief, or rescue. But having been shown you can’t accept what’s being dispensed by these terminals at face value, you never really do again, especially when the plot starts feeling abstract / hard-to-follow and you’re given conflicting orders. e.g. You’re now asked to help creatures you were told to shoot in earlier levels because a particular AI has aligned with them.

So you’re definitely a pawn in Marathon, and you’re given a rather mysterious view of what’s going on in the world framing yours, and I don’t think you ever feel certain about what’s going on out there. I certainly never felt particularly good or clear about what I’d done in Marathon after each level, plot-wise, as I never knew if it was really for the greater good. All I knew was that I survived.

- Joshua Barrett

March 20, 2021 at 5:05 pm

Marathon did have a PC port…

Anyways, Marathon and System Shock are very, very different beasts. System Shock, for all its lack of a levelling system and its comparatively action-oriented personality, is still a successor to Ultima Underworld and firmly entrenched in the Looking Glass tradition of building environments that feel more like living places than game levels: Theme informs design, not the other way around. Citadel Station feels like a real station: it’s cramped because every inch is being utilized for something: space is limited, and can’t be wasted. At the same time, each level is lined with passages and interconnections to ensure that humans can quickly and easily navigate between locations. Shodan can’t move walls, so she prevents your free movement through passive means: locking doors, manipulating the ship security system. No matter how badly something is needed for gameplay reasons, I always *believe* that there’s a narrative reason for it because Looking Glass has made me trust that there will always be one.

Marathon is constructed more like a traditional FPS of the era. Levels do more to simulate real places than Doom, but they are still “game-ey.” Ultimately, Marathon’s plot happens to “people” who aren’t you. You serve as an incidental agent for the more important parties and occasionally getting glimpses of the bigger picture. System Shock’s narrative actually centers on you. Marathon is also more action-oriented than System Shock, which is a slower, more methodical, almost horror-inspired game. Although it is hampered by weapon design I’d characterize as suboptimal (Marathon, I mean).

- Martin

March 20, 2021 at 6:21 pm

I thought on Marathon 2 was ported to the PC. Sure all three can be played on a pc now, but back in the 1990’s, …

Take the point about you not being in the middle of the events in Marathon though. That would provide a different playing experience.

- Brian

March 21, 2021 at 2:49 pm

Thanks—came here to raise that. Durandal’s messages still echo in my memory. And boy do I remember the first time I was walking a bridge through a big room, chasms on both sides, when a Compiler drifted up next to me. I just about had a heart attack.

- Oded

March 20, 2021 at 3:27 pm

Typo – “from Look Glass” should be “from Looking Glass”

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 4:53 pm

Thanks!

- Iffy Bonzoolie

March 20, 2021 at 6:03 pm

Another random Infocom link to Looking Glass: Meretzky worked at Floodgate for a time, Neurath’s later studio. This was after the 90’s, so I guess a bit retroactive.

Who was the Infocom of the aughts?

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2021 at 9:24 pm

I’m afraid I don’t know anywhere near enough about that era to say. Ask me again in fifteen years. ;)

- Kevin Butler

March 23, 2021 at 4:49 pm

Well then, I stand corrected. My apologies on this one.

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- John

March 20, 2021 at 11:06 pm

Huh. I knew that Austin Grossman had written for various games, but I did not know that System Shock was one of them. His novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is one of my favorite books. I’m also quite fond of his second novel, You, which is about, among other things, game development and the history of the games industry. As you read along, it’s fun to speculate about which characters might correspond to which actual industry figures.

Alas, this is still not quite enough to get me to play System Shock. I played the demo once on the family PC back in the late 90s and, uh, let’s say it didn’t click with me.

- Kai

March 21, 2021 at 4:21 pm

“So, there would no numbers in his next game” – missing a ‘be’, but I guess the duplicate ‘in’ in “the System Shock engine outdoes DOOM in in a number of” kinda evens it out.

- Jimmy Maher

March 21, 2021 at 8:29 pm

Thanks!

- Bmp

March 21, 2021 at 9:44 pm

When games have sophisticated writing, critics who prefer cerebral entertainment tend to overlook their gameplay weaknesses and overemphasize their strengths. Even given this, I think this article is a bit too unbalanced.

A reader who didn’t play any of these games would get the impression that System Shock is a flawless masterpiece that was not as successful as its rival Doom mostly because, due to its complexity, it was necessarily too demanding for the audience.

I’d argue against this. First, there are several weaknesses in System Shock’s gameplay that should be mentioned, and secondly, the comparison with Doom is rather biased.

I played and completed System Shock sometime in 2000-2010, after completing System Shock 2, and I enjoyed the game. But if I wanted to play a similar game today, I sure would like the level design and combat to be improved.

– If I remember correctly, the combat is boring a lot of the time because the player is able to control the situation too easily. You usually don’t need to engage more than 1 or 2 enemies at the same time. The different enemy types don’t force the player to use sufficiently different tactics – they can almost always be sniped around the corner. This is in contrast to Doom and especially Doom 2 with their huge variety of combat situations, due to the far more diverse level design and large monster variety.

– The level design in System Shock is rather monotonous both from a gameplay as well as from a visual perspective. It’s mostly cramped labyrinths. The game would have benefited a lot from Doom’s level design variety, which, in my opinion, far exceeded that of any other action game so far, due to the possibilities Doom’s engine gave its level designers. But even Ultima Underworld had more varied locations, in my opinion, not least due to the rivers and lakes.

– Player movement and controls are needlessly complex and fiddly and don’t feel half as good as Doom’s default controls and not one tenth as good as Doom’s mouse-look and keyboard combination. This can’t simply be excused due the game’s higher complexity – the user interface is just overloaded and poorly designed. It almost seems like Looking Glass’s more cerebral developers just didn’t have the intuition for smooth and intuitive movement controls, in a similar way as Ultima 8’s designers didn’t reach half of the movement feel as its inspiration Prince of Persia.

– System Shock has some advanced engine features, but I question how much benefit they actually bring to the game. The way the levels use slopes, to me they don’t seem to make much difference compared to stairs – and if as a level designer I could only choose one, I’d certainly choose stairs. System Shock has bridges (and Ultima Underworld already had them too – they’re sprite objects the player can stand on), which, granted, Doom would have benefited from. The lighting may be realistically simulated, but the level designer-controlled lighting in Doom sure seems to be used in far more impressive situations.

– Anyway, these advanced engine features are unimportant in light of the fact that System Shocks’s levels suffer enormously from the fact that they are rigidly tile-based, which Jon above already explained and which wasn’t even mentioned in the article despite its importance. This alone makes Doom’s levels so much more versatile and visually interesting that it’s really no contest.

– The claim about Looking Glass’s “aesthetic sophistication” is a bit vague, but regarding the visuals I’d say that System Shock is a bit drab and artistically merely decent. (Whereas, again, Doom established an iconic art style that can carry a whole subgenre.) And aside from the excellent voice acting, the sound effects pale to Doom’s growling demons searching for the player.

– What does “you must constantly use light and shadow” mean? Is there actually a practical way to sneak past enemies in the dark? I doubt it, as this claim was bandied about related to Ultima Underworld already, and it didn’t make much of a difference there either as far as I could tell. Generally, I don’t remember that I had to play in any kind of clever way to win System Shock, but maybe I’ve forgotten those parts.

– I always love it when gameplay is so good that it makes me want to re-play in a higher difficulty level (forcing me to play more tactically and more skillfully), or that it makes me want to continue playing with level expansion sets. That is very much the case with Doom, as anyone can see due to the sheer number of fan-made custom level sets on doomworld.com, proving the huge appetite for playing and for creating more levels. In contrast, the percentage of players who finish System Shock 1 or 2 and hunt for fan-made levels is far lower, I’d bet. There’s not this feeling that the official levels have merely scratched the surface of what is possible with the game features. The Thief games are two games where Looking Glass achieved this, though.

System Shock is still a great game (the sequel more so, IMO) and I’d like to play more well-made games in this genre. But if immersive sims are to be sufficiently commercially successful that they justify their development, it wouldn’t hurt to take a page out of Doom’s playbook.

A “vague sense of fatalism” because Doom “needed much less player education” and “was more likely to be commercially successful” is not exactly a suitable approach to make immersive sims competitive. Don’t underestimate the audience. But immersive sim developers shouldn’t limit themselves by bowing out of the competition with pure action titles when it comes to controls, combat, level design and fun gameplay flow.

For example, why the heck did the recent Prey limit its audience from the start by merely featuring fuzzy black shapes as enemies?

On a different note, for anyone who has completed System Shock I wholeheartedly recommend Shamus Young’s fan fiction book “Free Radical”, which is online here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/index.php

If you’re sceptical of the quality of a fan fiction work, maybe reconsider, as this book starts from the game’s premise and weaves a gripping story from start to finish, with a very cool ending. It’s worth it.

- Mike B.

March 22, 2021 at 12:31 am

I could never get into System Shock. System Shock 2, on the other hand, was a masterpiece. Still a pretty decent game today with mods. Highly looking forward to the System Shock remake coming this summer.

- Lars

March 22, 2021 at 11:23 am

The source code for the Mac/PPC version has officially been published on GitHub: https://github.com/NightDive-Studio
Unfortunately, It requires the Mac data specifically.

- Petter Sjölund

March 25, 2021 at 12:28 am

The re-write for modern systems and PC assets is here: https://github.com/Interrupt/systemshock

- Kevin Butler

March 23, 2021 at 3:40 pm

“…Three members of the band quickly agreed,…” Makes it sound like there are more members then three. To make it a better read, it probably should be “…The three members of the band quickly agreed,…”

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2021 at 4:25 pm

But there were more members than three. ;)

- Nate

March 24, 2021 at 4:17 am

Is there a word missing in this quote? I don’t know how to parse it.

“We hope that our toiling now to make things work when it is still very hard to do effectively…”

Maybe “to do so effectively”?

- Jimmy Maher

March 24, 2021 at 7:47 am

That’s a direct quote from a published interview. It reads clearly enough to me, but mileages may vary…

- Jonathan O

March 25, 2021 at 9:14 pm

“… is more advanced than the psuedo-3D of …” should be “… is more advanced than the pseudo-3D of …”

- Jimmy Maher

March 26, 2021 at 7:53 am

Thanks!

- Anton

March 26, 2021 at 1:19 pm

Well, it looks like you have triggered some sensitive Doom fans here. Personally I am extremely sad that everybody nowadays thinks id software and Doom were pioneers of FPS genre and overlook the fact that Ultima Underworld came earlier and had a lot of innovations that we take for granted today. But history has proven that, although Doom has better publicity, it is obvious that its path led nowhere – Half Life has practically killed Doom-style FPS, as developers try to incorporate better plots and immersion features nowadays, which is great IMHO.

- stepped pyramids

March 30, 2021 at 3:16 pm

I think that’s overstated. Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine, and the designers credit Doom as an inspiration. Quake multiplayer was massively influential on later games. The major non-Doom influence on modern FPS is Halo, anyway.

- EG

April 9, 2021 at 9:54 pm

CS-GO is the most-played PC game on Steam; that would speak against the claim here, not to mention the entire genres based on death-match type online play. If you limit it to single-player experiences, sure.

The Ratings Game, Part 1: A Likely and an Unlikely Suspect
April 9, 2021

Warning: this article contains images of pixelated male genitalia.

On December 9, 1993, members of the United States Senate’s Subcommittee on Regulation and Government Information and its Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice held a joint hearing on the topic of violence and sex in videogames. Educators, social scientists, activists, and several prominent figures from the videogame industry itself spoke there for almost three hours. More heat than light was on display for much of that time: the middle-aged politicians often displayed a comprehensive ignorance of the subject at hand, the supposed experts often treated nuanced issues with stubborn stridency, and the industry figures often proved more interested in attacking each other than mounting a coordinated defense against the charge of being the corruptors of America’s youth.

But history sometimes moves in surprising ways. The hearing prompted far-reaching changes in gaming out of all proportion to its worthiness as a good-faith debate about a significant social concern. The first and to-date only industry-wide standard for rating the content in videogames — the same system that is still in use today — was one outcome. And another, much stranger result was the splashy trade show that has since come to dominate the industry’s public-relations calendar. One might say that December 9, 1993, was the day that the games industry began to wake up to a sense of itself as a distinct mass-media entity in its own right.

This is the story of how those things came to be.

Videogames have been causing intermittent moral panics for almost as long as they’ve existed. The first of them to ignite public ire dates all the way back to 1976 and a small company called Exidy. The year before, Exidy had made a standup-arcade game called Destruction Derby, about the time-honored American motorsports pastime of the demolition derby, a staple of county fairs and other rural gatherings. When Chicago Coin, the company who had agreed to distribute the game to arcades, failed to pay them their royalties, Exidy revamped it into something called Death Race and released it on their own. Instead of other cars, you were now expected to collide with stick figures, called “gremlins” or “monsters” in Exidy’s official terminology, in order to score points. When you hit one, it was replaced with a little gravestone.

As it happened, though, a recent B-movie called Death Race 2000 was generating enraged headlines at the very same time. Starring a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, it dealt with a cross-country road race of the dystopian future where the drivers were rewarded with bonus points for mowing down pedestrians en route. It’s very difficult to say what the connection between the film and the game actually was. The programmer who created the latter has insisted to this day that he was unaware of the movie at the time he did so. Still, the shared title remains quite a coincidence. Perhaps a marketer at Exidy belatedly elected to capitalize on the film’s notoriety by giving the already finished game the same name?

Death Race, with its onscreen tombstones to mark dead pedestrians.

At any rate, the shared title certainly wasn’t lost on the media at the time. Several television-news programs, including the highly respected nationwide 60 Minutes, ran segments about the game after receiving a flood of complaints from parents and other concerned adults, and many or most arcade owners removed it from their floor. Nolan Bushnell, the founder and chief executive of industry leader Atari, was very displeased with the negative attention Death Race brought to a burgeoning new form of entertainment: “We had an internal rule that we wouldn’t allow violence against people. You could blow up a tank or you could blow up a flying saucer, but you couldn’t blow up people. We felt that was not good form.” But Pete Kaufman, the founder of Exidy, was unrepentant. Those arcade owners who weren’t scared away by the controversy, he noted, did a booming business with Death Race.

The young industry was already learning an important lesson: that extreme violence in a videogame is dangerous because of the unwanted attention it can attract, but that it also has the potential to be very, very profitable. The industry’s future would be marked by a delicate dance between these two realities, as it attempted to be outrageous enough to attract customers with a taste for violence without going so far as to bring the heavy hand of government down upon its head.

Atari and their American and Japanese competitors went from strength to strength in the years after Death Race. First arcades became centerpieces of adolescent social life, and then, thanks to the Atari VCS home console, videogames took over American living rooms as well. The elder generation reacted to these things in much the same way that their parents had to such youth phenomena as Elvis and the Beatles: with a shrug of complete incomprehension, followed in many cases by concerns about the influence of this strange new pop-culture development on their children’s mental and even moral well-being.

The city council of the Dallas, Texas, suburb of Mesquite went so far as to ban children from visiting arcades without an adult escort. A legal challenge raised by the American Civil Liberties Union in response made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which struck the law down as unconstitutional in 1982. Undaunted, Dr. C. Everett Koop, President Ronald Reagan’s unusually prominent surgeon general, became a vocal critic of videogames and an advocate for laws to limit their pernicious influence, claiming that they were consciously engineered to addict children, “body and soul.”

It’s an odd truism of American culture that, while violence in media may upset various people at various times, nothing brings out the censors in the body politic like a little sex. In October of 1982, a company called Mystique, with ties to the pornography industry, proved this once again with an Atari VCS game called Custer’s Revenge, which combined violence and sex, then added a concluding flourish of racism. In it, you played a reincarnation of the benighted general. His most prominent onscreen feature was his outlandishly long penis, which he used to rape the Native American women he found scattered about the battlefield, already helpfully tied to stakes.

Custer’s Revenge. Be careful of the cacti when you’re waving that thing around…

Controversy had clearly been the whole point of the game, and it was rewarded with its full measure, managing to unite the American Indian Community House, the National Organization for Women, and Women Against Pornography for a shared protest outside the New York City venue where it was shown to the press for the first time. Robin Quinn of the last-named organization proclaimed, accurately enough, that the game “says that rape is not only a legitimate form of revenge but a legitimate form of entertainment.” Even the aged George Armstrong Custer III came out of the woodwork to complain that his grandfather’s reputation was being “maligned,” while Atari filed a dubious lawsuit claiming that the very existence of the game on their console created a “wrongful association” in the minds of the public. Arnie Katz, the founding editor of Electronic Games magazine, remembers telling the leadership of the protest movement that “the best way to keep the game from selling is to ignore it.” In the absence of a willingness to heed that perhaps wise advice, Custer’s Revenge wound up selling about 80,000 copies, at $50 a pop. Two other, similarly tasteless “adult” games from Mystique attracted less attention from groups who largely spent their outrage on Custer’s Revenge, and, just as Katz had predicted, proved much less commercially successful.

Still, the arrival of games of this ilk would surely have led to more controversy and eventually to serious calls for legislation, if only what struck many as the passing fad for videogames hadn’t ended abruptly the following year, in the series of events that have gone down in history as the Great Videogame Crash. By the beginning of 1984, the arcade market was greatly diminished, the home-console market effectively destroyed. For the next few years, for the first and only time in the history of digital gaming, computers rather than consoles became the most popular way to play games in the home; the Commodore 64 home computer became the new heart of the gaming mass market.

But even that machine, ultra-popular though it was as a computer model, wasn’t a patch on what the Atari VCS had been. Likewise, the market for floppy-disk-based entertainment software was a small fraction of the size of the former market for console cartridges — so small that it existed out of the sights and minds of the sort of public agencies that had raised concerns about the videogames of the earlier era. Thus software publishers felt little or no compunction about including whatever content struck their fancy and seemed most likely to appeal to their primarily young and male audience. Strip-poker games, many featuring digitized photographs of real models, were a dime a dozen; casual profanity was everywhere; the CRPG Wasteland gave you the option of visiting a house of ill repute (and catching “Wasteland herpes” as a reward for your effort).

Sometimes the lack of condemnation from the fuddy-duddy set could be downright frustrating. When Steve Meretzky of the text-adventure maker Infocom failed to generate any controversy with A Mind Forever Voyaging, his brutal take-down of the Reagan administration’s conservative politics, he decided to make a sex comedy called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. He confidently expected that, as he wrote in the game’s self-congratulatory opening text, people would soon be “indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico.” The actual result? Crickets — and a bunch of other adventure games, such as Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry series, that were even naughtier, and included graphics to boot.

Sex Vixens from Space, one of many risque games that were eagerly played by adolescent boys during the games industry’s equivalent of pre-Hays Code Hollywood.

The return of concerns about videogame content to the public consciousness unsurprisingly coincided with the return of console systems, and the vastly greater number of players they’ve always tended to attract, to the center of the mass market. The Nintendo Entertainment System was first imported to North America from Japan in a rather quiet and cautious fashion in late 1985. But by 1987, it was gaining steam quickly, and by decade’s end its market penetration exceeded even that of the Atari VCS in its heyday.

The fact was, the executives at Nintendo, both those in Japan and in the United States, had made a careful study of what Atari had gotten right and wrong back in the day, and developed a plan for how they could do things in a better, more sustainable way. Nintendo exercised complete control over the NES and everything associated with it. They created an ironclad legal framework which allowed them to decide who was allowed to make NES games, what sort of games these were allowed to be down to the very last detail, and even how many cartridges their software “partners” were allowed to manufacture and sell. Then, as the icing on the cake, Nintendo took a cut of every NES game anyone sold. Not only did this approach make the company extraordinarily profitable, but it ensured that they wouldn’t have to contend with any examples of a Custer’s Revenge and the ensuing public-relations nightmare. Nintendo hewed to a firm “family-friendly” policy. Anecdotes about their censorship regime abound, from the swimsuit calendar which they forced LucasFilm Games to pull down from a wall inside Maniac Mansion to the gravestone crosses which Capcom had to remove from DuckTales — for, in Nintendo’s zeal not to offend, religious symbols of even the most understated stripe were strictly prohibited.

Nevertheless, plenty of Americans found plenty of room in their hearts to be offended by Nintendo’s success. In many cases, their concerns about the heavy-handed tactics which the company used to control both the medium and the message of the NES were perfectly reasonable. Still, a distinct whiff of xenophobia and/or outright racism clung to many of the criticisms, manifested in dark mutterings about the latest Pearl Harbor, couched in stereotypes about the shifty Oriental character. When Nintendo introduced the Game Boy handheld console in 1989 and saw it blow up as big as the NES, the mutterings threatened to become a chorus.

Believing that the winds of public opinion were at their back, Atari Games and Atari Corporation, the two halves into which the old king of American videogames had been split back in 1984, launched a series of legal challenges that attempted to tear down the barriers around Nintendo’s walled garden. These would drag on for years, but would never provide the decisive victory the deposed kings of gaming were looking for; they soon learned that Nintendo could afford good lawyers too. Ditto a probe by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission; the smoking gun these would-be trust busters were looking for either didn’t exist or was very well-hidden.

But there was also another reason that the government investigation fizzled out anticlimactically in 1992, two years after its beginning: Nintendo had some genuine competition in the console space by that point, making it hard for the agencies to stick them with the monopoly tag. The Sega Genesis console, another product of a Japanese company, had first reached American shores in August of 1989. It thoroughly outclassed the NES in technical terms, with a 16-bit rather than an 8-bit processor and far better graphics and sound. Justifiably alarmed, Nintendo did everything they could to snuff out Sega’s North American operation, pressuring everyone from game publishers to retail stores to shun the alternative platform or face the consequences. Their efforts kept Sega on the ropes for quite some time, but Nintendo never could completely finish the job. A turning point came when Electronic Arts, one of the largest American game publishers, chose to make Sega rather than Nintendo their platform of first choice.

By 1992, following years of dogged effort, Sega had brought their brand to a place of near commercial parity with Nintendo, despite the appearance in 1991 of a new Super NES which made up for most of the NES’s failings in comparison to the Genesis and then some. Sega owed their success at least partially to their willingness to embrace edgier and often more violent content, pitched to a slightly older adolescent demographic than the stereotypical Nintendo fanatic. The differences in corporate personality were vividly illustrated by the two companies’ de-facto mascots. Nintendo’s Mario was cute and sweet and harmless; Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog was manic and a little unhinged — a little bit more dangerous than the cuddly Italian plumber. Sega didn’t hesitate to call out their target by name: “Sega Genesis does what Nintendon’t,” ran one of their most-used slogans. But it could just as easily have read, “Sega Genesis does what Nintendo won’t,” in terms of content. The two companies’ North American management absolutely loathed one another. Soon they would parade their antipathies before no less august a body than the United States Senate.

Although that landmark hearing would purport to examine questionable videogame content in general, its story is inextricably bound up with that of two games in particular, as different from one another as they could be in their genres, format, and to some extent even the audiences they attempted to reach. One was notable for its extreme level of violence, while the other was notable for its combination of sex and violence — or rather was made notable by politicians and others who convinced themselves that it contained far more of both than was actually the case. We’ll take the two suspects one at a time.

Arcades were still blundering along at this late date, sustained by the impressive audiovisuals that were made possible by their specialized hardware, which not even the likes of the SNES could match. By far the biggest arcade hit of 1992 was a game called Mortal Kombat, the latest in what was already a long line of so-called “fighting games.” (“Aren’t most videogames fighting games?” says the naïve observer…)

The premise was simplicity itself: you and an opponent — in the form of either the computer or, for maximum entertainment, your human buddy — controlled avatars who stood face to face on the screen and beat the ever-loving crap out of one another. Mortal Kombat won special favor in a crowded field for the variety of fighters you could choose to control, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses; for its many moves, counter-moves, and power-move combinations; for its rambunctiously over-the-top depiction of the action, including copious amounts of blood; and for the so-called “fatalities” that finished a match, where a fighter’s heart might get pulled right out of his chest or his head ripped off his shoulders. Jeff Greeson, a student of the game and its lore, notes that “Mortal Kombat not only shocked anyone who had ever played the game, but those who simply walked by the game were mesmerized by its gore.” No arcade game had ever been as extreme as this. How could it not become a hit?

A Mortal Kombat “fatality.”

The life cycle of a hit arcade game in those days was much like that of a hit movie: it would remain an arcade exclusive for nine to twelve months in order to maximize that revenue stream, then come home in a version for consoles and/or computers. Midway Games, the maker of the original Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet, placed its home ports in the hands of the software publisher Acclaim Entertainment, who had contracts with both Nintendo and Sega. True to form, Sega encouraged Acclaim to put in as much of the arcade edition’s lurid violence as would fit within the more limited audiovisual capabilities of the Genesis. But Nintendo was different: while they certainly wanted the game on the SNES, they insisted that Acclaim tone it down — for example, by replacing flying blood with flying sweat, and by removing the gory fatalities entirely. Howard Lincoln, a Nintendo of America executive who is widely and justly regarded as one of the two principal architects of the brand’s success, remembers an extended back-and-forth with Acclaim over the issue: “Look, we’re going to make the Sega version, and it’s going to be right in line with the coin-op game. Having a toned-down version for Nintendo… Do you guys really want us to do that? Does that really make sense?” But Nintendo held firm to the family-friendly standards that had gotten them this far.

Versions of Mortal Kombat for the SNES, the Game Boy, the Genesis, and the Game Gear — the last being Sega’s handheld competitor to the Game Boy — shipped simultaneously on September 13, 1993, on the back of a marketing budget that was higher than the combined cost of creating them. Just as Acclaim had intended, “Mortal Monday” became a major event in the lives of countless young fans, who greeted the game the way their parents might have a new Led Zeppelin album. The merchandising manager of Electronics Boutique, one of the country’s biggest videogame retailers, called it “the largest new release we’ve ever had.” Later that week, the New York Times could already report that the Sega versions were handily outselling the Nintendo versions.

Whether you were into videogames or not, Mortal Kombat was an inescapable mass-media presence during the autumn of 1993.

Over the next two months, 1 million SNES Mortal Kombat cartridges were sold. This was an impressive showing – except that 2 million Genesis cartridges were sold over the same period. It was a triumphant moment for Sega, who had struggled so long and hard to reach this point, even as it struck Nintendo’s management as the most palpable sign yet that they were in danger of being dismissed as a kiddie company by the teenagers who were now flocking to Sega, bringing along with them their greater reserves of precious disposable income. For the first time, a serious internal debate began at Nintendo over the commercial sustainability of their family-friendly approach.

Despite or because of its outrageous violence, Mortal Kombat was and is a good game in the estimation of most connoisseurs of its genre. Even if it had never prompted a public controversy, it would probably still be fondly remembered by them today; it proved the starting point of a franchise that has encompassed thirteen more games to date. But the other game destined to take center stage before the United States Senate was not so good, and would almost certainly be completely forgotten today if not for its strange moment of infamy in the halls of government.

If nothing else, the game in question does have a fascinating origin story. It begins with Tom Zito, a journalist and music critic for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, who in 1984 was assigned by the last of these to profile Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame. He parlayed that meeting into a job with the Sunnyvale, California-based Axlon, one of the legendary technologist’s several companies, marketing baby monitors and talking Teddy bears which were distributed by the toy giant Hasbro.

But Bushnell always encouraged his proteges to think expansively rather than narrowly. Thus early in his tenure with Axlon, Zito allowed himself to become intrigued by the new video technology of the laser disc, and by the possibility of overlaying conventional computer graphics onto its pre-recorded random-access imagery. In 1986, he stumbled upon the NES and the burgeoning excitement around it during a routine visit to a department store. Deciding that a laser-disc-powered videogame console was just the ticket, he hired a small team to cobble together a Rube Goldberg contraption they called the Nemo. When the limitations of laser discs began to bite — they could fit only 30 minutes of video onto a side, and the hardware was expensive to boot — they tried to make the concept work with the even blunter instrument of a videotape player under the control of an attached computer. “What I truly believed was that interactive television could be something akin to today’s casual gaming,” says Zito. “I really believed it could be something very, very big.” But Bushnell, alas, displayed more and more skepticism as the technical challenges to the concept became more and more clear. So, Zito secured support directly from Hasbro to develop the gadget further, and he and his team of programmers and engineers split from Bushnell to work on it independently.

They decided that the best way to proceed was to create a full-length, playable game to demonstrate the potential of the Nemo. But what kind of game could they hope to make, given all the limitation of their prototype hardware?

As it happened, a game destined to go down in history as one of the schlockiest of all time was inspired by a much more high-brow piece of artistry. An experimental theatrical play called Tamara was enjoying an extended run at the time in a grand old American Legion mansion in Hollywood. Instead of sitting in one place and watching the show unfold on one stage, the audience could move around the mansion’s three floors on the trail of equally mobile actors; each spectator was encouraged to decide for herself which of the play’s many characters and sub-plots were most interesting and to see them through for herself, as it were.

Two of Zito’s associates, by the names of Rob Fulop and Jim Riley, went to see the play in question one evening. Then they saw it again, and then again. This was not atypical in itself: with so much happening simultaneously, the only way to piece together anything like the complete picture was to attend multiple performances. Yet the precise nature of Fulop and Riley’s curiosity was unusual: rather than trying to piece together the full plot, they were trying to understand how the play really worked, and how its approach might be adapted to interactive video. When they thought they had an understanding of those things, they produced a design document for something called Night Trap.

Night Trap was a bizarre creation by any standard, being the (interactive) story of a group of vampires in training who attack a mansion full of college girls having a weekend sleepover party. Not yet having won their fangs, the vampires have to suck the girls’ blood with a weird contraption of plastic tubing. These are unusually diffident — not to say nerdy — vampires: instead of overpowering the girls bodily, they’ve installed a network of surveillance cameras in the house, along with traps which they can activate remotely to capture the girls for blood extraction. The player’s role is that of a good Samaritan who has hacked into the surveillance system, with the goal of turning the tables on the vampires and catching them in their own booby traps. While by no means completely bereft of a certain creepy voyeuristic vibe — how could it be when it combined college girls in their pajamas, vampires, and a secret surveillance system? — the final script was far from sexually explicit, and likewise more silly than violent. The developers did, after all, envision the game someday being sold by Hasbro, a maker of children’s toys. Indeed, they allowed that company’s management to review the script and remove or change anything they found objectionable.

Fulop, Riley, and Zito spent sixteen days in 1987 shooting the footage for the game with a Hollywood crew that included the future cinematographer of Forrest Gump and the former producer of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The shoot wound up costing $1 million, several times the budget of even the most elaborate conventional videogames of the time.

For all the richly deserved schlocky reputation which it would later earn, Night Trap was a genuinely pioneering effort in its way. The combination of real-world footage featuring real actors with conventional graphics would become one of the dominant trends of computer gaming during the early- and mid-1990s. Many of the dubious hallmarks of this so-called “full-motion-video” era appeared for the first time in Night Trap. There was, for example, the way that it tried to make up for the cheesiness that was an inevitable result of its ultra-low cinematic budget by affecting a knowing, ironic attitude — i.e., it’s supposed to be terrible! That’s the joke? Get it? Well then, what are you complaining about? This sort of thing can work occasionally, but most of the time it just comes across as the cheaply disingenuous ploy it really is.

And then there was the use of actors who were vaguely recognizable, but not — or no longer — truly sought-after. “Interactive ‘moviegames’ were populated by performers either on their way up or on their way down the Hollywood ladder,” says Rob Fulop. “Nobody aspired to appear in a moviegame.” Night Trap’s big catch was Dana Plato, a young actress who had had a prominent role in the hit sitcom Diff’rent Strokes from 1978 until 1986, but whose struggles with alcohol and drugs, and the erratic behavior they brought on, had now all but derailed her career. “She’d come in late and never wanted to rehearse,” remembers Fulop. “Her doing this project was obviously a step down from her previous popularity, and she didn’t make a great deal of effort to hide this fact.” This sort of thing too would become all too typical of later interactive movies.

When the shoot was complete, the developers returned to Sunnyvale to try to figure out how to turn their pile of videotapes into a playable game on the Nemo. In the best spirit of Tamara, you were supposed to be able to switch between the video feeds from eight different cameras set up around the mansion; you would need to be in just the right place at just the right time to trigger a trap and catch each of the vampires. But making this random-access concept work using the fundamentally sequential medium of videotape was, needless to say, a tall order.

Amazingly, Hasbro allowed Zito and company to shoot the footage for a second interactive movie while they were still struggling to implement their first one. Zito conceived Sewer Shark as a visual-effects extravaganza, and therefore gave the director’s chair to John Dykstra, the effects supervisor for such films as Silent Running, Star Wars, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He spent most of his time setting up shots of the tunnels down which the player would fly a spacecraft; think of an interactive-movie version of the later 3D action game Descent, if your imagination can encompass such a thing. Any way you look at it, Sewer Shark is a well-nigh ludicrous technological stew. Just as Hollywood was beginning to embrace computer-generated imagery in place of many physically-constructed special effects, Sewer Shark flipped that formulation on its head; it was filmed using old-fashioned physical scale models, which were then digitized and displayed on a computer. Shot in exotic Hawaii for reasons no one can seem to explain, the Sewer Shark footage wound up costing $2 million.

When not supervising film shoots, Zito was spending a lot of time hobnobbing with the Hollywood set, trying to interest them in a concept that still had no practical delivery device. He talked to Jane Fonda about an interactive workout video; talked to Jerry Bruckheimer about an interactive Top Gun; talked to Paramount about an interactive Star Trek; talked to the rock band Yes about an interactive music video; talked to George Miller about an interactive Mad Max; talked to ESPN about interactive sports broadcasting. He even flew to London for a meeting with Stanley Kubrick. None of it went anywhere.

It isn’t clear how much progress his technical team made on the task of turning Night Trap and Sewer Shark into playable games on the Nemo while he was away. We can say for sure, however, that their progress wasn’t fast enough for Hasbro’s taste. The latter came to suspect, by no means entirely unreasonably, that Zito was more interested in enjoying his Hollywood jet-setter lifestyle than buckling down and delivering the finished product he had promised them. They finally pulled the plug on the Nemo in 1989 — ironically, just as the evolution of computer technology, especially the onset of CD-ROM, was beginning to make what Zito had first proposed to do some three years before seem at least potentially practical. But Zito, for his part, was well aware that the science-fictional was slowly moving into the realm of the possible. He convinced Hasbro to sell him the rights and all of the footage earmarked for Night Trap and Sewer Shark for a song.

Two years later, what had once seemed so pie-in-the-sky was now striking many people who weren’t named Tom Zito as gaming’s necessary future. That year, there appeared Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, the first published game to make extensive use of filmed live-action footage. It did very, very well.

Suddenly afraid that his five-year-old brainstorm was about to take off without him, Zito founded a company called Digital Pictures. Its first objective would be to make a pair of interactive movies built around the live-action footage which he had carried away from the Nemo project.  His rhetoric, once so bizarre, was now right in line with the emerging conventional wisdom: “Ultimately, I believe the [videogame] business will be more like traditional Hollywood stuff than what’s coming out of Silicon Valley today: some dinky animated guys running around the screen. We’ll be doing interactive game shows, talk shows, dramas, sitcoms.” “Why watch a movie where you can’t have any effect over it?” asked the Digital Pictures artist Josh Solomon. “Why not be able to put your own stamp on it?”

There was one important difference to separate Digital Pictures from most of the others jumping on the full-motion-video bandwagon. These others tended to focus on the high-end personal-computer marketplace, where CD-ROM drives were slowly but steadily winning acceptance, and where the hardware in general dramatically outclassed that of the consoles. But Zito was a mass-media populist by instinct; he wanted to bring his interactive movies to the living rooms of everyone, not just to the dens, offices, and bedrooms of a privileged few.

Both Nintendo and Sega were also aware of CD-ROM, and both were contemplating whether and how they could use the technology. But the former, after first partnering with Sony to make a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, abruptly pulled out of the deal; an optical drive wouldn’t finally make it to a Nintendo console until the release of the GameCube in 2001. Nintendo’s abandonment of the field left only Sega, who planned to make a CD add-on of their own for the Genesis. So, Zito signed on with them.

Re-purposing the aged footage wasn’t easy. First it had to be digitized, then downgraded dramatically to fit a venerable console that in all truth was thoroughly unsuited to the task it had been assigned: it could display just 61 colors at a time from a palette of just 512. Compared to the full-motion-video productions on personal computers — not exactly marvels of high-fidelity in themselves — Sewer Shark on the Genesis was a bad joke. Digital Pictures programmer Ken Melville:

All our video had to be tortured, kicking and screaming, into the most horrifying, blurry, reduced-color-palette mess imaginable. I shudder to think about it. The audio, the video, the accessing of data on the sloooow-crawling 10 K per second bandwidth CD was all torturous and disastrous. The limitations presented were enormous.

The actual gameplay that was shoehorned in on top of the video was as simplistic as could be, consisting of little more than cross-hair and some grainy targets to shoot at.

Sewer Shark.

Sega’s CD add-on shipped on September 15, 1992; the two-and-a-half minute television advertisement that was rolled out to mark the occasion had cost more to make than three or four typical videogames. The gadget had sold 1.5 million units by the time anyone managed to complete the first tally. As one of the first games to be made available for Sega CD, Sewer Shark did very well. In 1993, it was bundled with the add-on for a period of time, thereby making a lot more money for Digital Pictures.

Night Trap appeared soon after Sewer Shark. It was more formally ambitious than the simple rail shooter that was Sewer Shark — the original, Tamara-inspired gameplay concept had traveled the long and winding road to the Genesis intact — but it was no more attractive to look at and no more fun to play, being in the end an exercise in trial and error and rote timing. Predictably enough, the magazine reviews fixated on the novelty of its use of video and the nubile girls it featured so prominently, and especially on Dana Plato’s starring role. Over the five years since the footage had been shot, she had become one of Hollywood’s most infamous burnouts, having recently been arrested twice: once for robbing a liquor store (“I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes,” said the clerk when he phoned the police), then again for forging a drug prescription. But even her involvement constituted a paltry — not to mention rather mean-spirited — ground for playing a game, as some of the more perceptive or less beholden reviewers reluctantly acknowledged.

Night Trap. Dana Plato stands to the viewer’s left. She died of a drug overdose in 1999 at age 34, after an intensely troubled life.

Night Trap didn’t sell in particularly big numbers in comparison to its predecessor. Had it never come to a certain senator’s attention, it would doubtless have become no more than a minor footnote to gaming history, like the rest of Digital Pictures’s underwhelming output. As it was, though, it got to join Mortal Kombat as the public face of videogame depravity.

According to his own account, Joseph A. Lieberman, a United States Senator for the Democratic Party from the state of Connecticut, first heard about Mortal Kombat when his chief of staff Bill Andresen told the senator in casual conversation how his nine-year-old son had asked for a copy, and how he had refused because he had read in the newspaper that the game was “incredibly violent.” His curiosity kindled, Lieberman suggested that the two of them have a look at the game themselves. Lieberman:

I was startled. It was very violent, and rewarded violence. At the end, if you really did well, you’d get to decide how to kill the other guy, how to pull his head off. And there was all sorts of blood flying around.

Then we started to look into it, and I forget how I heard about Night Trap. I looked at that game too, and there was a classic. It ends with this attack scene on this woman in lingerie, in her bathroom. I know that the creator of the game said it was all meant to be a satire of Dracula, but nonetheless, I thought it sent out the wrong message.

Of course, the player’s objective in Night Trap was to protect the girls rather than attack them, and the nerdy trainee vampires were unusually non-violent by the traditional standards of their kind. Yet Lieberman would continue to spout misleading statements like these for months to come — before, during, and after the Senate hearing on videogame content which he instituted and oversaw.

The scene from Night Trap that got Joe Lieberman’s dander up.

In light of his manifest ignorance, many have questioned the senator’s own professed origin story of his investigation; did he and his chief of staff really have the wherewithal to go out and buy Mortal Kombat, buy or otherwise procure a Sega Genesis to play it on, and then get far enough into it to see its trademark fatalities? Tom Zito, for his part, claims that the investigation began in a very different way: that Nintendo, or one of their Washington lobbyists, arranged to show the good senator what sorts of filth their rival Sega was peddling. And indeed, the bad blood between the two companies was so pronounced that this conspiracy theory sounds more plausible than it perhaps ought to. We can say for sure only that, if Nintendo did touch off the affair in an attempt to stick it to their arch-rival, it would soon snowball hopelessly out of their control as well.

Naturally, we cannot hope to know what was really in Senator Lieberman’s mind in the midst of all this — whether he simply saw it as an easy way to win favor with his constituents (videogame players were not a large voting bloc in comparison to nervous parents and grandparents), or whether he really, truly felt the deep-seated concern he expressed on numerous occasions. In Lieberman’s defense, however, it should be noted that violent crime in the real world and its causes constituted a big part of Washington’s agenda that year and the next, in the midst of a spate of well-publicized incidents. For example, on October 1, 1993, a twelve-year-old girl named Polly Klaas was abducted from a slumber party in rural California at knife point, then murdered and buried in a shallow grave. Although the connection was never explicitly made during the Senate hearings, it isn’t a huge leap to presume that the slumber-party aspect of Night Trap may have been what tipped the balance and singled it out for so much overheated condemnation.

Whatever his motivation or combination thereof, Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Regulation and Government Information, reached out to his friend Herbert Kohl, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice. The two announced a joint hearing on the subject of videogame content and its effects on the psychology of children and adolescents, advertising it as the first step toward an eventual law that would require videogame publishers to mark any of their products which contained violent and/or sexual content on their boxes.

The videogame industry was about to get its day in a decidedly hostile court, with Mortal Kombat and Night Trap in the role of its two most flagrant offenders. The games made for quite the odd couple. Mortal Kombat was, for all its envelope-pushing violence, traditionalist in spirit, engineered to appeal to the teenage boys who had always been the biggest market for videogames; Night Trap, despite its manifestly clumsy execution, was an attempt to do something genuinely new in games, with the potential to appeal to new types of players. Mortal Kombat would later be remembered as a very good game; Night Trap as a very, very bad one. Mortal Kombat was a game whose content a reasonable person could reasonably object to in at least some contexts; Night Trap was most offensive in its sheer ineptness, and was hardly the grisly interactive slasher flick which Lieberman apparently believed it to be. Nevertheless, here they both were. December 9, 1993, would change the games industry forever.

(Sources: the books Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent, Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell, and Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff; Edge of February 1994; New York Times of October 15 1982 and September 16 1993; Retro Gamer 54; the article “Regulating Violence in Video Games: Virtually Everything” by Alex Wilcox in the Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary, Volume 31, Issue 1. Online sources include Kevin D. Impellizeri’s look back at the videogame hearings, “When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy” at GameSpot, “The 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming” at GameSpy, and Shannon Symonds’s blog post about Death Race at the Strong Museum of Play’s website.)

Comments
59 Responses

- James Schend

April 9, 2021 at 4:54 pm

Hi, minor edit: in a few places you have Sewer Shark as “Sewer Shock”.

Also “assigned by the last-named” took me a second to parse. (I assume it’s like “the latter” but when there’s three entities instead of two?) Might be worth a revision to make that a bit more clear.

Great article as always.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 5:02 pm

Thanks. Still have System Shock on the mind, I guess. ;)

- mycophobia

April 9, 2021 at 5:48 pm

“Game Cube” should be “GameCube”.

Great article; despite the familiarity of the story you tell it in a fascinating way

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 6:24 pm

Thanks!

- Steve

April 9, 2021 at 6:02 pm

Your photo with the caption “She died of adrug overdose”, probably meant to say “a drug”

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 6:25 pm

Thanks!

- Madeleine

April 9, 2021 at 6:49 pm

I’m pretty sure it’s spelled Polly Klaas, not Claas.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 6:53 pm

Thanks!

- Tucker McKinnon

April 9, 2021 at 7:01 pm

Hey, that’s Vinnie Jones in that Mortal Kombat billboard! (Or at least a plausible lookalike.) Per Wiki he was a UK footballer who had a reputation as a “hard man.” Since then he’s gone on to have a minor acting career playing various kinds of thugs.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 7:04 pm

Yes, that photo comes from a British magazine…

- Alex Smith

April 9, 2021 at 7:24 pm

Okay, so Death Race. Many people have assumed over the years that it was inspired in some way by the movie Death Race 2000. Its a perfectly logical and perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw under the circumstances. Its also been denied by everyone who worked on the game. I have interviewed Howell Ivy, its designer, who has denied any connection between the two and is not even sure he was aware of the movie at the time. It was a pretty small indie release, though it did generate enough controversy to generate outsized press coverage relative to its low box office, so whether he could have heard of it or not could cut either way.

I am inclined to take his word on this one though because the game really does not resemble the movie in any meaningful way. Ivy needed a new game quickly to replace Destruction Derby. The “collide with objects for points” objective was locked in from the original game and could not be changed, but he could easily swap out the graphics and decided to replace cars with stick figures. These are never described as people, and there is never reference to any elements that would be recognizable from the movie. This was not just damage control done after the fact when the game became controversial, its in the earliest descriptions of the game.

The earliest ad for the game in trade publication Replay stated the following:

Death Race 98 [the original name, shortened before launch] is what the player wants it to be:
mobsters in the 30’s
commandos in the 40’s
dragsters in the 50’s
hells angels in the 60’s
street racers in the 70’s
The first game to require the player to “get involved” in whatever way he wants.

Clearly at that time, they had no idea what they were trying to portray on screen, but they settled on monsters by the actual release, as the flyer announcing the game says nothing about mobsters or street racers or different time period and merely exclaims that “it’s fun chasing monsters.” The cabinet art also sports a graveyard and skeleton motif.

Now the name of the game may have come from the movie. I can certainly see someone at the company either subconsciously being pulled to that name because of the movie or overtly trying to cash in on its notoriety. But that would not be Ivy’s call and would be decided near or after the completion of the game. Even if the name came from the movie, however, its clear from the fuzzy early marketing copy that a name is the most Exidy took from it.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 8:34 pm

Thanks. The idea that the title could be entirely coincidental did — and to a large extent still does — strain the bounds of believability to me. But it seems we don’t know what the precise relationship was. Made an edit to reflect that ambiguity.

- Alex Smith

April 9, 2021 at 7:40 pm

“placed its home ports in the hands of the British software house Acclaim Entertainment”

Acclaim was founded by true red-blooded Americans and headquartered in Oyster Bay, New York. They did contract with UK software house Probe Software to do the Genesis and handheld ports. Utah-based Sculptured Software did the SNES port.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 8:13 pm

Thanks!

- arthurdawg

April 9, 2021 at 7:50 pm

80,000 copies of Revenge?

Whoah… more than I would have thought.

- Martin

April 9, 2021 at 8:52 pm

When you say first and only time if computers taken the lead, couldn’t you also say this was during the second and last (so far) time of the computers? This was the time when you could stay on the same computing platform (PC or Mac) and the the computers really would be twice as good two years later. The games were also exploiting that power as fast as it was becoming available. At this point the console paradigm was producing a frozen spec for many years while the computers continued to get better.

As you noted, you were also blocked in with intrusive console rules that didn’t exist in the computing world and anyone (well group by that time) that had a C compiler and an idea could develop something. This seemed to be the time of 3D games that consoles of the time were not well designed for.

We can argue about the specific years of the second PC gaming years but I would say from about 1992 to the launch of the first XBOX. By that time console of comparable spec were becoming available and could produce an equal quality of game.

Sorry that this isn’t anything to do with the subject matter of the article but to get it back on subject, is there any way to play either of these other than finding the hardware and CDs?

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 10:19 pm

I was speaking purely in terms of commercial profile, not making any judgments on creative/aesthetic merits. Personally, I too find computer games a lot more interesting — thus the nature of this site! — but they were no more than 10 to 15 percent of the market during the 1990s.

You can buy the PC version of Mortal Kombat on GOG.com.

I’m afraid that Night Trap and Sewer Shark will require sifting through abandonware archives and futzing with emulation. Night Trap did eventually get a PC port. That would probably be the easiest to get running, although the experience will not be quite the same; the PC video quality will be much better than the Sega original. You can also find plenty of footage from the games on YouTube, which is probably good enough for most. Suffice to say that they aren’t deathless gameplay experiences. ;)

- Sniffnoy

April 9, 2021 at 10:23 pm

I mean, Night Trap got a rerelease in 2017, with improved visuals and interface, which would presumably be the easiest way to play it, but maybe that’s not suitable if you’re talking about how to play it without improved visuals and interface. :P

- Josh Martin

April 16, 2021 at 9:45 pm

You can buy the PC version of Mortal Kombat on GOG.com.

There’s not much reason to bother with the PC version anymore except for pure curiosity, since more-or-less perfect emulations of the arcade original have been available for awhile. The Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection has technically been delisted from Steam due to its use of the now-deceased Games for Windows Live, but Steam keys for the game are still available from Amazon and Gamestop (among others), and the GFWL requirement can be unofficially patched out by placing a couple of files in the game directory, as outlined here. For those who don’t want to monkey around with that or are completely Steam-averse, you can get the first three games in the series via the Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe Edition, a four-disc collection from 2006 that also includes 26 other emulated games from the Midway/Williams/Atari Games libraries.

- Lisa H.

April 9, 2021 at 8:54 pm

Everyone else got to all my suggested edits ahead of me, except this one:

over the commercial sustainability of their family-friend approach

Should this have been “friendly“, as in all (I think) your other uses?

Having been a teenager in the 1990s, I have of course long been familiar with Mortal Kombat; but this article would have been the first I’d ever heard of Night Trap had I not coincidentally run across it just yesterday on The Cutting Room Floor.

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 9:58 pm

Thanks!

- Sniffnoy

April 9, 2021 at 9:01 pm

I’m assuming you deliberately skipped over mentioning Scene of the Crime in order to keep this from being too long, but I feel like it’s worth mentioning, so I’ll mention it. :) Zito and co. didn’t go directly from seeing Tamara to making Night Trap; first they made a demo called Scene of the Crime, where — like in Night Trap, and clearly inspired by Tamara — you watched a house through security cameras you could switch between, in this case trying to determine who had committed a crime there.

Another thing you skipped but which I think is worth mentioning is that the reason the vampires (or, as they’re referred to in-game, “augers”) use such an unwieldy contraption to extract blood from their victims — calling it a “drill” makes it sound like a usual drill-looking thing, which it definitely is not — rather than just biting them or whatever, is because it was filmed under Hasbro’s auspices, and they were very concerned about reproducible violence. (And Zito and co. went through several other possibilities first which Hasbro rejected on these grounds.) Had it been a more normal-looking drill, I expect it would have been rejected like those other candidates (and for all I know, maybe that was one of them)!

- Jimmy Maher

April 9, 2021 at 10:08 pm

Your first point is indeed a little further down in the weeds than I want to go, but your second is well-taken. I didn’t realize that Hasbro was consulted so closely. Thanks!

- Jacen aka Jaina

April 10, 2021 at 2:43 am

I definitely did not expect to see Custer’s custard flinger today, nor am I super thrilled about it, honestly.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2021 at 7:34 am

Disclaimer added.

- Jacen aka Jaina

April 11, 2021 at 11:56 pm

Appreciated

- Richard Goodness

April 10, 2021 at 2:22 pm

But you’re okay with the tied-up naked lady? You’re right, men’s bodies are disgusting. I can’t believe anyone would want to look at one.

- e2k

April 12, 2021 at 2:02 pm

Doesn’t seem like they mentioned that either way. Seems like you’re looking for a fight

asshole

- Jeff Nyman

May 15, 2021 at 6:29 pm

I think the point overall — and culturally it is an interesting one, given the content of the article — is that more people might get offended by seeing one aspect of an image than another. We see this being played out in culture as a whole and it the selectivity has had an interesting impact on gaming history. This selectivity itself becomes more interesting as gender factors in.

If someone does choose to, say, have a problem with seeing the male penis in the image, it would be interesting if they also didn’t have a problem with the naked woman in that same image (who is tied up and being assaulted, no less).

None of this is me taking a moral stance nor dismissing the viewpoints here. Rather it’s just noting the interesting things that people focus on while still not seeming to care about something immediately related.

Case in point: to change the original comment from Jacen aka Jaina, I could say this: “I definitely did not expect to see a scene of a naked woman tied to cactus who is likely being assaulted by the naked near her today, nor am I super thrilled about it, honestly.” I don’t say that because to make a point about such a game, you sort of have to show what you are talking about.

But that leads to another case in point: the disclaimer (at least currently) says “this article contains images of pixelated male genitalia.” Not “this article contains images of pixelated nudity” (since both the male and the female are nude). Even more to the point, is someone who is concerned about Custard’s image as concerned about “Sex Vixens from Space” since it’s pretty impossible to miss what the ship is shaped as!

- Captain Rufus

April 10, 2021 at 8:59 am

Joe Lieberman would continue with his ignorant stupidity almost a decade later when these kids he “protected” from this videogame would be sent over to die in the Middle East also because he didn’t actually feel like learning or actually doing any real research into anything. I live in his state and refused to ever vote for him including in the 2000 election. (I voted Nader. Mistakes were made ok? I thought maybe a third party could at least get some sort of traction for the future.)

As to Digital Pictures? Nothing but worthless fmv trash. Non games with even less gameplay than much of the Adventure Game and Visual Novel genres have. Except DP’s output added terrible live action messes on top of the limited abilities of the Genesis to be even worse. At least the Dragons Lair type experiments have a fun cartoon ruined by the game. Digital Pictures had neither video or a game worth playing. Watching arcade Time Gal on YouTube is a fun way to kill 20 minutes. DP is nothing even to that degree.

Hell in general i’m glad live action FMV has mostly gone away. The switch to computer generated stuff and talented voice over/motion capture artists provide far better non playable elements to the point the Telltale Walking Dead series and Until Dawn are worth “playing” to get the story. (Not that there is much player agency in them and its pretty obvious if you try a second run. But its interesting to see what choices other folks picked in their watch.)

- Xantonz

April 10, 2021 at 9:07 am

Hi Jim,
Great article as always.
2 nitpicks:
Code Hayes should be code Hays I think.

Also the difference in power between the snes and the genesis is nowhere near as big as the difference between the genesis and the nes.
This struck me as a little unfair to poor old genesis, as in some aspects, it was actually stronger than the snes (side scrolling etc), and anyway the snes, while a stronger machine overall, was not miles ahead.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2021 at 11:49 am

Thanks! Console hardware is far from my area of expertise…

- Dan Mastriani

April 10, 2021 at 10:14 pm

Honestly, consoles through much of their history can be hard to compare on the basis of raw power. Different companies made often wildly different choices when it came to price versus performance. Sega were able to get a deal late in development and use a 68000 as the heart of the Genesis. Nintendo used a 6502 descendent at a lower clock rate for the SNES, but had lots of specialized hardware. I’m simplifying a bit here, but the Genesis CPU was faster, while the SNES could offload more tasks onto its graphics hardware. Impressive things were done on both systems by developers that designed for the strengths of the hardware.

A decent comparison may be the 8-bit computer market, as even as recently as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, console manufacturers were producing fairly idiosyncratic designs. Honestly, Nintendo still is.

- Joshua Barrett

June 11, 2021 at 1:44 pm

To be fair, the finger was firmly planted on the SNES’s side of the scale. SNES games supported more colors, better sprites, and allowed a per-line TRS (Translation, Rotation, Scaling) matrix on a background layer—creating the famous “mode-7” effect. The Genesis made up for this with a faster graphics DMA and higher fillrate, allowing for higher resolution graphics and some software tricks to mitigate the above hardware limitations. The Genesis and SNES CPUs are far more comparable than they’re made out to be: While the genesis’s 68k is indisputably better, the SNES’s 65816 can still sometimes beat it, having inherited some of the the 6502’s legendary cycle efficiency, but it’s still a 16-bit CPU on an 8-bit bus, and there’s only so much you can do. The SNES’s coprocessors help pick up the slack, though—the Genesis CPU really does need to do more.

The real place the SNES shines is in sound. The Genesis relies on the serviceable Yamaha OPN-2 FM synthesis chip and rather disappointing (read: Pre-SID) TMS SN76489 for music and effects, all controlled by a Z-80 coprocessor. This is serviceable and puts the NES to shame, but while it is technically higher fidelity than the SNES, there is only so much it can do. By contrast, the SNES’s S-SMP was a custom audio co-processor and synth design by Sony (in fact, it was designed by Ken Kutaragi, who would later ovesee and do design work on the Playstation), and one of the first chips in a console that did *sample synthesis*, as well as providing some built in effects. In practice, this meant that while the Genesis had better *quality*, it had a fairly restricted musical palette. By contrast, the SNES was considerably more flexible, letting composers run wild. The result was a frankly *embarrassingly good* run of absolutely incredible music out of teams at Nintendo, HAL, Square, and countless others.

- Wouter Lammers

April 10, 2021 at 7:09 pm

I’m not sure if Mortal Kombat is as highly regarded by fighting game fans as you make it out to be. It’s gameplay is rather simplistic compared to many other fighting games even at that time: every character basically moved the same and had the same attacks, they only really differed in their visuals, their special moves and their fatalities. And those fatalities were fun to look at once but served no actual purpose in the game.
Not your area so much I assume! I did really enjoy reading the history around both games, I was aware of some of it but not close to all!

- Martin

April 10, 2021 at 9:31 pm

Seems like all fighting games are like two players with half a pack of cards each and each person draws a card and whoever has the ‘better’ card wins the point. Play through the entire deck and whoever scores the most points wins.

Sure fighting games have other nuances such as timing and multi-action moves but isn’t that them in a nutshell? Other than better graphics, goreier deaths and fancier multi-moves, how have they advanced?

- Dan Mastriani

April 10, 2021 at 10:27 pm

I’d say that’s a bit off the mark, unless both players are just mindlessly pressing buttons. If you want a card analogy, it’d be closer to something like Magic: The Gathering, where you’re playing the cards in your hand in response to what your opponent is doing. Except, of course, that you have a whole lot less time to think.

Anyway, Mortal Kombat II is a big jump over the first game. Not just with obvious things like better graphics and more characters, but more responsive control and deeper gameplay. The first one grabbed a lot of attention with its presentation, using digitized actors in place of hand-drawn art, but it can be stiff and awkward to play.

- Martin

April 10, 2021 at 11:37 pm

What do you mean by deeper gameplay? Just trying to understand what you are saying.

- Gnoman

April 11, 2021 at 1:52 am

One thing elided from the article is that Mortal Kombat’s character graphics were created by filming real actors and then turning the film into animated sprites.

This is one of the reasons the game was so well received, but it was also a large part of the controversy. You were, after all, watching brutal violence against actual people in a way that (at that time) you would only see in the most infamous of exploitation movies. I distinctly remember Lieberman getting great mileage out of that back in the day.

This is a potent and obvious parallel to Night Trap, as much of the controversy with that title came from the quite real young actresses the game featured.

- Dan Mastriani

April 11, 2021 at 3:38 am

Off the top of my head, it became possible to do combos. In fighting game parlance, a chain of attacks that your opponent can’t interrupt. This is one of Street Fighter II’s major innovations, though it’s done differently in Mortal Kombat II, where with the correct timing and positioning you can “juggle” opponents by landing additional hits after knocking them into the air. Basically, this raises the skill ceiling, as dedicated players can discover the most effective and easiest to consistently execute combos, thereby maximizing the damage they can do when successfully attacking an opponent. In other words, there’s more of a reward for taking the time to learn the properties of the characters and their moves.

- Sung

April 11, 2021 at 3:33 pm

A lovely Sunday read — thank you, Jimmy! Your timing for this article is quite apt, as the new Mortal Kombat movie will be released shortly on HBOMax (4/23). I have to say, I’m super looking forward to this version, as the first movie was great but on the jokey side. This one looks very much more in step with the darker tenor of the franchise. I mean in the trailer there’ s a part where Sub-Zero stabs a guy, freezes the guy’s blood, then stabs him again with THAT!

- Ahab

April 11, 2021 at 4:44 pm

“missing gore aside, the SNES version was by far the better looking and better playing of the two”

What I’ve heard is that the SNES version plays much worse, due to sluggish speed and unresponsive controls. Granted, at the time this probably mattered less to the player base than the gore and fatalities.

Source:
https://youtu.be/jxc_K7RKRy0?t=1016

Also I think it would be fair to say that SNES graphics hardware was more capable than the Genesis’, with bigger sprites and much more color depth, but Genesis had the upper hand in several ways – CPU speed, DMA speed, and more streamlined architecture. Calling one system better than the other is contentious as best.

- Josh Martin

April 16, 2021 at 9:30 pm

I’ll go further than this and say that the SNES version was simply broken. The arcade game wasn’t super fine-tuned in the first place—even the final 5.0 revision has some pretty easy infinites—but the developers of the SNES version didn’t even properly implement the pushback used in other versions as rudimentary anti-infinite protection, so once you back an opponent into a corner you can just spam punches (or various other attacks) and they’ll have no way of getting out of it.

- Josh Martin

April 16, 2021 at 10:17 pm

Also, not to get too console-warriorish, while the SNES did have a larger maximum sprite size—64×64 versus 32×32 on the Genesis—it offered much less overall flexibility in sprite sizes, supporting only four fixed sizes (8×8, 16×16, 32×32, 64×64) and only allowing two of those sizes to be used onscreen at once. My understanding is that the 64×64 maximum was rarely used and most SNES games stuck with 8×8 and 16×16, building larger objects out of multiple sprites as needed. The SNES also didn’t support non-square sprites at all whereas the Genesis allowed sprites of semi-arbitrary size to be built up out of 8×8 tiles, which in turn allowed for more efficient use of space. Here’s an illustration of how this worked in practice, and it wouldn’t be doable on an SNES because it uses four different sprite sizes for just a single frame of animation, two of which are non-square. This is why some games with large amounts of animation had to be cut down for the SNES, with Mickey Mania and Earthworm Jim missing entire levels found in the Genesis version.

- Nate

April 11, 2021 at 9:47 pm

I agree with the others in that the SNES and Genesis weren’t far apart at first. Things like the Super FX chip later did give Nintendo an advantage.

Typo: “Interacive”

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2021 at 6:49 am

Thanks!

- Josh T.

April 12, 2021 at 3:40 pm

“Anecdotes about their censorship regime abound, from the hamster-in-a-microwave gag which they forced LucasFilm Games to edit out of Maniac Mansion…”

That scene was actually left in the NES version, as mentioned here: https://www.crockford.com/maniac.html

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2021 at 3:52 pm

Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

April 15, 2021 at 5:13 pm

To be fair, they did later force that gag to be removed from the obscure second printing of Maniac Mansion cartridges, as well as all copies of the European NES version.

- Kevin Butler

April 14, 2021 at 3:43 pm

As mentioned already, Exidy put out Death Race in 1976. Exidy also put out “friendly” games such as Venture, Targ, and Robot Bowl. However, Exidy would push the envelope in the mid-80’s (after the great video game crash). In the early 1980’s, they would successfully merge light-gun technology with the arcade game and produce games such as Crossbow and Cheyenne. Unfortunately, this would take an extremely dark turn when they released Chiller in 1986. A game so gory and controversial most arcades (here in the states anyway) would not carry it since it more a game of gore for the sake of gore. Unlike other other games that were violent, the victims in this game could not defend themselves. I know this really gets off the beaten path but I do think its worth mentioning although it seems that it feel to the wayside due to that lack of publicity so it quickly faded into the night or this would have definitely been at the forefront of some hearings on game violence.

- Lt. Nitpicker

April 15, 2021 at 3:16 am

A pretty significant error and a minor one in this article. First the significant one:

“Sega’s CD add-on shipped on September 15, 1992, with Sewer Shark in the box…”

This is incorrect, as the original Sega CD shipped with Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (vol 1), the shmup Sol-Feace, CD+G and audio CD sampler discs, and a compilation of 4 (or later 5) slightly updated Sega Genesis games called “Sega Classics Arcade Collection”. The updated “Model 2” Sega CD was bundled with Sewer Shark, but when the system was released it was a separate, retail game.
Source: https://segaretro.org/Mega-CD_consoles_in_North_America

As for the minor error:
Digital Arts programmer Ken Melville:
I assume you mean Digital Pictures there.

Otherwise, pretty good article.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2021 at 6:29 am

Thanks!

- Tom Owen

April 18, 2021 at 6:07 pm

“Nintendo’s abandonment of the field left only Sega, who planned to make a CD add-on of their own for the Genesis”

Everyone forgets about (or never heard of!) NEC’s TurboGrafx-16. They released the TurboGrafx-CD in the United States in November 1989, well before Sega’s CD-ROM add on hit the market in 1992 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboGrafx-16#TurboGrafx-CD/CD-ROM%C2%B2).

- Lt. Nitpicker

April 19, 2021 at 2:44 am

NEC was mostly irrelevant by this point in time (1991~), having handed off marketing of the TurboGrafx-16 to a joint venture between it and Hudson Soft, because of said console achieving an increasing marginal marketshare of the game console space. Sega, at the very least were selling consoles, and their CD-ROM add-on had more potential for success, not to mention having more power, than NEC’s.

Sources:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/225466/stalled_engine_the_turbografx16_.php

- Kate Willaert

May 3, 2021 at 2:04 am

I’m deep in the middle of researching Mystique for my next video, so I wanted to comment on a few minor details here:

– The reason the controversy blew up so fast is that the publisher, AMA, invited those groups to come see the games at the conference.

– Custer’s Revenge wasn’t released solo, the first three games were released simultaneously. The reason Custer attracted all the attention was because of the rape and racism, whereas the other two games were merely about sex.

– For that reason, I don’t think it was ultimately about the sex. Not only did the other two games not get as much attention, but several adult arcade games were also doing the rounds at the time, yet were often only written about in the context of not being as extreme as Custer.

- Jimmy Maher

May 3, 2021 at 3:28 pm

Thanks! Adjusted a couple of verb tenses…

- Dave Murray

May 6, 2021 at 12:22 am

I played Night Trap at the time, it was terrible and much less raunchy than advertised. Like watching a student movie knockoff of a cheap slasher flick.

Mortal Kombat never really grabbed me, I preffered Tekken or the previous generation of beat-em-ups like Yie Ar Kung-Fu. (sp?)

- Ross

May 6, 2021 at 10:59 pm

I feel like that’s usually the way when games become controversial. Night Trap got held up as an example of filth requiring government intervention, and it’s not even as prurient as what you could see on basic cable, to say nothing of skinnemax. The same would be true of Harvester a few years later, which mabye had the tone of a video nasty but the visuals were more along the lines of a low-budget cronenberg.

As a teenager in the era before ubiquitous internet smut, it was a constant disappointment to jump through hoops to acquire a game I had been promised would appeal to my basest urges only to get something with less visible boob than the Victoria’s Secret catalog.

- Joshua Barrett

June 11, 2021 at 3:34 pm

As noted by others, the degree to which Mortal Kombat was held in good esteem by fighting game players is slightly overstated here. It was huge with general audiences but sorta looked down on by the diehard players putting their quarters into SFII Hyper Fighting, out of a mix of elitism and some very genuine issues with MK’s systems that didn’t get sorted out for another entry or two. Mostly elitism.

The Ratings Game, Part 2: The Hearing
April 23, 2021

It’s widely known by those who are interested in the history of gaming that the videogame industry was hauled into a United States Senate hearing on December 9, 1993, to address concerns about the violence and sex to be found in its products. Yet the specifics of what was said on that occasion have been less widely disseminated. This, then, is my attempt to remedy that lack. What follows is a transcript of the hearing in question. It’s been rather heavily edited by me with an eye toward grammar, clarity, and concision, but always in good faith, making every effort to preserve the meaning behind the mangled dictions and pregnant pauses that are such an inevitable part of extemporaneous speech.

Being a snapshot of a very particular moment in time, the transcript below needs to be understood in the context of that time. I hope that my previous article has provided much of that context, and that the links, footnotes, and occasional in-line comments in the transcript itself will provide the rest. I cannot emphasize enough, however, the importance of the fact that the hearing took place during a major spate of violent crime. Many of the other “murder panics” of American history had little relationship to the true statistical levels of violent crime, having been drummed up by disingenuous leaders and accepted by their credulous followers for reasons of emotion and prejudice. But there was some justification for this one: 1993 was marked by just a shade under one murder or non-negligent manslaughter for every 10,000 American citizens, the culmination of more than a decade of steadily increasing violence. No one assembled at the hearing could know that violent crime would begin a precipitous plunge the following year, the start of a decline that has lasted almost all the way through to our present year of 2021.

For all that the hearing is of its time in this and countless other respects, there’s also a disappointing timelessness about the affair. Many of the arguments deployed for and against the idea of hyper-violent videogames as a negative social force are little changed from the ones we hear today. Even more dismayingly, the psychological research into the matter is hardly more clear-cut today than it was in 1993, being shot through with the same researcher biases and methodological weaknesses. Much has changed over the past-quarter century, but it seems we’ve made very little progress at all in our understanding of this issue.

But enough of my editorializing. Here’s the transcript so that you can decide for yourself.

As one of the two instigators of the proceedings, Senator Herbert Kohl delivered the opening remarks. A moderate Democrat from Wisconsin, he had made a fortune founding and running a chain of grocery stores and department stores that bore his name, and was currently the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. He was nearing the end of his first term in the Senate, facing an election the following November.

Senator Herbert Kohl: Today is the first day of Hanukkah, and we have already begun the Christmas season. It is a time when we think about peace on earth and goodwill toward all people, and about giving gifts to our friends and loved ones, but it is also a time when we need to take a close, hard look at just what it is we are actually buying for our kids. That is why we are holding this hearing on violent videogames at this time.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, had a more conventional political background than his colleague. A lawyer by education, he had first been elected to his state’s Senate in 1970, then gone on to to serve as its attorney general for six years in the 1980s. Like Kohl, he belonged to the more moderate — i.e., conservative — wing of his party, and like him was facing his first reelection campaign as a United States Senator the following November.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Senator Joseph Lieberman: Thank you very much, Senator Kohl. It’s a privilege to co-chair this joint hearing with you. You’ve been out front protecting our children, and occasionally protecting the rest of us from them, in terms of their ability to obtain guns.[1]Kohl was a noted proponent of commonsense gun control, especially among minors.

Every day, the news brings more images of random violence, torture, and sexual aggression right into our living rooms. Just this week, we heard the dreadful story of a young girl abducted from a slumber party in her own home and then found dead. A man on a commuter train begins coldly and methodically to fire away at innocents on their way home, killing five people and injuring many others.

Violent images permeate more and more aspects of our lives, and I think it’s time to draw the line with violence in videogames. The new generation of videogames contains the most horrible depictions of graphic violence and sex, including particularly violence against women. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, these violent videogames threaten to rob this holiday season of its spirit of goodwill. Instead of enriching a child’s mind, these games teach a child to enjoy torture. For those who have not seen these so-called “games” before, I want to show you what we’re talking about. What you’re about to see are scenes from two of the most violent videogames.

First we have Mortal Kombat, which is a martial-arts contest involving digitized characters. When a players wins in the Sega version of the game, the so-called “death” sequence begins. The game narrator instructs the player to “finish” — I quote, “finish” — his opponent. The player may then choose a method of murder, ranging from ripping the heart out to pulling off the head of the opponent with spinal cord attached. A version made by Nintendo leaves out the blood and decapitation, but it is still a violent game.

First, the Sega version.

And this is a brief sequence from the Nintendo version.

This version does not have the death sequences, and instead of red blood spurting out there’s… well, there’s some other liquid.

The second game is Night Trap, a game set in a sorority house. The object is to keep hooded men from hanging young women from a hook or drilling their necks with a tool designed to drain their blood. Night Trap uses actual actors and attains an unprecedented level of realism. It contains graphic depictions of violence against women, with strong overtones of sexual violence. I find this game deeply offensive and believe that it simply should be taken off the market now.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Lethal Enforcers.[2]Konami’s Lethal Enforcers, a light-gun-based shooting-gallery game, was, like Mortal Kombat, one of the big arcade hits of 1992, and was likewise now coming home on consoles and computers.

This gun, called the “Justifier,” is the handheld implement with which you play the game by shooting at the screen. The more successful you are, the more powerful the gun becomes.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[3]The dream of streaming videogame content in the same way that one streams television programs was an old one already by this point, dating back at least to the beginning of the previous decade. Despite many bold predictions and more scattershot attempts at actual implementation, it’s never quite come to pass in the comprehensive way that seemed so well-nigh inevitable in 1993.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[4]Sega had actually rolled out its own content-rating system just before the release of Mortal Kombat in September of 1993. Shortly thereafter, Sega and Nintendo, feeling the heat not only from Washington but from such powerful entities as California’s attorney general, did indeed agree to work together on a joint rating system — an unusual step for two companies whose relationship had heretofore been defined by their mutual loathing. On the very morning of this hearing, most of the rest of the video- and computer-game industry signed on to the initiative.

I have three major concerns as the industry develops a rating system. First, there are questions about the system itself. Who will do the rating? Will all manufacturers participate? How many age-specific ratings will there be? Will the industry spend money to inform parents about the meanings of the ratings? Second, a rating system must not be perverted into a cynical marketing ploy to attract children to more violent games. We must not allow the industry to trumpet a violent rating as a selling point. Third, the industry must work to enforce whatever rating system it creates. It should consider licensing agreements and contracts which specify that ratings will be clearly visible in any advertising and understandable by parents and consumers. Distributors, including video-rental stores and toy stores, should face some kind of penalty from manufacturers if they sell or rent to children below the minimum ages in the ratings.

Even if all of these concerns with a rating system are addressed, the videogame industry in my opinion will not have done as much as it should do to avoid creating more violence in our already too violent society. The rating system must not become a fig leaf for the industry to hide behind. They must also accept their responsibility to control themselves and simply stop producing the worst of this junk. The videogame industry has not lived up to their responsibility to America’s parents and children. I hope they will do so in the coming months, at worst by developing a credible and enforceable rating system, and at best by taking the worst games or the worst parts of those games off the market. If the violence and sex don’t come out of the games, parents should be able to keep the games out of their homes.

Senator Kohl: Thank you very much for that, Senator Lieberman. I’d like to briefly outline the major issues as I see them.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[5]The body of psychological research on the subject was — and is — nowhere near as clear-cut as this formulation implies. And the industry was, of course, motivated to implement a voluntary rating system by fear of government action rather than a sudden conviction that its products could indeed be harmful to children.

Second, let me say that I share Senator Lieberman’s outrage at the excerpts that we have just viewed. Mortal Kombat and Night Trap are not the kind of gifts that responsible parents give. Night Trap, which adds a new dimension of violence specifically targeted against women, is especially repugnant. It ought to be taken off the market entirely, or at the very least its most objectionable scenes should be removed.

But those games are only two examples. Senator Lieberman mentioned another videogame called Lethal Enforcers, which comes with an oversized handgun called the “Justifier.” This game teaches our kids that a gun can solve any problem with lethal force. Sometimes the player hits innocent bystanders. In that case, blood splatters to the ground, but what the heck, bystanders need to learn to get out of the way. Make no mistake: Lethal Enforcers is aimed at young kids. The lede of the ad says, “You won’t find a toy like this in any Cracker Jack box!” Well, I hope not.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[6]Passed on November 30, 1993, the Brady Bill was a landmark piece of gun-control legislation which mandated that all prospective purchasers of a gun must first pass a background check and then wait five days to take delivery of their weapon.

We all know that there are many causes of the violence that plagues our cities and increasingly our suburbs and small towns: broken families, poor education, easy access to firearms, drugs, the lists goes on and on. Certainly violent videogames and TV violence have become a significant part. We cannot become paralyzed by the multiplicity of causes or the magnitude of the challenge. We need to make every effort to reduce this culture of carnage, and we need to make that effort now — because these games are going to become even more sophisticated and persuasive. Experts can debate whether entertainment violence causes brutality in society or merely reflects it, but there should be no dispute that the pervasive images of murder and mayhem encourage our kids to view violent activity as a normal part of life, and that interactive videogame violence desensitizes children to the real thing. Our children should not be told that to be a winner you need to be a killer. That subtle but menacing message pollutes our society.

I’d like to call now upon my esteemed colleague Senator Dorgan.

Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat from North Dakota, worked briefly in the aerospace industry before becoming tax commissioner of his state in 1968 at the age of just 26. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980, going on to serve six terms there before being elected to the Senate in November of 1992.

Senator Byron Dorgan: I wanted very much to be here because I think this is a very important issue. It has been quite a leap from Pac-Man to Night Trap. Violence in videogames is a close cousin to violence on television. I know there are critics of these hearings; these critics are similar in my judgment to those who are still saying there’s no evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. There’s no evidence, they say, that violence in videogames affects our children. Have they lost all common sense? Of course it affects our children, and it affects our kids in a very negative way.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Night Trap for the first time. It is a sick, disgusting videogame in my judgment. It’s an effort to trap and kill women.[7]The player’s objective in Night Trap, of course, is not to trap and kill women but rather to protect them from others who seek to do so.

I know some people will say we are trying to become the thought police. That is not my intention, but we have to take some basic responsibility in this country to protect children. Those who have children understand that they deserve protection. Certain things are appropriate for them and certain things are not. An author once said that 100 years from now it won’t really matter how big your income was or how big your house was, but the world might be a different place because you were important in the life of a child. Maybe our efforts will be important in the lives of children, and will make improvements in this world. I hope so.

Senator Kohl: We’d like to call our first panel now, composed of representatives from academia and education, and also concerned citizens. You may each give a statement.

Parker Page was the head of the Children’s Television Resource and Education Center, an advocacy group whose concerns about violent content on children’s television had recently spread to videogames.

Parker Page: Parents and educators tell us that they are increasingly worried about the effects of violent videogames on children. But do their worries merit national attention? In a country which is grappling with an epidemic of real-life violence, should we bother ourselves with kids’ leisure-time activities like playing videogames? We think the answer is yes.

For, while the impact of violent videogames is still open to debate, early studies as well as decades of television research warn us of possible consequences, especially for young children. The TV research is conclusive: violent screen images have their own special effects. Children who watch a steady diet of violent programming increase their chances of becoming more aggressive toward other children, less cooperative and altruistic, more tolerant of real-life violence, and more afraid of the world outside their homes. The case against videogame violence is not nearly so clear-cut for one simple reason: there hasn’t been enough research.

In the last ten years, only a handful of published reports have explored the effects of videogames. Moreover, the few experimental studies that have been conducted relied on crude cartoon-like videogames produced in the early 1980s, archaic by today’s standards of technological wizardry. Even so, several of the initial videogames studies suggest that there is a link between violent videogames and children’s aggression. For example, research studies have shown that, at least in the short term, children who play violent videogames are significantly more aggressive afterward than children who play less violent videogames. All this research is limited and it’s dated. The overall trends, however, must give us cause for concern as we approach virtual reality.

Mortal Kombat is the latest in a new generation of videogames that allow software designers to combine high levels of violence with fully digitized human beings. While these lifelike characters may make the videogame more thrilling, TV research sends us a warning that the more realistic the images of violence, the more likely they are to influence young children’s behavior and attitudes. Unfortunately, there is no timeout for millions of American children who are daily immersed in videogame violence and bombarded by videogame advertising. Therefore we recommend the following:

We recommend that the federal government fund independent research projects and disseminate their findings in order to shed additional light on the effects of videogames and other emerging interactive media. We recommend that the videogame industry provide parents with more accurate and detailed product information than is currently available, make a commitment to advertising strategies and marketing that reinforce the rating system rather than undercut it, and pursue an industry-wide agreement to put a cap on violence. Videogames that allow young players to participate in heinous acts of cruelty and inhumanity should not exist, regardless of profits.

Having made these recommendations, it’s important to underscore that parents must still shoulder the major responsibility for guiding their children’s entertainment activities. We recommend strongly that parents become actively involved in helping their children make videogame choices that reflect each family’s values, that they take seriously the videogame warning labels and content descriptions that are available, and that they make videogame playing truly interactive by setting up time limits, by substituting less violent games, and by making game-playing a social rather than an isolating activity.

In conclusion, I believe that this national attention on videogame violence affords us a rare opportunity to avoid the enormous time lag between the TV-violence research findings and public awareness. We have a chance to lower the impact of videogame violence on children’s lives sooner rather than later. I hope that all of us will seize the moment.

Eugene Provenzo was (and is) a professor of pedagogy at the University of Miami. He had recently published the book Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo.

Eugene Provenzo: Most adults pay relatively little attention to videogames. Although I’ve been studying toys, games, and the culture of childhood for nearly twenty years, it wasn’t until a neighbor came up to me three years ago and asked me what I thought of videogames that I began to consider their implications. What I found shocked me.

During the past decade, the videogame industry has developed games whose social content has been overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist, issues that I’ve addressed extensively in my research. For example, in Video Kids I explored the 47 most popular videogames in America. I found that 40 had violence as their main theme, and thirteen included scenarios in which women were kidnapped and had to be rescued — i.e., the idea of women as victims. Although men were often rescued in games too, they were never rescued by women. Videogames have a marked tradition of extreme violence which is also combined with gender discrimination.

Some of my more recent research suggests that videogames are evolving into a new type of interactive medium — participatory or interactive television is what I’m calling it. This new CD-ROM-based videogame technology represents a major evolutionary step beyond the simple graphics of the classic Space Invaders arcade games so popular fifteen or twenty years ago, or even the tiny animated cartoon figures that we see in the Nintendo system. When you combine CD-ROM-based technology, which allows you to have digitized films in the computer, with virtual-reality technologies like Sega’s Activator, which allows you to literally have your movements sensed — punching, hitting, kicking, all translated into the computer — you have something remarkable — a remarkably new and different type of thing. I want to make it very clear that we are dealing with something different, a new type of television.

I believe that the remaining years of this decade will see the emergence and definition of this media form in the same way that the 1940s and 1950s saw television emerge as a powerful social and cultural force. If the videogame industry is going to provide the foundation for the development of interactive television, I think that citizens, parents, educators, and legislators have cause for considerable concern and alarm.

We are at the threshold of a new generation of interactive television. While I believe as an educator that this technology has wonderful potential, I’m also convinced that if we continue using it without addressing the full ramifications and significance of the social content of videogames, we’ll be doing a serious disservice to both our children and our culture.

Dr. Robert Chase was the vice-president of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States; its ranks included more than 2 million schoolteachers and other education professionals.

Robert Chase: I join Senator Lieberman in calling for the producers of electronic games to live up to their responsibilities in helping to raise a generation of children free from violence. It is disheartening that there is even a demand for games that are explicitly violent and graphically sexual.

The first line of defense against the wide distribution of such games remains the family. All parents must assume for themselves the responsibility to raise their children with values of respect and decency and a sense of limits about what is appropriate behavior. I don’t wish anyone to dictate to me what is appropriate for my daughters to see or to say or to do, any more than I would presume to tell you what is appropriate for your sons and daughters. However, I hope we share a commitment to providing parents with appropriate tools to make reasonable judgments for our children.

Electronic games, because they are active rather than passive, can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence; they can actually encourage violence as the solution of first resort by rewarding participants for killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable. The guidelines that now exist for films should be extended to electronic games. We can and must establish a system of parental notification about the graphic sexual or violent materials contained in some videogames.

Marilyn Droz represented the National Coalition Against Television Violence.

Marilyn Droz: I’ve been a parent for sixteen years, a wife for twenty years, a teacher for 23 years, and a woman since the day I was born. Let me tell you, in all of the hats I wear, I find the games we’ve seen today extremely offensive, and the only words I can say to the manufacturers and shareholders of the companies are, “Shame on you!” I think they really should stop and think about what they’re doing. I mean, how would you like to have a teenage daughter go out on a date with someone who’s just played three hours of one of those games?

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[8]This is, at best, an extremely dubious etymology. The Danish word “tøj,” which is pronounced like the English “toy,” actually means clothing. While “værktøjer” means tools, there is no single word for “little tools”: one would need to say “små værktøjer” to get that concept across. The Danish word for toy, on the other hand, is “legetøj.” If the English word descends from the Scandinavian languages at all, it is almost certainly an abbreviated version of this word. Even this, however, is by no means a firmly established etymology.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[9]I have seen no evidence in my own research that there was ever a time when videogames were as popular among girls as boys.

Games have confused children’s desire for action with violence. Children want action, they want excitement; they do not need to see the insides of people splattered against the wall. We all work so hard to raise our children well, and our efforts are undermined by videogames, which teach them that the only way to solve problems — the quickest, most efficient way — is to kill ’em off. There are very few women characters with any control or power. Videogames tell our girls that they can be either sex objects or victims; that’s their choice. The very few women who have any kind of power are built with iron body parts, or they can blow a kiss of death. Once again, we’ve got sex and violence. This has to stop.

Almost everything we purchase nowadays has regulations. We have regulations saying that physical toys cannot contain parts that are easy to swallow. Well, I’m finding this violence difficult to swallow. Thank you for bringing this issue before the public.

Eugene Provenzo: I think another thing to point out here is that the psychological studies of the effects of videogames are all from the early 1980s. They’re based on arcade games like Space Invaders, which are highly depersonalized. There are four generations of videogames. There’s Pong, there’s Space Invaders, there’s Nintendo with its cartoon figures, and we’re into the next stage right now, which is Night Trap-type games. And there’s a new stage after this, which is the combining of this with virtual-reality devices. We’re beginning to move into that, where kids can physically participate in the violence. We need to do more studies; we don’t know yet what the results of playing a game like Night Trap are. But we can make some guesses.

Parker Page: Yes, there needs to be a body of upwards of 100 studies before the research on videogames will be as definitive as the research on television. However, given the similarities with television watching, I would be amazed if we don’t find either similar or stronger effects.

Eugene Provenzo: There’s a parallel issue that I think is relevant here in terms of violence against women. There is a new field emerging called cybersex; that’s not a joke. What it amounts to is pornography on CD-ROM. You can dial up what you want — a blonde, a redhead, a brunette, male or female — then do what you want to them. Imagine that getting into the hands of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old who’s had no sexual experience. And they play these games for three or four years, then they finally meet a real woman on a date. That’s very scary. Look at the portrayal of the women in Night Trap. There are obvious sexual overtones there.

Parker Page: There are some folks who believe that violent videogames can drain away aggression — that they can have a cathartic effect, making kids less violent. That’s a great theory, but it makes for very lousy research. The research in the area of TV violence points in the exact opposite direction.

Senator Lieberman: Dr. Provenzo, you state in your book that videogames are not only violent and sexist but also racist. Can you give a few examples?

Eugene Provenzo: Sure. In interviews with children, they talked about the ninjas as being bad. And then you ask them who the ninjas are, and they said, “The Japs and the Chinese.” It turns out that they perceive Asians as being extremely violent, as being dangerous, as being evil. There is homophobia operating, in terms of how certain types of women are portrayed. It’s subtle and hard to get at sometimes, but I think it presents a relatively disturbing world.

I interviewed large numbers of girls. They said, “I don’t like videogames. I don’t like computers. I think I would like them, but I don’t like what they’re about.” The industry people often argue that videogames are children’s introduction into the culture of computing. We’re discriminating against girls by providing them with these consistent negative images. They get turned off of computers. We’re driving them away from these tools of the 21st century that they need to master. I think that’s very objectionable.

Senator Dorgan: Sega states in five mitigating points responding to the controversy over Night Trap that it was meant to be a satire of vampire films, and that the controversial scene we’ve just seen is displayed only when the player loses. Does that make you feel any better?

Marilyn Droz: Oh, it makes me feel a lot better that if you’re a loser you’re dead.

Eugene Provenzo: At the beginning of Night Trap, your commander looks you straight in the eye and says, “If you don’t have the brains or guts for this mission, then give control to someone who does.” A fascist military type looks at you and essentially says, “If you’re not man enough to do this, forget it! You don’t deserve to play this game!”

I’d like to make a suggestion that I don’t think is that difficult to implement: I’d like to see violence portrayed accurately. I would like to see a videogame where, if you punch someone viciously, they don’t get up and take another punch. Children don’t understand what guns and hitting do. They don’t get that communicated to them. They think that guns aren’t that serious. They don’t understand that when a bullet goes through your leg, you may not walk again, you may lose your leg.

Senator Lieberman: We thank all of you for coming. Let me now call the second panel.

Howard Lincoln is a legendary figure in the history of videogames. Along with Minoru Arakawa, he is widely and justly recognized for resurrecting the videogame console in North America in the form of the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time of this hearing, he had the title of senior vice president of Nintendo of America, but he effectively ran the multi-billion-dollar branch as a co-equal with Arakawa, its official founder and president. Famous or infamous, depending on one’s point of view, for his take-no-prisoners approach to business, his fingerprints were on every aspect of Nintendo’s American strategy.

Howard Lincoln: Nintendo is just as concerned about the issue of violence in videogames as anyone in this room. Of course, every entertainment executive tells Congress that. But Nintendo can back it up.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[10]This chip also allowed Nintendo to assure that they collected a royalty from each and every game that was sold for their console — something Atari wouldn’t or couldn’t do during the first videogame craze.

Of course, our guidelines are not perfect, and may not answer everyone’s concerns. After all, videogames are a form of entertainment covering everything from education to the martial arts. But I must say that we have made a good-faith effort to keep offensive material off our game systems, and we intend to continue applying our game guidelines in the future.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. Let me state for the record that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system.[11]It wouldn’t have been technically feasible to release a Nintendo version of Night Trap because the company had no CD drive in its product catalog.

Let me turn to Mortal Kombat. To meet our game guidelines, we insisted that one of our largest licensees, Acclaim Entertainment, remove the blood and death sequences present in the arcade version before we would approve this game. We did this knowing that our competitor would leave these scenes in, and with full knowledge that we would make more money if we included the offensive material. We knew that we would lose money by sanitizing Mortal Kombat, but sanitize it we did. We have been criticized by thousands of young players for insisting that the death sequences be removed from this game.

Senator Lieberman: So, people actually complain that they can’t have the more violent game on the Nintendo system?

Howard Lincoln: That’s correct. Letters and phone calls say, “Leave in the violence! You’re censoring!”

We share the public’s growing concern with violence. Nintendo will do everything it can to develop a workable game-rating system. But a rating system is no substitute for corporate responsibility. Rating games will not make them less violent. Only manufacturers can do that by keeping outrageous games like Night Trap off the market.

Bill White was a vice-president of marketing and communications at Sega of America. He had left Nintendo to join what everyone there regarded as the enemy camp less than six months before. The bad blood between Lincoln and White — a proxy for the bad blood between the arch-rival corporate entities they represented — was palpable throughout the hearing.

Bill White: I want to address three key points. First, the fallacy that Sega and the rest of the digital interactive-media industry only sell games to children. In fact, our consumer base is much broader. Second, the efforts which Sega has already made to provide parents with the information they need to distinguish between interactive-media products which are appropriate for young people and those which are not. And third, the efforts which Sega is currently making to gain the cooperation of all interactive-media companies to develop an industry-wide rating system.

In recent days, the glare of the media spotlight on this issue has resulted in a number of distorted and inaccurate claims. The most damaging of these in my view is the notion that Sega and the rest of the digital-interactive industry are only in the business of selling games to children. This is not the case. Yes, many of Sega’s interactive-video titles are intended and purchased for young children. Many other Sega titles, however, are intended for and purchased by adults for their personal entertainment and education. The average Sega CD user is almost 22 years old, and only 5 percent are under the age of thirteen. The average Sega Genesis user is almost nineteen years old, and fewer than 30 percent are under the age of thirteen. There truly is something for everyone in our software catalog, and the variety of available software is multiplying each day. Interactive media should be treated no differently than the television, motion-picture, recorded-music, or publishing industries. Attempts to relegate digital interactive software to a media backwater are outdated and inappropriate. It makes no more sense to conclude today that digital interactive media is only for children than it would have, when the Gutenberg press was in its infancy, to conclude that the printed word was only for Bible readers.

Digital interactive media communicates increasingly diverse information to an increasingly diverse audience. Looking at our most recent data for 1993, action-adventure titles such as Sonic Spinball and Jurassic Park account for 40 percent of the revenue from our library. Sports titles such as NBA Action ’94, World Series Baseball, and Joe Montana Football account for 35 percent of our revenues. Fighting games such as X-Men and Eternal Champions comprise 13 percent of our revenues. Titles in the children-entertainment category such as Barney’s Hide and Seek, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and Fun ‘N Games produce 5 percent of our revenues. Role-playing games such as Landstalker make up 5 percent of revenues. And strategy and puzzle games such as Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine constitute 2 percent of revenues.

As you can see, evolving interactive technology reaches a huge market that goes well beyond the child-oriented titles that gave the industry its start. Anything Congress might do on this front would affect a large, diverse group of consumers, young and old, in a volatile industry still in its infancy. Information, not regulation, is the appropriate policy.

Last September, Sega completed its implementation of a comprehensive guidance program which we began developing over a year and a half ago. It is a three-pronged approach designed to help parents determine the age-appropriateness of different interactive-video software. It includes a rating system, a toll-free hotline, and an informational brochure. Building on the motion-picture industry’s model, the Sega rating system applies one of three classifications to each interactive program released by Sega: GA for general audiences, MA-13 for mature audiences age thirteen and over, and MA-17 for titles not suitable for those under age seventeen. A Videogame Rating Council, created by Sega and consisting of independent experts in the areas of child psychology, sociology, cinema, and education, is responsible for evaluating each game and giving it the appropriate rating classification. I want to emphasize that this is an independent council. Even though it takes considerable time to evaluate each product, individual council members are paid only a small honorarium for each game they rate.

And now we and others in this industry are prepared to take the next step. This morning, a number of interactive-video companies and some of the nation’s leading retailers announced their plan for creating an industry-wide rating system. The coalition committed to this effort includes Atari, 3DO, Wal-Mart, Sears, Toys ‘R’ Us, Blockbuster Video, and videogame publishers representing over 90 percent of the market. The goal is to develop and implement a rating system that enjoys widespread support and voluntary participation throughout the industry.

There is every reason to be optimistic about the industry’s ability to voluntarily provide parental guidance, but we ask that you treat digital interactive media as you have treated other media such as the motion-picture industry: give parents the power to choose what’s right for their kids, but don’t tell adults what’s right for them.

Ileen Rosenthal was the general counsel of the Software Publishers Association. Formed in 1984, when videogame consoles seemed to most to be a fad of the past and personal computers the exclusive future of interactive entertainment, the traditionally computer-focused SPA was not an overly prominent voice in the world of Nintendo and Sega, although the latter was a member. Indeed, their biggest concern for years was a problem that effectively didn’t exist on the consoles, thanks to the latter’s use of cartridge-based, read-only media: software piracy, which the SPA opposed with a long-running media campaign whose tagline was “Don’t Copy That Floppy!” The presence of a representative of the SPA at this landmark hearing is often overlooked — as, for that matter, Rosenthal’s presence apparently was to some extent by the people who called the hearing; in marked contrast to the sustained grilling delivered to Howard Lincoln and especially Bill White, she would receive just one perfunctory yes/no question from the senators after making her opening statement.

While they made up only about 10 percent of the digital-gaming market in 1993, computer games were hotbeds of innovation, being in many cases more complex and aesthetically ambitious than their console counterparts, with a customer demographic that skewed older even than that of Sega. The people holding the hearing would doubtless have found plenty on personal computers to be outraged about, had they only looked: CD-ROM-based “interactive movies” like Voyeur were far more sexually suggestive than the likes of Night Trap, while action games like id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, which were now regularly bubbling up from the rough-and-ready shareware underground, were at least as violent as Mortal Kombat. But, thanks to their smaller and older player base — and doubtless thanks to the fact that personal computers tended to be installed in private bedrooms and offices rather than public living rooms — the content of computer games would largely escape serious mainstream scrutiny for years to come. Not until the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999 was carried out by a pair of rabid DOOM fans would computer games find themselves the focal point of a controversy over violent media. (In one of those delicious concordances which history delivers from time to time, id Software would upload the first episode of DOOM to the shareware servers that were to host it about eight hours after this hearing wrapped up.)

Ileen Rosenthal: As the videogame industry has grown, we are finding that some products have begun to incorporate violent and explicit themes. It is inevitable that some of these products will find their way into the hands of children. However, in our attempt to protect our children from those games which contain violent and mature themes, we must not lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of games are appropriate for children, and have the potential to develop many important and socially desirable skills. For example, it is a fact that children who are considered to have short attention spans can focus for hours on a videogame, discovering rules and patterns by an active and interactive process of trial and error. Surely the potential of this medium for bettering our children’s thinking skills is enormous. Even in the literature of Dr. Page’s organization, it asks, “Is there anything good about playing videogames?” The answer: “Sure there is. Like puzzles, board games, and other forms of interactive entertainment, playing videogames can help kids relax, learn new strategies, develop concentration skills, and achieve goals. If they are playing with others, it can also be a great time for socialization.”

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Microsoft Flight Simulator; Wing Commander: Privateer, an outer-space role-playing game; Front Page Sports: Football; X-Wing; Lands of Lore, a fantasy role-playing game; SimCity.[12]Rosenthal doesn’t make it clear here that, in keeping with the computer focus of the SPA, this list includes only games for computers, not consoles. Further, only games that were sold as boxed products in retail stores are included; the list misses entirely the vibrant shareware scene, where games like id’s Wolfenstein 3D were already pushing the envelope on gore and violence at least as much as Sega. Thus it provides a somewhat distorted view of the overall state of gaming even on computers.

Dawn Wiener, president of the Video Software Dealers Association, and Craig Johnson, a past president of the Amusement and Music Operators Association, also delivered prepared statements. But they largely echoed Bill White’s statement that the industry ought to be allowed to regulate itself — it’s clear that a degree of message coordination went on prior to the hearing — and they did so in fairly milquetoast fashion at that. So, I’ve chosen to omit their statements here.

Senator Lieberman: Mr. White, let me go right to the heart of the matter with you. Mr. Lincoln just said that Night Trap has no place in our society. Why don’t you agree? Why don’t you pull Night Trap off the market?

Bill White: The interactive-media industry has grown tremendously, and children represent only a portion of the audience that we serve. Night Trap was developed for an adult audience. Sega’s independent rating council labeled it MA-17: “not appropriate for children.”

Senator Lieberman: But do you think that stuff is appropriate even for an adult audience? A provocatively dressed woman is brutally attacked. A lot of the products your company produces are great. Why do you need to produce this stuff, whether for adults or kids?

Bill White: If you saw only the violent or gory scenes from Roots or Gone with the Wind out of context, you might conclude that they’re horrible films. In reality, they aren’t. You’ve picked out a particular segment of the game. A winning effort in Night Trap saves the women. Your job as the player is to identify the villains and to trap them. This game is appropriate for adults who choose to entertain themselves with it.

Senator Lieberman: And if you’re a bad player?

Bill White: If you’re a bad player, you will see that scene.

Senator Lieberman: You have a long way to go to convince me that you’re raising anyone’s values or reducing their aggression, particularly toward women.

Bill White: We agree with much of what the earlier panel said. We believe that more research is necessary to conclude what effect games can have on both adults and children.

Senator Lieberman: Then why don’t you wait until the research is done?

Bill White: Because we believe that adults can make the choice for themselves of whether that game is right or wrong for them.

Senator Lieberman: I have here a recent Sega brochure. You’ve got Night Trap alongside Joe Montana Football and Spider-Man Versus Kingpin and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Is this responsible advertising?

Bill White: We’ve taken the first step toward an industry-wide rating system. Just as the motion-picture industry produces films for adults as well as children, the interactive-entertainment industry will continue to produce products that are appropriate for both. We would like to see better enforcement at retail. We would like to see the ratings prominently displayed in advertising.

Senator Lieberman: You agree, then, that this brochure is irresponsible?

Bill White: That was developed prior to our full implementation of our rating system.

Senator Lieberman: If you’ve updated your rating system, I hope that you’ll also update your promotional system.

I want to show an advertisement for Mortal Kombat for Sega. This game is rated MA-13, not suitable for children under thirteen. But just watch this advertisement, and tell me whether it doesn’t encourage children under thirteen to buy Mortal Kombat.

The nerd that became a hero by buying Mortal Kombat looks to me to be under thirteen. What can you do to prevent boys under thirteen from seeing this ad and deciding that their masculinity and freedom from bullies will be determined by whether they can play this game?

Bill White: That advertisement is directed to teens, not to children. I can’t comment on the age of the cast because I just don’t know. The intent of our rating system is to take a first step. We’re proud of that step. We don’t believe it’s perfect, but we do believe that more information is the answer, not government regulation, and certainly not censorship.

Senator Lieberman: I agree with you. The rating system is only a first step. And it’s a fig leaf to cover a lot of transgressions if you don’t enforce it better and, I hope, apply a little bit of self-control to yourselves. Is that ad placed on children’s shows?

Bill White: No, that ad would not be placed on a children’s show. We buy television time directed toward teenagers and time directed toward children. That ad was not approved for children’s television.

Senator Lieberman: I have an ad here from GamePro magazine. At the top it says, “He’s back! Splatterhouse 3 is the kind of game ratings systems were invented for!” At the bottom, it says that it “includes deadly new weapons, six levels of monster-bashing mayhem, and killer special moves!” Doesn’t that kind of advertisement make a mockery of your rating system?

Bill White: I haven’t seen this advertisement. We have no control over what an independent publisher says about our rating system, any more than the motion-picture industry can control what an individual studio says about its rating system.

Senator Lieberman: But wouldn’t you agree, having seen it now, that that makes a mockery of your rating system? I can’t believe that’s what you want.

Bill White: We want to take the next step. That’s why we’ve worked around the clock for the past two weeks to establish an industry coalition that will develop an industry-wide rating system.

Senator Lieberman: Well, there’s a lot of work to do, to put it mildly.

Mr. Lincoln, I appreciate that you’ve been self-regulating to some degree, and I also appreciate that you’ve accepted the idea of a rating system. Even though your games are less violent and less graphically sexual, there is violence in them. Dr. Provenzo feels that there is a lot of violence in the Nintendo products. Can assure us that everyone involved with Nintendo is committed to the rating system?

Howard Lincoln: I can certainly do that. But the point I’m making is that a rating system just doesn’t go far enough. We have to get our hands on the game content. We’ve been doing that, although, like anything, it’s not perfect.

I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the videogame market has been transformed from children to adults. It hasn’t been — and Mr. White, who is a former Nintendo employee, knows the demographics as well as I do. Further, I can’t let you be subject to this nonsense that this Sega Night Trap game is only meant for adults. There was no rating on this game at all when it was introduced. Small children bought it as Toys “R” Us, and he knows that as well as I do. They adopted the rating system when they started getting heat about this game. But today, as sure as I’m sitting here, a child can go into a Toys “R” Us and buy this product, and no one will challenge him.

I agree that everything Nintendo has done hasn’t been perfect. As a matter of fact, when I came into this hearing this morning, I saw that you have an advertisement for one of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System games. It says, “They’ve got a bullet with your name on it!” I phoned our head office and found out that licensee put out that advertisement without our consent, without our review, and without our permission. If that advertisement is not withdrawn, that company is in breach of its license agreement. We do have the ability and the right to control advertising by our licensees, and we take that seriously. I’d like to apologize to this committee for the fact that we slipped up. But let me tell you, when I get back to Seattle, I will call that licensee.

Senator Lieberman: Thank you for your forthrightness. Thank you for taking responsibility. You’ve shown some leadership here. You’re not perfect, as you’ve said, but you’ve been a damn sight better than the competition.

Bill White: Senator, it’s all well and good for Nintendo to say it has content guidelines. Sega has content guidelines as well. I had the opportunity to meet with your staff and show them some Nintendo games, and to compare their level of violence to the same games on the Sega platform. I’d like to show some of that comparison in order to illustrate that the guidelines Mr. Lincoln speaks of continue to allow excessive violence — without the benefit of a rating system, without the benefit of packaging that clearly states this is for mature audiences.

Senator Lieberman: Mr. White, let me just say this to you. Today, Mr. Lincoln has accepted the idea of a rating system. Nintendo had previously been self-regulating more than you. They chose not to produce Night Trap, and they have a less violent version of Mortal Kombat. You have a rating system, but I still haven’t heard you accept responsibility for regulating the content of your games. That is what’s at issue, notwithstanding the tape you’ve just shown us, which doesn’t compare in my opinion to Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.

Senator Kohl: I’d like to ask both Mr. Lincoln and Mr. White the following question. As you expand your business into the adult market, can you guarantee that children won’t see this adult product?

Howard Lincoln: No.

Senator Kohl: Mr. White?

Bill White: No, we can’t, Senator. All we can do is work with the mechanisms that are available to us.

Senator Kohl: So, there’s no way we can feel comfortable that material which some of us might feel doesn’t belong on the market at all won’t get onto the market and then be viewed by children?

Bill White: There’s an interesting difference between Sega and Nintendo here, in that we’ve moved ahead with CD technology, while Nintendo has not. They continue to focus on children. We have recognized that the interactive-entertainment market is far larger. We would like to have a rating system that will allow us to develop games for that broad array of players.

Howard Lincoln: I didn’t realize the hearing was focused on market share. I thought we were talking about regulation and violence. My colleague must think differently. Certainly the industry is moving into new territory with new technology. Nintendo, for example, will soon be coming out with a 64-bit system. Graphics are going to become much better. Unless we can get everyone in the industry to put a stop to the kind of things you’re seeing in Night Trap, we’re just deceiving ourselves.

Senator Kohl: I think it’s encouraging that you find so much to disagree with each other about. It indicates that you’re not here in a lockstep way. You’re really concerned about what the others are doing, and are worried perhaps that you’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I hope you walk away with one thought: if you don’t do something about it, we will. Senator Dorgan?

Senator Dorgan: Does anybody here have any notion how many babies will be born this year out of wedlock? No? Over 1 million, 800,000 of whom will never learn the identity of their father during their lifetime. Children are growing up without supervision, without the parents you so blithely say should supervise them. I agree that parents ought to be involved in their children’s viewing habits and so on, but the fact is, in many cases there are no parents! What do you do about those kids?

I understand that Night Trap was not rated when it was first released, and then it was rated at the MA-13 level. Is that correct?

Bill White: Once it was rated, it was rated MA-17, Senator.

Senator Dorgan: Do you consider those over the age of thirteen to be mature?

Bill White: MA-13 is appropriate for teenagers and older.

Senator Dorgan: Isn’t the word “mature” attached to that rating?

Bill White: Yes.

Senator Dorgan: So, the presumption is that those over thirteen years of age are mature?

Bill White: Yes, with parental discretion.

Senator Dorgan: Are you kidding me? What kind of rating system identifies kids of thirteen as mature?

Bill White: It’s similar to the motion-picture rating of PG-13.

Senator Dorgan: We have some responsibility to protect children. We protect them from access to alcohol. We protect them in a whole range of areas. With respect to a videogame in which a woman is grabbed by the neck with a hook, drilled in the neck with a tool, or someone grabs the heart out of a character… we ought to have just as much concern about protecting our children from that sort of trash.

Mr. White, I’ve read your written statement, and I honestly think you don’t understand what we’re talking about here. In your final point about Night Trap, you write this: “Finally, there is some research indicating a short-term, momentary increase in playful aggressive behavior after playing videogames or watching violent television programming. But there is no research indicating this has any lasting impact. In fact, quite the opposite is true.” My sense is that you just don’t get what this hearing is about. You say, “This is not for kids. This is adult entertainment.” But you and I both know that kids will have wide access to it. We need to exercise responsibility and protect those children. Profiting at the expense of America’s kids is not moral profit.

Senator Lieberman: Mr. White, in your rating system you have a category of “non-approved.” The latest version of your guidelines reads: “As always, Sega will not approve products which include material that encourages criminality of any kind.” Isn’t a game that requires kids to point a gun at the television set encouraging criminality? We’re all aware of the incredible outbreak of gun violence in this country.

Bill White: We rely on the independent rating council to make those decisions because we in corporate management are not psychologists or sociologists. They have rated that product MA-17: only appropriate for adults.

I’d also like to point out that Nintendo produces a “rapid-fire machine gun” that uses the same technology. They have no rating on that product to suggest it is for adults.

Senator Lieberman: Mr. Lincoln, what game is that for?

Howard Lincoln: This is something that can be purchased for the Super NES. It’s called the “Super Scope.” Sega’s gun is called the “Justifier.” Our gun is for target-shooting. [There is laughter in the room after Lincoln makes this statement, although it was apparently not intended in jest.]

Lethal Enforcer, the game you’re speaking of, was initially rejected by Nintendo. We told the licensee that they would have to remove the name “Justifier” and we wouldn’t approve their packaging. Because of this, that game is not yet out on Nintendo.

Senator Lieberman: I hope you’ll think again before it goes onto the market because this is about more than the name “Justifier.” That is a handgun, pure and simple. No matter what name is on it, putting it in the hands of kids gives them the wrong idea. And I must say that your Super Scope also looks like an assault weapon to me.

Pursuant to your commitment to have a rating system, would you commit to do everything in your power to ensure that the ratings are not only visible on your products but visible in their advertising?

Bill White: Yes. The ratings should be prominent in advertising. You have our commitment to that. I don’t believe that same commitment has been made by Nintendo.

Howard Lincoln: I don’t know what he’s talking about there. As you well know, we have made a commitment to the rating system. But we are concerned that a rating system by itself might just lead to an open season on more violent games. The commitment I’ll make is that we’ll be the first ones back here if what we see is just business as usual. If we’re going to have a rating system, let’s put some meat into it and enforce it.

Senator Lieberman: Ms. Rosenthal, will you make the same commitment?

Ileen Rosenthal: Absolutely. The software industry is sincerely interested in the well-being of children.

Senator Lieberman: A final question for Mr. White. In your guidelines, you say you won’t publish products which denigrate any ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious group. Obviously I think that Night Trap denigrates a sexual group, namely women. But there’s a Konami ad which talks about “fighting ninjas in Chinatown.” Obviously that’s culturally inaccurate since ninja are in the folklore of Japan, not China. But do you agree that that’s in violation of the spirit of your own guidelines?

Bill White: Senator, those guidelines refer to the games themselves, not to their advertising. And that’s not our advertisement.

Senator Lieberman: Would you include that kind of language — “fighting Ninjas in Chinatown” — in your own advertising?

Bill White: No. We strongly discourage that kind of language.

Senator Lieberman: Okay.

Senator Kohl and I are very serious about this, and intend to stay with it. I hope you’re able as an industry to come up with a rating system that addresses everyone’s concerns, but I think the best guarantee of that is for us to stick to the course we’ve set. I know there’s a tremendous market incentive here, but the best thing you can do — not only for the country but for yourselves — is to self-regulate. It will be important for the ultimate credibility and success of your business. And it’s important to the maintenance of our Constitutional freedoms. Because unless people start to self-regulate, the sense that we’re out of control is going to lead to genuine threats to our freedom. We’ve come a ways today, but we’ve got a long ways to go yet. I hope you’ll become the leaders in this, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Senator Kohl: We have an awful lot of freedom in America. But there’s always that tendency to use the system down to the last inch to maximize profit. We can push it too far, and do great damage to our country. We all hope very much that you take a step back and consider our common responsibilities as citizens. Thank you.

(The full hearing is available for viewing in the C-SPAN archives.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Kohl was a noted proponent of commonsense gun control, especially among minors.

↑2

Konami’s Lethal Enforcers, a light-gun-based shooting-gallery game, was, like Mortal Kombat, one of the big arcade hits of 1992, and was likewise now coming home on consoles and computers.

↑3

The dream of streaming videogame content in the same way that one streams television programs was an old one already by this point, dating back at least to the beginning of the previous decade. Despite many bold predictions and more scattershot attempts at actual implementation, it’s never quite come to pass in the comprehensive way that seemed so well-nigh inevitable in 1993.

↑4

Sega had actually rolled out its own content-rating system just before the release of Mortal Kombat in September of 1993. Shortly thereafter, Sega and Nintendo, feeling the heat not only from Washington but from such powerful entities as California’s attorney general, did indeed agree to work together on a joint rating system — an unusual step for two companies whose relationship had heretofore been defined by their mutual loathing. On the very morning of this hearing, most of the rest of the video- and computer-game industry signed on to the initiative.

↑5

The body of psychological research on the subject was — and is — nowhere near as clear-cut as this formulation implies. And the industry was, of course, motivated to implement a voluntary rating system by fear of government action rather than a sudden conviction that its products could indeed be harmful to children.

↑6

Passed on November 30, 1993, the Brady Bill was a landmark piece of gun-control legislation which mandated that all prospective purchasers of a gun must first pass a background check and then wait five days to take delivery of their weapon.

↑7

The player’s objective in Night Trap, of course, is not to trap and kill women but rather to protect them from others who seek to do so.

↑8

This is, at best, an extremely dubious etymology. The Danish word “tøj,” which is pronounced like the English “toy,” actually means clothing. While “værktøjer” means tools, there is no single word for “little tools”: one would need to say “små værktøjer” to get that concept across. The Danish word for toy, on the other hand, is “legetøj.” If the English word descends from the Scandinavian languages at all, it is almost certainly an abbreviated version of this word. Even this, however, is by no means a firmly established etymology.

↑9

I have seen no evidence in my own research that there was ever a time when videogames were as popular among girls as boys.

↑10

This chip also allowed Nintendo to assure that they collected a royalty from each and every game that was sold for their console — something Atari wouldn’t or couldn’t do during the first videogame craze.

↑11

It wouldn’t have been technically feasible to release a Nintendo version of Night Trap because the company had no CD drive in its product catalog.

↑12

Rosenthal doesn’t make it clear here that, in keeping with the computer focus of the SPA, this list includes only games for computers, not consoles. Further, only games that were sold as boxed products in retail stores are included; the list misses entirely the vibrant shareware scene, where games like id’s Wolfenstein 3D were already pushing the envelope on gore and violence at least as much as Sega. Thus it provides a somewhat distorted view of the overall state of gaming even on computers.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hearing1.mp4

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hearing2.mp4

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hearing3.mp4

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hearing4.mp4

Comments
47 Responses

- Andrew McCarthy

April 23, 2021 at 4:15 pm

It remains a thoroughly dispiriting aspect of these hearings how eager Lieberman was to impose a Hays Code-style blanket censorship policy, in the form of “thou shalt not” commandments, on the game industry, and how eager Howard Lincoln and Nintendo were to accommodate him.

- Andrew McCarthy

April 23, 2021 at 4:29 pm

If Sega hadn’t been determined to come out swinging on this issue, and other studios who agreed with them remained in the woodwork, what would have happened? Nothing’s certain, of course, but I suspect the passage of blanket prohibitions on what content could be in games (whether by government or a private regulator like the ESA) rather than a rating system would have been much more likely.

- Lt. Nitpicker

April 23, 2021 at 5:21 pm

Aside, from some of the obvious disingenuous statements, the “Mortal Kombat on Genesis” footage is actually arcade footage, due to the Genesis version having a different score font and placement of the score at the bottom, while the SNES version has it at the top. As for the ESRB, I think it was a resource to parents who paid attention to it and understood it as a recommendation and not the final word, as well as the content descriptors.

- Kaj Sotala

April 23, 2021 at 5:28 pm

“In September of 1993, most of the games on it had nothing to do with violence: Microsoft Flight Simulator; Wing Commander: Privateer, an outer-space role-playing game; Front Page Sports: Football; X-Wing; Lands of Lore, a fantasy role-playing game; SimCity.”

I’m not sure whether this should be interpreted as saying “none of the games that I’m mentioning have nothing to do with violence” or “most of the games I mention have nothing to do with violence”, but either way the combination of Wing Commander, X-Wing, and Lands of Lore makes up half of the games listed. I’m somewhat amused by the implication that fantasy violence and space craft shooting at each other have “nothing to do with violence”, though of course it’s not very _graphic_ violence.

- Andreas Davour

April 23, 2021 at 5:51 pm

…and the murderers in NRA are still out there facilitating people getting killed. Even more tragic.

- Johnny Billy

April 23, 2021 at 8:04 pm

Quit voting for Democrats who want to do nothing but control our lives.

- Eric Nyman

April 23, 2021 at 10:31 pm

All 3 of these Senators are no longer in Congress.

Today, it’s Republicans who claim violent videogames are more to blame than real guns for violence. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754793/trump-gun-control-video-games-violence-republicans-no-evidence-dayton-el-paso-texas-ohio

- Eric Nyman

April 23, 2021 at 10:32 pm

See also here. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/video-game-violence-became-partisan-issue/595456/

- Richard Wells

April 23, 2021 at 11:39 pm

The successor to Joe Lieberman, Chris Murphy, has held that violent video games are a problem. https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/06/senator-murphy-video-games-mass-shootings

- Jacen aka Jaina

April 24, 2021 at 5:32 am

Republicans are working on multiple anti transgender bills of various levels of making human lives worse and directly harming children.

- Alex Smith

April 24, 2021 at 5:17 pm

And my guess is Joe Lieberman and his fellow moderate Democrat Joe Biden would have been completely on board with this in the 1990s. Obviously, Biden has evolved on a few issues since then, which is a good thing. The point is that politics change over time, the right and the left shift, and there is no need to deflect from what Democrats believed in the 1990s by countering with what Republicans believe today. We can condemn 1990s Democrats for unseemly censorship and 2020s Republicans for barbaric transphobia equally without the need for bringing up the latter in a forum devoted to the former. There are far better venues for that.

- Tom

April 24, 2021 at 4:10 pm

Interesting how Republicans are always blamed for censorship, yet the MK hearings (and the main players involved) typically go ignored…. funny that.

- Alex Smith

April 24, 2021 at 5:08 pm

In recent times it has been Republicans behind a lot of this, though not exclusively. California State Senator Leland Yee, notorious video game censor and arms trafficker (yes, really, look it up!) was also a Democrat for instance. It’s really a mistake to try and paint a narrative where only affiliates of one political group hold problematic beliefs or opinions. Censorship is sadly a tool all sides wield to advance their agendas because it’s guaranteed to fire up the base. We just tend to be more sensitive to the censorship we disagree with.

- Odkin Wood

April 30, 2021 at 8:01 am

The media always blames the Right, but when you look behind any political attack on culture – not just denunciation and criticism, but actual threat of government intervention – you find Democrats crying “for the children”, Whether it’s about comic books, guns, rock music, or video games, it’s always Democrats actually trying to lower the boot of authority. Republicans complain and take personal responsibility to boycott, while Democrats try to use the power of government to control. Yet the media blames the side THEY WANT to blame.

- Sniffnoy

April 23, 2021 at 8:25 pm

It’s a tired observation at this point, but Night Trap actually would appear on a Nintendo system 25 years later with the 2018 rerelease!

Also the idea of Nintendo’s guidelines prohibiting ethnic stereotypes is amusing, when you consider such games as Street Fighter II or Punch-Out. :P (Not saying that their use of such stereotypes is wrong in this context, but they’re clearly present.)

As for what the senators had to say… well, I’ll skip commenting on that junk, I think.

(I was also going to make Kaj Sotala’s comment, but he got there first. :) )

- microtherion

April 24, 2021 at 10:35 pm

Surely the creators of Super Mario would never, ever, resort to ethnic stereotypes!

- Martin

April 23, 2021 at 9:23 pm

I’m assuming this is Part 2 of a number larger than 2 so there is more to come.

What is interesting is to hear what people who have never touched a computer let alone a computer game think about where computers were and where they were going in 1993. Clearly this “virtual reality” thing was right around the corner and the very idea that adults would be playing video games seemed unlikely to be anything big.

It would have been interesting to hear what the Senetors would have said about games as discussed a few months ago on this site about playing the role of Nazis in war simulations. But for that, we will never know.

- Nate

April 24, 2021 at 12:11 am

“general consul” -> “general counsel”

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2021 at 5:38 am

Thanks!

- stepped pyramids

April 24, 2021 at 1:09 am

A weird thing that stands out to me is that Lieberman refers to Night Trap as being set in a “sorority house”, which it isn’t. It’s the estate of a family of rich WASP-y vampires who have lured girls over for a slumber party. That’s why the house is full of hidden passages and traps and whatnot. He at least accurately describes that the goal of the game is not to trap women, unlike Sen. Dorgan. But it seems clear to me that Holy Joe never played or reviewed extensive footage of the game, because you’d think that “teenage slumber party” would have worked as well if not better than “sorority house” for his point.

- Brent

April 24, 2021 at 2:33 am

As someone who’s been conditioned their whole life to think these hearings were a travesty… the Senators come off way better than I imagined. Except for their lack of understanding that the medium deserved to be treated like film and TV, they make a lot of good points. (Doesn’t take away from Lieberman being human garbage in other regards ofc)

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2021 at 5:49 am

Yes, I had a similar reaction when I watched the hearing for the first time. I often hear it described as a “moral panic.” I don’t quite agree with that description, and wanted to publish this piece so that others could also decide for themselves.

Senators Lieberman and Kohl are clearly struggling to reconcile their view of videogames with the idea that they may not be just for children, and are misinformed on any number of other particulars, and do veer into smarmy “think of the children!” territory from time to time — but the problem of videogames whose content was completely opaque to parents was a legitimate one, and the solution that came out of this hearing was a worthwhile one in my opinion. It’s arguably the academic expert Eugene Provenzo who comes off the worst here. (Does he know what country Nintendo comes from?) And Senator Dorman, who is apparently here just to grandstand about unwed mothers and similar tiresome bugbears, and the disingenuous Howard Lincoln…

- Olof Kindgren

April 30, 2021 at 6:42 pm

I think it’s bit sad that everyone focus so much on the violence aspects here. These people are making some very good points about the racism and sexism, the latter which hasn’t really been seriously discussed until very recently.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

April 24, 2021 at 3:05 am

“Despite many bold predictions and more scattershot attempts at actual implementation, [streaming games has] never quite come to pass in the comprehensive way that seemed so well-nigh inevitable in 1993.”

Well, not quite true… There was OnLive and Gaikai a decade ago, and now there’s Luna, GeForce Now, and Stadia, plus several smaller players. It has been shown to work for many people. Whether there’s a profitable business there does remain to be seen, but we have the technology!

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2021 at 5:39 am

I considered becoming a profitable business to be part of “coming to pass in a comprehensive way.” ;)

- Jacen aka Jaina

April 24, 2021 at 5:34 am

The nerd that becomed a hero

Is my next band name. Might be sic, of course.

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2021 at 5:51 am

:) Thanks!

- Zed Banville

April 24, 2021 at 10:21 am

Quite amusing to read the testimony from progressive panelists Eugene Provenzo and Marilyn Droz castigating videogames for being “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobic”, and even “fascist”. Plus ça change…

Meanwhile, the trio of Democrat Senators were disingenuously linking rising crime rates to videogames, while sanctimoniously claiming action needed to be taken to protect children.

- Martin

April 24, 2021 at 1:02 pm

Off subject, but what was the cause of the rise of violence up to 1993 and then the subsequent fall?

Has it reached a known reason, is it still a political football or are we still at the wild guessing phase?

- Brian

April 24, 2021 at 1:26 pm

I don’t know that the total answer is clear as to why violence has dropped off so much in the last 30 years… probably many different inputs have affected this.

What is interesting are the number of people who insist the world is much more violent and dangerous now, when the numbers clearly show it isn’t. Moral panics are such an interesting point of discussion!

- Eric Nyman

April 24, 2021 at 1:39 pm

The rise and fall of the use of lead in products such as gasoline and paint was almost certainly a major factor. There is a very well documented correlation across the world between exposure to lead and crime levels. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/

- Ross

April 24, 2021 at 2:29 pm

There are definitely many factors involved in the decline of violence, but it’s popularly theorized that the removal of lead from paint and gas was one of the major factors. Lead exposure in youth has been demonstrated to cause damage specifically to the parts of the brain responsible for controlling violent impulses. The increase in violence tracks pretty well in time and geography to auto pollution and the decline tracks equally closely to the changes in environmental regulations. The science is far from settled, but it seems like more studies support the hypothesis than refute it.

- Martin

April 24, 2021 at 7:46 pm

Is there evidence in other countries that probably removed the lead at a different time to back that up?

Sorry for distracting the thread Jimmy.

- Eric Nyman

April 25, 2021 at 1:12 am

Martin, yes there is. It correlates almost perfectly in each country–a crime rise starting about 15 years after lead is introduced, and a drop starting about 15 years after its ban. The link above provides further information.

- Zed Banville

April 27, 2021 at 12:23 am

The subsequent fall in violent crime rates is still a point of political contention that can be ascribed, partly or wholly, to various causes ranging from criminal justice policy and better policing to infant lead poisoning. However, the earlier rise in crime rates during the 60s and 70s predates even the popularity of the Atari VCS, much less the Nintendo Entertainment System, much less the more realistic depictions of violence in games such as Mortal Kombat or Night Trap that only emerged as violent crime rates were around their zenith. Considering only the chronology of crime rates versus videogame prevalence, as well as the relatively young age distribution of the audience for console games, they could at most be a contributing factor to the tail end of the rise in violent crime — and as much as fervent critics of videogames might wish it, research has never demonstrated a causal connection between playing violent videogames and engaging in actual violent behavior.

- Doug Orleans

April 29, 2021 at 4:24 am

Personally I also find the lead hypothesis fairly convincing. There’s also a more controversial hypothesis that the legalization of abortion contributed to the decrease in crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

- Odkin Wood

April 30, 2021 at 8:05 am

The rise of three strikes laws and broken-window policing. Permanently remove career criminals and you cut out a lot. Stop tolerating petty crime, and all crime goes down. The reversal of this is why crime is going to go through the roof in the next 5 years.

- Damien

April 24, 2021 at 3:40 pm

The constant back-stabbing between the Nintendo and Sega representatives is absolutely amazing. Did they really think that could work to their individual advantage?!

- Alex Smith

April 24, 2021 at 5:46 pm

Not to spoil the ending, but that unfortunate display disgusted those in the industry as well and directly motivated EA executive Jack Heistand to take a leading role in bringing everyone together to form the ESRB. Heistand served as the voice of a more unified industry in a far more sedate follow up hearing in early 1994.

- Bobby Impollonia

April 26, 2021 at 12:37 am

It’s strange to see Lethal Enforcers singled out so much. In that game, you are a police officer going after organized crime. I’d expect senators to consider that one of the least offensive contexts for a player to use a gun.

The game used digitized images of real people. I guess that’s what really bothered them especially given the focus on Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 26, 2021 at 12:44 am

“First we have Mortal Kombat, which is a martial-arts contents”

Should that be a martial-arts _contest_?

- Jimmy Maher

April 26, 2021 at 7:54 am

Yes. Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

April 26, 2021 at 3:33 pm

Small typo: “conclusion, I believe that this national attention on videogame violence affords us a rare opportunity to avoid the enormous time lag between the TV-violence research findings and public awareness We have…”.
A missing period after “awareness” and before “We have…”

- Jimmy Maher

April 26, 2021 at 3:40 pm

Thanks!

- Kevin Butler

April 27, 2021 at 2:29 pm

What’s even more entertaining is when they start the debate as to what mature is. White brings up the fact that movies (thank you Gremlins and Indiana Jones) have a PG-13 rating while Night Trap started with a MA-13 but got moved to a MA-17. So, now he is sparring with Dorgan and Kohl (to a lesser degree) in regard to what constitutes mature. They seem, though, totally oblivious to the fact he is leading them down a one-way path in regard to movie violence and those who see that doesn’t seem to be as bad as one seeing it in a video game. I would love to see data (from that time period) for how many teens watched PG, PG-13, R, and maybe even X movies (that had violence and/or extreme sexuality) versus those who were buying “violent” video games. Then establish some sort of verifiable and duplicatable data to show said correlation. Since the ultimate goal of these farcical hearings was to create a correlation between teen violence and violent video games, it seems that this “tunnel-vision” approach more than back-fired on them. I remember these hearings and still thought they were a joke since everyone was on their moral “high-ground” soapbox posturing. These hearing were less about science and more about getting re-elected again.

- Josh T.

April 27, 2021 at 3:43 pm

“Marilyn Droz represented the American Coalition Against Television Violence.”

I believe that should be the “National Coalition on Television Violence”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2021 at 3:53 pm

As it says in the picture, right? ;) Thanks!

The Ratings Game, Part 3: Dueling Standards
May 7, 2021

When Sega, Nintendo, and the Software Publishers Association (SPA) announced just before the Senate hearing of December 9, 1993, that they had agreed in principle to create a standardized rating system for videogames, the timing alone marked it as an obvious ploy to deflect some of the heat that was bound to come their way later that day. At the same time, though, it was also more than a ploy: it was in fact the culmination of an effort that had been underway in some quarters of the industry for months already, one which had begun well before the good Senators Lieberman and Kohl discovered the horrors of videogame violence and sex. As Bill White of Sega was at pains to point out throughout the hearing, Sega had been seriously engaged with the question of a rating system for quite some time, and had managed to secure promises of support from a considerable portion of the industry. But the one entity that had absolutely rejected the notion was the very one whose buy-in was most essential for any overarching initiative of this sort: Nintendo. “Howard [Lincoln] was not going to be part of any group created by Sega,” laughs Dr. Arthur Pober, one of the experts the latter consulted.

So, Sega decided to go it alone. Again as described by Bill White at the hearing, they rolled out a thoroughly worked-out rating system for any and all games on their platforms just in time for Mortal Kombat in September of 1993. It divided games into three categories: GA for general audiences, MA-13 for those age thirteen or older, and MA-17 for those age seventeen or older. An independent board of experts was drafted to assign each new game its rating without interference from Sega’s corporate headquarters; its chairman was the aforementioned Arthur Pober, a distinguished educational psychologist with decades of research experience about the role of media in children’s lives on his CV. Under his stewardship, Mortal Kombat wound up with an MA-13 rating; Night Trap, which had already been in stores for the better part of a year by that point, was retroactively assigned a rating of MA-17.

Although one might certainly quibble that these ratings reflected the American media establishment’s terror of sex and relatively blasé attitude toward violence, Sega’s rating system bore all the outward signs of being a good-faith exercise. At the very least it was, as White repeatedly stated at the hearing, a good first step, one that was taken before any of the real controversy even began.

The second step was of course Nintendo’s grudging acquiescence to the concept of a universal rating system on the day of the hearing — a capitulation whose significance should not be underestimated in light of the company’s usual attitude toward intra-industry cooperation, which might be aptly summarized as “our way or the highway.” And the third step came less than a month later, at the 1994 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, which in accordance with long tradition took place over the first week of the new year in Las Vegas.

Anyone wandering the floor at this latest edition of CES would have seen a digital-games industry that was more fiercely competitive than ever. Sega, celebrating a recent report that gave them for the first time a slight edge over Nintendo in overall market share, had several attention-grabbing new products on offer, including the latest of their hugely popular Sonic the Hedgehog games; the Activator, an early attempt at a virtual-reality controller; the CDX, a portable CD player that could also be used as a game console; and, most presciently of all, a partnership with AT&T to bring online multiplayer gaming, including voice communication, to the Genesis. Meanwhile Nintendo gave the first hints about what would see the light of day some 30 months later as the Nintendo 64. And other companies were still trying to muscle their way into the bifurcated milieu of the living-room consoles. Among them were Atari, looking for a second shot at videogame glory with their Jaguar console; Philips, still flogging the dead horse known as CD-I; and a well-financed new company known as 3DO, with a console that bore the same name. Many traditional makers of business-oriented computers were suddenly trying to reach many of the same consumers, through products like Compaq’s new home-oriented Presario line; even stodgy old WordPerfect was introducing a line of entertainment and educational software. Little spirit of cooperation was in evidence amidst any of this. With “multimedia” the buzzword of the zeitgeist, the World Wide Web looming on the near horizon, and no clarity whatsoever about what direction digital technology in the home was likely to take over the next few years, the competition in the space was as cutthroat as it had ever been.

And yet in a far less glitzy back room of the conference center, all of these folks and more met to discuss the biggest cooperative initiative ever proposed for their industry, prompted by the ultimatum they had so recently been given by Senators Lieberman and Kohl: “Come up with a rating system for yourself, or we’ll do it for you.” The meeting was organized by the SPA, which had the virtue of not being any of the arch-rival console makers, and was thus presumably able to evince a degree of impartiality. “Companies such as 3DO, Atari, Acclaim, id Software, and Apogee already have rating systems,” said Ken Wasch, the longstanding head of the SPA, to open the proceedings. “But a proliferation of rating systems is confusing to retailers and consumers alike. Even before this became an issue in the halls of Congress or in the media, there was a growing belief that we needed a single, easily recognizable system to rate and label our products.”

But the SPA lost control of the meeting almost from the moment Wasch stepped down from the podium. The industry was extremely fortunate that neither Senator Lieberman nor Kohl took said organization up on an invitation to attend in person. One participant remembers the meeting consisting mostly of “people sitting around a table screaming and carrying on.” Cries of “Censorship!” and “Screw ’em! We’ll make the games we want to make!” dominated for long stretches. Many regarded the very notion of a rating system as an unacceptable intrusion by holier-than-thou bureaucrats; they wanted to call what they insisted was the senators’ bluff, to force them to put up actual government legislation — legislation whose constitutionality would be highly questionable — or to shut up about it.

Yet such advocates of the principle of free speech over all other concerns weren’t the sum total of the problem. Even many of those who felt that a rating system was probably necessary were thoroughly unimpressed with the hosts of the meeting, and not much disposed to fall meekly into line behind them.

The hard reality was that the SPA had never been viewed as a terribly effectual organization. Formed  to be the voice of the computer-software industry in 1984 — i.e., just after the Great Videogame Crash — it had occupied itself mostly with anti-piracy campaigns and an annual awards banquet in the years since. The return of a viable console marketplace in the form of the Nintendo Entertainment System and later the Sega Genesis had left it in an odd position. Most of the publishers of computer games who began moving some or all of their output to the consoles were members of the SPA, and through them the SPA itself got pulled into this brave new world. But there were certainly grounds to question whether the organization’s remit really ought to involve the console marketplace at all. Was the likes of Acclaim, the publisher of console-based videogames like Mortal Kombat, truly in the same business as such other SPA members as the business-software titans Microsoft and WordPerfect? Nintendo had always pointedly ignored the SPA; Sega had joined as a gesture of goodwill to their outside publishers who were also members, but hardly regarded it as a major part of their corporate strategy. In addition to being judged slow, bureaucratic, and uncreative, the SPA was regarded by everyone involved with the consoles as being much more invested in computer software of all stripes than console-based videogames. And what with computer games representing in the best case fifteen percent of the overall digital-games market, that alone struck them as a disqualifier for spearheading an initiative like this one.

Electronic Arts, the largest of all of the American game publishers, was in an interesting position here. Founded in 1983 to publish games exclusively for computers, EA had begun moving onto consoles in a big way at the dawn of the 1990s, scoring hits there with such games as the first installments in the evergreen John Madden Football series. By the beginning of 1994, console games made up over two-thirds of their total business.

A senior vice president at EA by the name of Jack Heistand felt that an industry-wide rating system was “the right thing to do. I really believed in my heart that we needed to communicate to parents what the content was inside games.” Yet he also felt convinced from long experience that the SPA was hopelessly ill-equipped for a project of this magnitude, and the disheartening meeting which the SPA tried to lead at CES only cemented that belief. So, immediately after the meeting was over, he approached EA’s CEO Larry Probst with a proposal: “Let’s get all the [other] CEOs together to form an industry association. I will chair it.” Probst readily agreed.

Jack Heistand

The SPA was not included in this other, secret meeting, even though it convened at that same CES. Its participants rather included a representative from each of the five manufacturers of currently or potentially viable consoles: Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Philips, and 3DO. Rounding out their numbers were two videogame-software publishers: Acclaim Entertainment of Mortal Kombat fame and of course Electronic Arts. With none of the console makers willing to accept one of their rivals as chairman of the new steering committee, they soon voted to bestow the role upon Jack Heistand, just as he had planned it.

Sega, convinced of the worthiness of their own rating system, would have happily brought the entirety of the industry under its broad tent and been done with it, but this Nintendo’s pride would never allow. It became clear as soon as talks began, if it hadn’t been already, that whatever came next would have to be built from scratch. With Senators Lieberman and Kohl breathing down their necks, they would all have to find a way to come together, and they would have to do so quickly. The conspirators agreed upon an audacious timetable indeed: they wanted to have a rating system in place for all games that shipped after October 31, 1994 — just in time, in other words, for the next Christmas buying season. It was a tall order, but they knew that they would be able to force wayward game publishers to comply if they could only get their own house in order, thanks to the fact all of the console makers in the group employed the walled-garden approach to software: all required licenses to publish on their platforms, meaning they could dictate which games would and would not appear there. They could thus force a rating system to become a ubiquitous reality simply by pledging not to allow any games on their consoles which didn’t include a rating.

On February 3, 1994, Senator Lieberman introduced the “Video Game Rating Act” to the United States Senate, stipulating that an “Interactive Entertainment Rating Commission” should be established, with five members appointed by President Bill Clinton himself; this temporary commission would be tasked with founding a new permanent governmental body to do what the industry had so far not been willing to do for itself. Shortly thereafter, Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, introduced parallel legislation in the House. Everyone involved made it clear, however, that they would be willing to scrap their legislation if the industry could demonstrate to their satisfaction that it was now addressing the problem itself. Lieberman, Kohl, and Lantos were all pleased when Sega dropped Night Trap from their product line as a sort of gesture of good faith; the controversial game had never been a particularly big seller, and had now become far more trouble than it was worth. (Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, was still posting sales that made it worth the controversy…)

On March 4, 1994, three representatives of the videogame industry appeared before Lieberman, Kohl, and Lantos at a hearing that was billed as a “progress report.” The only participant in the fractious hearing of three months before who returned for this one was Howard Lincoln of Nintendo, who had established something of a rapport with Senator Lieberman on that earlier occasion. Sega kept Bill White, who most definitely had not, well away, sending instead a white-haired senior vice president named Edward Volkwein. But most of the talking was done by the industry’s third representative, Jack Heistand. His overriding goal was to convince the lawmakers that he and his colleagues were moving as rapidly as possible toward a consistent industry-wide rating system, and should be allowed the balance of the year to complete their work before any legislation went forward. He accordingly emphasized over and over that ratings would appear on the boxes of all new videogames released after October 31.

The shift in tone from the one hearing to the next was striking; this one was a much more relaxed, even collegial affair than last time out. Lieberman, Kohl, and Lantos all praised the industry’s efforts so far, and kept the “think of the children!” rhetoric to a minimum in favor of asking practical questions about how the rating system would be implemented. “I don’t need to get into that argument again,” said Senator Lieberman when disagreements over the probability of a linkage between videogame violence and real-world aggression briefly threatened to ruin the good vibe in the room.

“I think you’re doing great,” said Senator Kohl at the end of the hearing. “It’s a wonderful start. I really am very pleased.” Mission accomplished: Heistand had bought himself enough time to either succeed or fail before the heavy hand of government came back on the scene.

Heistand’s remit was rapidly growing into something much more all-encompassing than just a content-rating board. To view his progress was to witness nothing less than an industry waking up to its shared potential and its shared problems. As I’ve already noted, the videogame industry as a whole had long been dissatisfied with its degree of representation in the SPA, as well as with the latter’s overall competence as a trade organization. This, it suddenly realized, was a chance to remedy that. Why not harness the spirit of cooperation that was in the air to create an alternative to the SPA that would focus solely on the needs of videogame makers? Once that was done, this new trade organization could tackle the issue of a rating system as just the first of many missions.

The International Digital Software Association (IDSA) was officially founded in April of 1994. Its initial members included Acclaim, Atari, Capcom, Crystal Dynamics, Electronic Arts, Konami, Nintendo, Philips, Sega, Sony, Viacom, and Virgin, companies whose combined sales made up no less than 60 percent of the whole videogame industry. Its founding chairman was Jack Heistand, and its first assigned task was the creation of an independent Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Heistand managed to convince Nintendo and the others to accept the man who had chaired Sega’s ratings board for the same role in the industry-wide system. Arthur Pober had a reputation for being, as Heistand puts it, “very honorable. A man of integrity.” “Arthur was the perfect guy,” says Tom Kalinske, then the president and CEO of Sega of America. “He had good relationships inside of the education world, inside of the child-development world, and knew the proper child psychologists and sociologists. Plus, we knew he could do it — because he had already done it for us!”

Neutral parties like Pober helped to ease some of the tension that inevitably sprang up any time so many fierce competitors were in the room together. Heistand extracted a promise from everyone not to talk publicly about their work here — a necessary measure given that Howard Lincoln and Tom Kalinske normally used each and every occasion that offered itself to advance their own company and disparage their rival. (Witness Lincoln’s performance at the hearing of December 9…)

Over the course of the next several months, the board hammered out a rating system that was more granular and detailed than the one Sega had been using. It divided games into five rather than three categories: “Early Childhood” (EC) for children as young as age three; “Kids to Adults” (K-A) for anyone six years of age or older; “Teen” (T) for those thirteen or older; “Mature” (M) for those seventeen or older; and “Adults Only” (AO) for those eighteen or older. It was not a coincidence that these ratings corresponded fairly closely to the movie industry’s ratings of G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17. A team of graphic artists came up with easily recognizable icons for each of the categories — icons which proved so well-designed for their purpose that most of them are still used to this day.

The original slate of ESRB icons. Since 1994, remarkably few changes have been made: the “Kids to Adults” category has been renamed “Everyone,” and a sixth category of games suitable for those ten years and older, known in the rating system’s nomenclature as “Everyone 10+,” has been added.

The ESRB itself was founded as a New York-based non-profit. Each game would be submitted to it in the form of a videotape of 30 to 40 minutes in length, which must contain the game’s most “extreme” content. The board would then assign the game to one of its teams of three reviewers, all of whom were trained and overseen by the ESRB under the close scrutiny of Arthur Pober. The reviewers were allowed to have no financial or personal ties to the videogame industry, and were hired with an eye to demographic diversity: an example which Heistand gave of an ideal panel consisted of a retired black male elementary-school principal, a 35-year-old white full-time mother of two, and a 22-year-old white male law student. A measure of checks and balances was built into the process: publishers would have the chance to appeal ratings with which they disagreed, and all rated games would have to pass a final audit a week before release to ensure that the videotape which had been submitted had been sufficiently representative of the overall experience. The ESRB aimed to begin accepting videotapes on September 1, 1994, in keeping with the promise that all games released after October 31 would have a rating on the box. Everything was coming together with impressive speed.

But as Heistand prepared to return to Washington to report all of this latest progress on July 29, 1994, there remained one part of the games industry which had not fallen into line. The SPA was not at all pleased by the creation of a competing trade association, nor by having the rug pulled out from under its own rating initiative. And the computer-game makers among its members didn’t face the same compulsion to accept the ESRB’s system, given that they published on open platforms with no gatekeepers.

The relationship between computer games and their console-based brethren had always been more complicated than outsiders such as Senators Lieberman and Kohl were wont to assume. While the degree of crossover between the two had always been considerable, computer gaming had been in many ways a distinct form of media in its own right since the late 1970s. Computer-game makers claimed that their works were more sophisticated forms of entertainment, with more variety in terms of theme and subject matter and, in many cases, more complex and cerebral forms of gameplay on offer. They had watched the resurrection of the console marketplace with as much dismay as joy, being unimpressed by what many of them saw as the dumbed-down “kiddie aesthetic” of Nintendo and the stultifying effect which the consoles’ walled gardens had on creativity; there was a real feeling that the success of Nintendo and its ilk had come at the cost of a more diverse and interesting future for interactive entertainment as a whole. Perhaps most of all, computer-game makers and their older-skewing demographic of players profoundly resented the wider culture’s view of digital games of any stripe as essentially children’s toys, to be regulated in the same way that one regulated Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars. These resentments had not disappeared even as many of the larger traditional computer-game publishers, such as EA, had been tempted by the booming market for console-based videogames into making products for those systems as well.

Johnny L. Wilson, the editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World magazine, voiced in an editorial the objections which many who made or played computer games had to the ESRB:

[The ESRB rating system] has been developed by videogame manufacturers and videogame publishers without significant input by computer-based publishers. The lone exception to this rule is Electronic Arts, which publishes personal-computer titles but nets more than two-thirds of its proceeds from videogame sales. The plan advocated by this group of videogame-oriented companies calls for every game to be viewed by an independent panel prior to release. This independent panel would consist of parents, child psychologists, and educators.

How does this hurt you? This panel is not going to understand that you are a largely adult audience. They are not going to perceive that there is a marketplace of mature gamers. Everything they evaluate will be examined under the rubric, “Is it good for children?” As a result, many of the games covered in Computer Gaming World will be rated as unsuitable for children, and many retailers will refuse to handle these games because they perceive themselves as family-oriented stores and cannot sell unsuitable merchandise.

The fate of Night Trap, an unusually “computer-like” console game, struck people like Wilson as an ominous example of how rating games could lead to censoring them.

Honestly held if debatable opinions like the above, combined perhaps with pettier resentments about the stratospheric sales of console games in comparison to those that ran on computers and its own sidelining by the IDSA, led the SPA to reject the ESRB, and to announce the formation of its own ratings board just for computer games. It was to be called the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC), and its founding president was to be Robert Roden, the general counsel and director of business affairs for the computer-game publisher LucasArts. This choice of an industry insider rather than an outside expert like Arthur Pober reflected much of what was questionable about the alternative rating initiative.

Indeed, and although much of the reasoning used to justify a competing standard was cogent enough, the RSAC’s actual plan for its rating process was remarkable mostly for how comprehensively it failed to address the senators’ most frequently stated concerns about any self-imposed rating standard. Instead of asking publishers to submit videotapes of gameplay for review by an independent panel, the RSAC merely provided them with a highly subjective questionnaire to fill out; in effect, it allowed them to “self-rate” their own games. And, in a reflection of computer-game makers’ extreme sensitivity to any insinuation that their creations were just kids’ stuff, the RSAC rejected outright any form of age-based content rating. Age-based rating systems were “patronizing,” claimed the noted RSAC booster Johnny L. Wilson, because “different people of widely disparate ages have different perceptions of what is appropriate.” In lieu of sorting ratings by age groups, the RSAC would use descriptive labels stipulating the amount and type of violence, sex, and profanity, with each being ranked on a scale from zero to four.

The movie industry’s rating system was an obvious counterexample to this idea that age-based classification must necessarily entail the infantilization of art; certainly cinema still enjoyed vastly more cultural cachet than computer games, despite its own longstanding embrace of just such a system. But the computer-game makers were, it would seem, fairly blinded by their own insecurities and resentments.

A representative of the SPA named Mark Traphagen was invited to join Jack Heistand at the hearing of July 29 in order to make the case for the RSAC’s approach to rating computer games. The hearing began in an inauspicious fashion for him. Senator Lieberman, it emerged during opening statements, had discovered id Software’s hyper-violent computer game of DOOM in the interim between this hearing and the last. This occasion thus came to mark the game’s coming-out party on the national stage. For the first but by no means the last time, a politician showed a clip of it in action, then lit into what the audience had just seen.

What you see there is an individual with a successive round of weapons — a handgun, machine gun, chainsaw — just continuing to attack targets. The bloodshed, the gunfire, and the increasingly realistic imagery combine to create a game that I would not want my daughter or any other child to see or to play.

What you have not seen is some of the language that is displayed onscreen when the game is about to be played. “Act like a man!” the player is told. “Slap a few shells into your shotgun and let’s kick some demonic butt! You’ll probably end up in Hell eventually. Shouldn’t you know your way around before you make an extended visit?”

Well, some may say this is funny, but I think it sends the wrong message to our kids. The game’s skill levels include “I’m Too Young To Die” and “Hurt Me Plenty.” That obviously is not the message parents want their kids to hear.

Mark Traphagen received quite a grilling from Lieberman for the patent failings of the RSAC self-rating system. He did the best he could, whilst struggling to educate his interrogators on the differences between computer and console games. He stipulated that the two were in effect different industries entirely — despite the fact that many software publishers were, as we’ve seen, active in both. This was an interesting stand to take, not least in the way that it effectively ceded the ground of console-based software to the newly instituted IDSA, in the hope that the SPA could hang onto computer games.

Traphagen: Despite popular misconceptions and their admitted similarities to consumers, there are major differences between the personal-computer-software industry and the videogame industry. While personal-computer software and videogame software may be converging toward the compact disc as the preferred storage medium, those of us who develop and publish entertainment software see no signs of a convergence in either product development or marketing.

The personal-computer-software industry is primarily U.S.-based, small to medium in size, entrepreneurial, and highly innovative. Like our plan to rate software, it is based on openness. Its products run on open-platform computers and can be produced by any of thousands of companies of different sizes, without restrictive licensing agreements. There is intense competition between our industry and the videogame industry, marked by the great uncertainty about whether personal computers or some closed platform will prevail in the forthcoming “information superhighway.”

Senator Lieberman: Maybe you should define what a closed platform is in this regard.

Traphagen: A closed platform, Senator, is one in which the ability to create software that will run on that particular equipment is controlled by licensing agreements. In order to create software that will run on those platforms, one has to have the permission and consent of the equipment manufacturer.

Senator Lieberman: And give us an example of that.

Traphagen: A closed platform would be a videogame player.

Senator Lieberman: Such as a Sega or Nintendo?

Traphagen: That is right. In contrast, personal computers are an open platform in which any number of different companies can simply buy a development package at a retailer or a specialty store and then create software that will operate on the computer.

Traphagen explained the unwillingness of computer-game makers to fall under the thumb of the IDSA by comparing them to indie film studios attempting to negotiate the Hollywood machine. Yet he was able to offer little in defense of the RSAC’s chosen method of rating games. He made the dubious claim that creating a videotape for independent evaluation would be too technically burdensome on a small studio, and had even less to offer when asked what advantage accrued to not rating games by suitable age groups: “I do not believe there is an advantage, Senator. There was simply a decision that was taken that the ratings would be as informative as possible, without being judgmental.”

Some five weeks after this hearing, the RSAC would hold a press conference in Dallas, Texas, the home of id Software of DOOM fame. In fact, that game was used to illustrate how the rating system would work. Even some of the more sanguine members of the gaming press were surprised when it received a rating of just three out of four for violence. The difference maker, the RSAC representatives explained, was the fact that DOOM’s violence wasn’t “gratuitous”; the monsters were trying to kill you, so you had no choice but to kill them. One has to presume that Senators Lieberman and Kohl would not have been impressed, and that Mark Traphagen was profoundly thankful that the press conference occurred after his appearance before them.

Even as it was, the senators’ skepticism toward the RSAC’s rating system at the hearing stood out all the more in contrast to their reception of the ESRB’s plan. The relationship between Senator Lieberman and Jack Heistand had now progressed from the cordial to the downright genial; the two men, now on a first-name basis, even made room for some banter on Heistand’s abortive youthful attempts to become a rock star. The specter of government legislation was never even raised to Heistand. It was, needless to say, a completely different atmosphere from the one of December 9. When the hearing was finished, both sides sent out press notices praising the wisdom and can-do spirit of the other in glowing terms.

But much of the rest of the games industry showed far less good grace. As the summer became the fall and it became clear that game ratings really were happening, the rants began, complete with overheated references to Fahrenheit 451 and all of the other usual suspects. Larry O’Brien, the editor of the new Game Developer magazine, made his position clear in the first line of his editorial: “Rating systems are crap.”

With the entire entertainment industry rolling over whenever Congress calls a hearing, it’s fallen on us to denounce these initiatives for what they are: cynical posturing and electioneering with no substance. Rating systems, whether for movies, television, videogames, or any other form of communication, don’t work, cost money, and impede creativity. Everyone at those hearings, politicians and witnesses alike, knows that. But there’s nothing politicians love more than “standing up for the family” and blaming America’s cultural violence on Hollywood. So the entertainment industry submissively pisses all over itself and proposes “voluntary” systems from the pathetic to the laughable.

Parents should decide. If parents don’t want their kids to play X-COM or see Terminator 2, they should say no and put up with the ensuing argument. They don’t need and shouldn’t get a rating system to supplement their authority. The government has no right to help parents say no at the video store if that governmental interference impedes your right to develop whatever content you feel appropriate.

We all have responsibilities. To create responsibly, to control the viewing and gaming habits of our own children, and to call the government’s ratings initiatives what they are: cynical, ineffective, and wrong-headed.

The libertarian-leaning Wired magazine, that voice of cyber-futurism, published a jeremiad from Rogier Van Bakel that was equally strident.

Violent games such as DOOM, Night Trap, and Mortal Kombat are corrupting the minds and morals of millions of American children. So what do you do? Easy.

You elect people like Herb Kohl and Joe Lieberman to the US Senate. You applaud them when they tell the videogame industry that it’s made up of irrepressible purveyors of gratuitous gore and nefarious nudity. You nod contentedly when the senators give the industry an ultimatum: “Either you start rating and stickering your games real soon, or we, the government, will do it for you.”

You are pleasantly surprised by the industry’s immediate white flag: a rating system that is almost as detailed as the FDA-mandated nutrition information on a can of Campbell’s. You contend that that is, in fact, a perfect analogy: all you want, as a consumer, is honest product labeling. Campbell’s equals Sega equals Kraft equals 3DO.

Finally, you shrug when someone remarks that it may not be a good idea to equate soup with freedom of speech.

All that was needed now was a good conspiracy theory. This Karen Crowther, a spokesperson for makers of shareware computer games, helpfully provided when she said that the government had gotten “hoodwinked by a bunch of foreign billion-dollar corporations (such as Sony, Nintendo, and Sega) out to crush their US competition.”

Robert Peck, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, flirted with a legal challenge:

This [rating] system is a response to the threat of Senators Lieberman and Kohl that they would enact legislation requiring labels unless the industry did something to preempt them. The game manufacturers are being required to engage in speech that they would otherwise not engage in. These ratings have the government’s fingerprints all over them.

This present labeling system isn’t going to be the end of it. I think some games are going to be negatively affected, sales-wise, and the producers of those games will probably bring a lawsuit. We will then see that this system will be invalidated.

The above bears a distinct whiff of legalistic wishful thinking; none of it came to pass.

While voices like these ranted and raved, Jack Heistand, Arthur Pober, and their associates buckled down soberly to the non-trivial task of putting a rating on all new console-based videogames that holiday season, and succeeded in doing so with an efficiency that one has to admire, regardless of one’s position on the need for such a system. Once the initial shock to the media ecosystem subsided, even some of the naysayers began to see the value in the ESRB’s work.

Under the cover of the rating system, for example, Nintendo felt able to relax many of their strict “family-friendly” content policies. The second “Mortal Monday,” heralding the release of Mortal Kombat II on home consoles, came in September of 1994, before the ESRB’s icons had even started to appear on games. Nevertheless, Nintendo improvised a stopgap badge labeling the game unsuitable for those under the age of seventeen, and felt protected enough by it to allow the full version of the coin-op original on their platform this time, complete with even more blood and gore than its predecessor. It was an early sign that content ratings might, rather than leading game makers to censor themselves, give them a feeling of carte blanche to be more extreme.

By 1997, Game Developer was no longer railing against the very idea of a rating system, but was fretting instead over whether the ESRB’s existing approach was looking hard enough at the ever more lifelike violence made possible by the latest graphics hardware. The magazine worried about unscrupulous publishers submitting videotapes that did not contain their games’ most extreme content, and the ESRB failing to catch on to this as games continued to grow larger and larger: “The ESRB system uses three (count ’em, three) ‘demographically diverse’ people to rate a game. (And I thought television’s Nielsen rating system used a small sample set.) As the stakes go up in the ratings game, the threat of a publisher abusing our rating system grows larger and larger.”

Meanwhile the RSAC strolled along in a more shambolic manner, stickering games here and there, but never getting anything close to the complete buy-in from computer-game publishers that the ESRB received from console publishers. These respective patterns held throughout the five years in which the dueling standards existed.

In the end, in other words, the computer-game people got what they had really wanted all along: a continuing lack of any concerted examination of the content of their works. Some computer games did appear with the ESRB icons on their boxes, others with the RSAC schemas, but plenty more bothered to include no content guidance at all. Satisfied for the time being with the ESRB, Senators Lieberman and Kohl didn’t call any more hearings, allowing the less satisfying RSAC system to slip under the radar along with the distinct minority of digital games to which it was applied, even as computer games like Duke Nukem 3D raised the bar for violence far beyond the standard set by DOOM. The content of computer games wouldn’t suffer serious outside scrutiny again until 1999, the year that a pair of rabid DOOM and Duke Nukem fans shot up their high school in Columbine, Colorado, killing thirteen teachers and students and injuring another 24. But that is a tragedy and a controversy for a much, much later article…

(Sources: the books Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent, and Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff; Game Developer of September 1994, December 1994, August/September 1995, September 1997, and January 1998; Computer Gaming World of June 1994, December 1994, May 1996, and July 1999; Electronic Entertainment of November 1994 and January 1995; Mac Addict of January 1996; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1994; Washington Post of July 29 1994; the article “Regulating Violence in Video Games: Virtually Everything” by Alex Wilcox in the Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary, Volume 31, Issue 1; the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s publication Rating Video Games: A Parent’s Guide to Games; the 1994 episode of the television show Computer Chronicles entitled “Consumer Electronics Show.” Online sources include Blake J. Harris’s “Oral History of the ESRB” at VentureBeat and C-SPAN’s coverage of the Senate hearings of December 9 1993, March 4 1994, and July 29 1994.)

Comments
31 Responses

- Sarah Walker

May 7, 2021 at 4:34 pm

Interesting reading how this evolved in the US.

There was a parallel version of this running at the same time in the UK (and I’d assume many other countries). Games were mostly exempt from classification following the 1984 Video Recordings Act, with exceptions around extreme violence or sexual content which would require submissions to the BBFC, responsible for film classification; I believe Mortal Kombat and Night Trap both got BBFC certificates. Regardless, there was still a similar panic around the same time, with Night Trap getting mentioned in parliament.

The response was the voluntary ELSPA ratings system, similar to the ESRB system, though I don’t believe it had the same pushback from the computer games industry. This ran alongside the BBFC system. While the ELSPA system seems to have worked okay, the BBFC were much less than ideal for reviewing games which caused a few controversies; my main memories are Doom II’s 18 rating (apparently given due to fear of a moral panic rather than any content actually in the game; it was later re-rated 15), the Carmageddon ‘green blood’ censoring which was quickly un-done by a patch, and the delays in Carmageddon 2’s rating due to the BBFC not owning a 3D accelerator card. In any case both systems were scrapped in the 2000s and replaced with the Europe-wide PEGI ratings.

- David Boddie

May 7, 2021 at 9:01 pm

Link for the UK parliamentary mention of Night Trap: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1993-12-16a.1395.0#g1399.1

- Bingo

May 8, 2021 at 4:13 am

“the Europe-wide PEGI ratings.”

Yes, most of Europe uses the PEGI rating system but there is one outlier: Germany has its own system managed by a body called USK which is inspired/derived from the national film rating system FSK which was established earlier.

Games that are rated by the USK are played by the people evaluating and rating them instead of just relying on footage and/or information provided by the developer or publisher.

Some games released in Germany feature both PEGI and USK ratings on their box covers which can make them look a bit cluttered, especially when they also include other icons, ad blurbs, stickers, etc.

- Martin

May 7, 2021 at 6:21 pm

Can anyone explain the content differences between M and AO? Example games in the AO category and why? Didn’t even know there was such a rating.

As for America’s ‘fear’ of sex but relative acceptance of violence, I assume that would be a relic of a Puritanical background.

- Krebizfan

May 7, 2021 at 7:19 pm

The list of AO games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AO-rated_video_games Not many and most were deliberately pushing for the rating to get the marketing boost of controversy making up for being poorly designed games.

Looking at the ESRB scheme, extended sex and violence scenes and the use of real money for gambling triggers an AO rating. The difference would be between sequences the story requires and pure porn as evaluated by the members of the ESRB.

- Gnoman

May 8, 2021 at 2:49 am

The difference between M and AO is the difference between R and NC-17/X. Very few games have ever received an AO rating because all of the major retailers absolutely refused to stock any game with that rating. Before the Internet, this was a death knell to sales.

More practically, console makers generally refused to allow content that would go beyond M anyway, out of fears that it would hurt their brand. The only major title that ever got the rating did so retroactively – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was upped from M to AO because hackers were able to find and re-enable a sex minigame that had been scrapped early in development. Rockstar dealt with this by releasing a “second edition” that had the offending content scrubbed.

- Kevin Butler

May 10, 2021 at 5:51 pm

Yep, that would be the “Hot Coffee” code/mod. At first, Rockstar blamed the hackers for putting in said code but after some investigation, it was later discovered the code already existed and Rockstar thought they had hidden and disabled it with full knowledge of said code. The hackers only found the code and with a GameShark or AR code breaker, one could activate that code on version 1 (which now is getting rarer). Rockstar threatened any site that if they published the cheat codes for activating the “Hot Coffee” mini-game, severe repercussions would occur. If anything, it was one of the rare games that became instantly more popular changing from an M to an AO rating although stores refused to carry it until they fixed the problem.

- dmdr

May 10, 2021 at 12:10 am

“As for America’s ‘fear’ of sex but relative acceptance of violence, I assume that would be a relic of a Puritanical background.”

1) not all of America’s early settlers were Puritans ;
2) even if they were, sex creates new people, violence is a tool for correcting idiots (there’s a reason why marriage by choice has been historically rare). Being ‘fear’ful of violence but blase about sex is essentially the same thing as being mad about spanners but totes OK with unrestricted human cloning, ie. dumb.

ALSO!!!! I found a typo: “The relationship between computer games and their console-based brethren had always been more complicated than outsiders such as Senators Lieberman and Khol were wont to assume.”

“Khol”

- Jimmy Maher

May 10, 2021 at 5:04 am

Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 7, 2021 at 7:11 pm

The blurb on the Sega CDX in your article is misleading, as its game console functions can only be used while attached to a wall socket and TV, in addition to a controller being plugged into the console. By most definitions, this would disqualify it as a “handheld” console. Instead, a better description would be “a portable CD player that could also be used as a traditional game console.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 7, 2021 at 8:04 pm

Thanks!

- Alex

May 9, 2021 at 3:38 pm

“portable CD player that could also be used a game console”

I think it’s missing an “as” in the updated version

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2021 at 4:56 pm

Teach me not to make late-night edits. Thanks!

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 10, 2021 at 4:38 pm

Minor corection: The Sega (Genesis) CDX console is referred to by that name in promotional material and on the system’s label itself, with no dash.

Source: https://segaretro.org/File:GenesisCDX_Bottom.jpg

- Jimmy Maher

May 10, 2021 at 7:27 pm

Thanks!

- Wutan

May 8, 2021 at 4:18 am

Ah, the Sega CDX, also know as the Sega Multimega in some regions, a gorgeous looking “all-in-one” version of a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega CD/Mega CD and a portable (battery powered) CD player.

I had me one of those many years back. It was just beautiful to look at and very compact in size in comparison to its “donor” consoles. I wish I hadn’t sold it… :-(

- Jeff Scott

May 8, 2021 at 6:49 am

The video of Doom sounded like it was using the pc speaker. I wonder whether that was a deliberate choice or just due to a lack of sound card in the computer used to record the footage.

- Avian Overlord

May 8, 2021 at 7:37 pm

Something I’d be really interested to see you write about is the ESRB’s content standards and how they’ve affected the industry. One particular area that comes to mind is the ESRB’s more liberal stance on homosexuality compared to say, the MPAA.

- Mayhaym

May 9, 2021 at 9:50 pm

I always thought the pushback against rating systems in the video/computer game industry had more to do with the earlier self-imposed (under threat of regulation) ratings system in comics, that contributed to the demise of EC Comics (and others).

- Kev McHugh

June 3, 2021 at 1:51 pm

The comics industry created the Comics Code Authority in response to government pressure. The CCA was more analogous to the Hays Code (which it was modeled after) than the MPAA. Certain topics or images were strictly off-limits under the CCA.

This dramatically curtailed what comics artists could do for decades and made horror comics a non-starter. You couldn’t do werewolves or vampires. Not even if you said it was just for adults. There wasn’t a concept of adults material under the CCA, it’s one-size-fits-all.

So it was presumably an instructive example for the video game industry, who wanted to be able to sell games to adults and teens, and not make everything fit the 8 year old demographic.

One reason to adopt a rating system is too avoid a Hays Code/CCA style system, which is much more like a censor.

- mycophobia

May 10, 2021 at 5:58 pm

“Kid to Adults” –> “Kids to Adults”

Also, I believe the “10+” is officially “Everyone 10+”, according to https://www.esrb.org/ratings-guide/

- Jimmy Maher

May 10, 2021 at 7:29 pm

Thanks!

- Michael L Waddell

May 10, 2021 at 9:27 pm

> “The meeting was organized by the SPA…”

You never define that group. Who were they?

- Jimmy Maher

May 11, 2021 at 5:56 am

The name is spelled out in the first line of this article, and the organization’s function is described in the previous article in this series. Shortly after the line you cite, the SPA’s purpose, culture, and reputation are discussed in some detail. Not sure how much more defining I can do than that. ;)

- Michael L Waddell

May 11, 2021 at 1:52 pm

Ah, there it is. If you put “Software Publishers Association (SPA)” at first mention, it’s easy for readers to recognize and/or search for.

- Eric

May 19, 2021 at 12:31 pm

Seconded. As a non-native English speaker who reads The Economist, their fastidious habit of always mentioning acronyms next to the spelled-out names is frequently useful.

- Jimmy Maher

May 19, 2021 at 1:02 pm

I kind of hate the way it reads in an opening sentence, but fair enough. Thanks!

- Lisa H.

May 20, 2021 at 9:47 pm

If it helps (it probably won’t), the Associated Press and Chicago styles disagree with each other on what to do. Both want you to spell it out on first use, but only Chicago wants you to immediately follow that with the acronym in parentheses; AP prescribes just going ahead and starting to use the acronym with the second use (much like I just did in this sentence).

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2021 at 6:58 am

I kind of walk a line between the two normally, including acronyms in parentheses only where I think there might be some confusion and where I think it looks okay. I just don’t like it in this opening sentence. But of course clarity has to trump my fussy writerly concerns about aesthetics, difficult as they may be for me to accept sometimes.

- Michael

May 15, 2021 at 9:36 pm

“making products for those system as well”
Should read “systems.”

On a different level, I find this sentence a bit questionable: “Why haven’t Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye been banned from high-school reading lists yet?” he concluded, thus deliberately or inadvertently conflating a rating system with outright censorship.

It appears to me that you are in fact conflating High School reading lists with “outright censorship.” A reading list is a list of books which have been rated by educators as “appropriate” for the age range in question; hence it resembles a ratings system much more closely than a Nazi book bonfire.

- Jimmy Maher

May 15, 2021 at 9:46 pm

A fair point. Thanks!

The Ratings Game, Part 4: E3 and Beyond
May 21, 2021

In 1994, the Consumer Electronics Show was a seemingly inviolate tradition among the makers of videogame consoles and game-playing personal computers. Name a landmark product, and chances were there was a CES story connected with it. The Atari VCS had been shown for the first time there in 1977; the Commodore 64 in 1982; the Amiga in 1984; the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985; Tetris in 1988; the Sega Genesis in 1989; John Madden Football in 1990; the Super NES in 1991, just to name a few. In short, CES was the first and most important place for the videogame industry to show off its latest and greatest to an eager public.

For all that, though, few inside the industry had much good to say about the experience of actually exhibiting at the show. Instead of getting the plum positions these folks thought they deserved, their cutting-edge, transformative products were crammed into odd corners of the exhibit hall, surrounded by the likes of soft-porn and workout videos. The videogame industry’s patently second-class status may have been understandable once upon a time, when it was a tiny upstart on the media landscape with a decidedly uncertain future. But now, with it approaching the magic mark of $5 billion in annual revenues in the United States alone, its relegation at the hands of CES’s organizers struck its executives as profoundly unjust. Wherever and whenever they got together, they always seemed to wind up kibitzing about the hidebound CES people, who still lived in a world where toasters, refrigerators, and microwave ovens were the apex of technological excitement in the home.

They complained at length as well to Gary Shapiro, the man in charge of CES, but his cure proved worse than the disease. He and the other organizers of the 1993 Summer CES, which took place as usual in June in Chicago, promised to create some special “interactive showcase pavilions” for the industry. When the exhibitors arrived, they saw that their “pavilions” were more accurately described as tents, pitched in the middle of an unused parking lot. Pat Ferrell, then the editor-in-chief of GamePro magazine, recalls that “they put some porta-potties out there and a little snack stand where you could pick up a cookie. Everybody was like, ‘This is bullshit. This is like Afghanistan.'” It rained throughout the show, and the tents leaked badly, ruining several companies’ exhibits. Tom Kalinske, then the CEO of Sega of America, remembers that he “turned to my team and said, ‘That’s it. We’re never coming back here again.'”

Kalinske wasn’t true to his word; Sega was at both the Winter and Summer CES of the following year. But he was now ready and willing to listen to alternative proposals, especially after his and most other videogame companies found themselves in the basement of Chicago’s McCormick Place in lieu of the parking lot in June of 1994.

In his office at GamePro, Pat Ferrell pondered an audacious plan for getting his industry out of the basement. Why not start a trade show all his own? It was a crazy idea on the face of it — what did a magazine editor know about running a trade show? — but Ferrell could be a force of nature when he put his mind to something. He made a hard pitch to the people who ran his magazine’s parent organization: the International Data Group (IDG), who also published a wide range of other gaming and computing magazines, and already ran the Apple Macintosh’s biggest trade show under the banner of their magazine Macworld. They were interested, but skeptical whether he could really convince an entire industry to abandon its one proven if painfully imperfect showcase for such an unproven one as this. It was then that Ferrell started thinking about the brand new Interactive Digital Software Association. The latter would need money to fund the ratings program that was its first priority, then would need more money to do who knew what else in the future. Why not fund the IDSA with a trade show that would be a vast improvement over the industry’s sorry lot at CES?

Ferrell’s negotiations with the IDSA’s members were long and fraught, not least because CES seemed finally to be taking the videogame industry’s longstanding litany of complaints a bit more seriously. In response to a worrisome decline in attendance in recent editions of the summer show, Shapiro had decided to revamp his approach dramatically for 1995. After the usual January CES, there would follow not one but four smaller shows, each devoted to a specific segment of the larger world of consumer electronics. The videogame and consumer-computing industries were to get one of these, to take place in May in Philadelphia. So, the IDSA’s members stood at a fork in the road. Should they give CES one more chance, or should they embrace Ferrell’s upstart show?

The battle lines over the issue inside the IDSA were drawn, as usual, between Sega and Nintendo. Thoroughly fed up as he was with CES, Tom Kalinske climbed aboard the alternative train as soon as it showed up at the station. But Howard Lincoln of Nintendo, very much his industry’s establishment man, wanted to stick with the tried and true. To abandon a known commodity like CES, which over 120,000 journalists, early adopters, and taste-makers were guaranteed to visit, in favor of an untested concept like this one, led by a man without any of the relevant organizational experience, struck him as the height of insanity. Yes, IDG was willing to give the IDSA a five-percent stake in the venture, which was five percent more than it got from CES, but what good was five percent of a failure?

In the end, the majority of the IDSA decided to place their faith in Ferrell in spite of such reasonable objections as these — such was the degree of frustration with CES. Nintendo, however, remained obstinately opposed to the new show. Everyone else could do as they liked; Nintendo would continue going to CES, said Lincoln.

And so Pat Ferrell, a man with a personality like a battering ram, decided to escalate. He didn’t want any sort of split decision; he was determined to win. He scheduled his own show — to be called the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 — on the exact same days in May for which Shapiro had scheduled his. Bet hedging would thus be out of the question; everyone would have to choose one show or the other. And E3 would have a critical advantage over its rival: it would be held in Los Angeles rather than Philadelphia, making it a much easier trip not only for those in Silicon Valley but also for those Japanese hardware and software makers thinking of attending with their latest products. He was trying to lure one Japanese company in particular: Sony, who were known to be on the verge of releasing their first ever videogame console, a cutting-edge 32-bit machine which would use CDs rather than cartridges as its standard storage medium.

Sony finally cast their lot with E3, and that sealed the deal. Pat Ferrell:

My assistant Diana comes into my office and she goes, “Gary Shapiro’s on the phone.” I go, “Really?” So she transfers it. Gary says, “Pat, how are you?” I say, “I’m good.” He says, ‘”You win.” And he hangs up.

E3 would go forward without any competition in its time slot.

Howard Lincoln, a man accustomed to dictating terms rather than begging favors, was forced to come to Ferrell and ask what spots on the show floor were still available. He was informed that Nintendo would have to content themselves with the undesirable West Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, a space that hadn’t been remodeled in twenty years, instead of the chic new South Hall where Sony and Sega’s big booths would have pride of place. Needless to say, Ferrell enjoyed every second of that conversation.

The dawn of a new era: E3 1995.

Michael Jackson, who was under contract to Sony’s music division, made an appearance at the first E3 to lend his star power to the PlayStation.

Jack and Sam Tramiel of Atari were also present. Coming twelve years after the Commodore 64’s commercial breakout, this would be one of Jack’s last appearances in the role of a technology executive. Suffice to say that it had been a long, often rocky road since then.

Lincoln’s doubts about Ferrell’s organizational acumen proved misplaced; the first E3 went off almost without a hitch from May 11 through 13, 1995. There were no less than 350 exhibitors — large, small, and in between — along with almost 38,000 attendees. There was even a jolt of star power: Michael Jackson could be seen in Sony’s booth one day. The show will be forever remembered for the three keynote addresses that opened proceedings — more specifically, for the two utterly unexpected bombshell announcements that came out of them.

First up on that first morning was Tom Kalinske, looking positively ebullient as he basked in the glow of having forced Howard Lincoln and Nintendo to bend to his will. Indeed, one could make the argument that Sega was now the greatest single power in videogames, with a market share slightly larger than Nintendo’s and the network of steadfast friends and partners that Nintendo’s my-way-or-the-highway approach had prevented them from acquiring to the same degree. Settling comfortably into the role of industry patriarch, Kalinske began by crowing about the E3 show itself:

E3 is a symbol of the changes our industry is experiencing. Here is this great big show solely for interactive entertainment. CES was never really designed for us. It related better to an older culture. It forced some of the most creative media companies on earth to, at least figuratively, put on gray flannel suits and fit into a TV-buying, furniture-selling mold. Interactive entertainment has become far more than just an annex to the bigger electronics business. Frankly, I don’t miss the endless rows of car stereos and cellular phones.

We’ve broken out to become a whole new category — a whole new culture, for that matter. This business resists hard and fast rules; it defies conventional wisdom.

After talking at length about the pace at which the industry was growing (the threshold of $5 billion in annual sales would be passed that year, marking a quintupling in size since 1987) and the demographic changes it was experiencing (only 51 percent of Sega’s sales had been to people under the age of eighteen in 1994, compared with 62 percent in 1992), he dropped his bombshell at the very end of this speech: Sega would be releasing their own new 32-bit, CD-based console, the Saturn, right now instead of on the previously planned date of September 2. In fact, the very first units were being set out on the shelves of four key retailers — Toys “R” Us, Babbage’s, Electronics Boutique, and Software Etc. — as he spoke, at a price of $399.

Halfhearted claps and cheers swept the assembly, but the dominant reaction was a palpable consternation. Many of the people in the audience were working on Saturn games, yet had been told nothing of the revised timetable. Questions abounded. Why the sudden change? And what games did Sega have to sell alongside the console? The befuddlement would soon harden into anger in many cases, as studios and publishers came to feel that they’d been cheated of the rare opportunity that is the launch of a new console, when buyers are excited and have already opened their wallets wide, and are much less averse than usual to opening them a little wider and throwing a few extra games into their bag along with their shiny new hardware. Just like that, the intra-industry goodwill which Sega had methodically built over the course of years evaporated like air out of a leaky tire. Kalinske would later claim that he knew the accelerated timetable was a bad idea, but was forced into it by Sega’s Japanese management, who were desperate to steal the thunder of the Sony PlayStation.

Speaking of which: next up was Sony, the new rider in this particular rodeo, whose very presence on this showcase stage angered such other would-be big wheels in the console space as Atari, 3DO, and Philips, none of whom were given a similar opportunity to speak. Sony’s keynote was delivered by Olaf Olafsson, a man of extraordinary accomplishment by any standard, one of those rare Renaissance Men who still manage to slip through the cracks of our present Age of the Specialist: in addition to being the head of Sony’s new North American console operation, he was a trained physicist and a prize-winning author of literary novels and stories. His slick presentation emphasized Sony’s long history of innovation in consumer electronics, celebrating such highlights as the Walkman portable cassette player and the musical compact disc, whilst praising the industry his company was now about to join with equal enthusiasm: “We are not in a tent. Instead we are indoors at our own trade show. Industry momentum, accelerating to the tune of $5 billion in annual sales, has moved us from the CES parking lot.”

Finally, Olafsson invited Steve Race, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, to deliver a “brief presentation” on the pricing of the new console. Race stepped onstage and said one number: “$299.” Then he dropped the microphone and walked offstage again, as the hall broke out in heartfelt, spontaneous applause. A $299 PlayStation — i.e., a PlayStation $100 cheaper than the Sega Saturn, its most obvious competitor — would transform the industry overnight, and everyone present seemed to realize this.

The Atari VCS had been the console of the 1970s, the Nintendo Entertainment System the console of 1980s. Now, the Sony PlayStation would become the console of the 1990s.

“For a company that is so new to the industry, I would have hoped that Sony would have made more mistakes by now,” sighed Trip Hawkins, the founder of the luckless 3DO, shortly after Olafsson’s dramatic keynote. Sam Tramiel, president of the beleaguered Atari, took a more belligerent stance, threatening to complain to the Federal Trade Commission about Sony’s “dumping” on the American market. (It would indeed later emerge that Sony sold the PlayStation essentially at cost, relying on game-licensing royalties for their profits. The question of whether doing so was actually illegal, however, was another matter entirely.)

Nintendo was unfortunate enough to have to follow Sony’s excitement. And Howard Lincoln’s keynote certainly wouldn’t have done them any favors under any circumstances: it had a downbeat, sour-grapes vibe about it, which stood out all the more in contrast to what had just transpired. Lincoln had no big news to impart, and spent the vast majority of his time on an interminable, hectoring lecture about the scourge of game counterfeiting and piracy. His tone verged on the paranoid: there should be “no safe haven for pirates, whether they board ships as in the old days or manufacture fake products in violation of somebody else’s copyrights”; “every user is a potential illegal distributor”; “information wants to be free [is an] absurd rationalization.” He was like the parent who breaks up the party just as it’s really getting started — or, for that matter, like the corporate lawyer he was by training. The audience yawned and clapped politely and waited for him to go away.

The next five years of videogame-console history would be defined by the events of this one morning. The Sega Saturn was a perfectly fine little machine, but it would never recover from its botched launch. Potential buyers were as confused as developers by its premature arrival, those retailers who weren’t among the initial four chosen ones were deeply angered, and the initial library of games was as paltry as everyone had feared — and then there was the specter of the $299 PlayStation close on the horizon for any retail-chain purchasing agent or consumer who happened to be on the fence. That Christmas season, the PlayStation was launched with a slate of games and an advertising campaign that were masterfully crafted to nudge the average age of the videogame demographic that much further upward, by drawing heavily from the youth cultures of rave and electronica, complete with not-so-subtle allusions to their associated drug cultures. The campaign said that, if Nintendo was for children and Sega for adolescents, the PlayStation was the console for those in their late teens and and well into their twenties. Keith Stuart, a technology columnist for the Guardian, has written eloquently of how Sony “saw a future of post-pub gaming sessions, saw a new audience of young professionals with disposable incomes, using their formative working careers as an extended adolescence.” It was an uncannily prescient vision.

Sony’s advertising campaign for the PlayStation leaned heavily on the heroin chic. No one had ever attempted to sell videogames in this way before.

The PlayStation outsold the Saturn by more than ten to one. Thus did Sony eclipse Sega at the top of the videogame heap; they would remain there virtually unchallenged until the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox in 2001. By that time, Sega was out of the console-hardware business entirely, following a truly dizzying fall from grace. Meanwhile Nintendo just kept trucking along in their own little world, much as Howard Lincoln had done at that first E3, subsisting on Mario and Donkey Kong and their lingering family-friendly reputation. When their own next-generation console, the Nintendo 64, finally appeared in 1996, the PlayStation outsold it by a margin of three to one.

In addition to its commercial and demographic implications, the PlayStation wrought a wholesale transformation in the very nature of console-based videogames themselves. It had been designed from the start for immersive 3D presentations, rather than the 2D, sprite-based experiences that held sway on the 8- and 16-bit console generations. When paired with its commercial success, the sheer technical leap the PlayStation represented over what had come before made it easily the most important console since the NES. In an alternate universe, one might have made the same argument for the Sega Saturn or even the Nintendo 64, both of which had many of the same capabilities — but it was the PlayStation that sold to the tune of more than 100 million units worldwide over its lifetime, and that thus gets the credit for remaking console gaming in its image.

The industry never gave CES another glance after the success of that first E3 show; even those computer-game publishers who were partisans of the Software Publishers Association and the Recreational Software Advisory Council rather than the IDSA and ESRB quickly made the switch to a venue where they could be the main attraction rather than a sideshow. Combined with the 3D capabilities of the latest consoles, which allowed them to run games that would previously have been possible only on computers, this change in trade-show venues marked the beginning of a slow convergence of computer games and console-based videogames. By the end of the decade, more titles than ever before would be available in versions for both computers and consoles. Thus computer gamers learned anew how much fun simple action-oriented games could be, even as console gamers developed a taste for the more extended, complex, and/or story-rich games that had previously been the exclusive domain of the personal computers. Today, even most hardcore gamers make little to no distinction between the terms “computer game” and “videogame.”

It would be an exaggeration to claim that all of these disparate events stemmed from one senator’s first glimpse of Mortal Kombat in late 1993. And yet at least the trade show whose first edition set the ball rolling really does owe its existence to that event by a direct chain of happenstance; it’s very hard to imagine an E3 without an IDSA, and hard to imagine an IDSA at this point in history without government pressure to come together and negotiate a universal content-rating system. Within a few years of the first E3, IDG sold the show in its entirety to the IDSA, which has run it ever since. It has continued to grow in size and glitz and noise with every passing year, remaining always the place where deals are made and directions are plotted, and where eager gamers look for a glimpse of some of their possible futures. How strange to think that the E3’s stepfather is Joseph Lieberman. I wonder if he’s aware of his accomplishment. I suspect not.

Postscript: Violence and Videogames

Democracy is often banal to witness up-close, but it has an odd way of working things out in the end. It strikes me that this is very much the case with the public debate begun by Senator Lieberman. As allergic as I am to all of the smarmy “Think of the children!” rhetoric that was deployed on December 9, 1993, and as deeply as I disagree with many of the political positions espoused by Senator Lieberman in the decades since, it was high time for a rating system — not in order to censor games, but to inform parents and, indeed, all of us about what sort of content each of them contained. The industry was fortunate that a handful of executives were wise enough to recognize and respond to that need. The IDSA and ESRB have done their work well. Everyone involved with them can feel justifiably proud.

There was a time when I imagined leaving things at that; it wasn’t necessary, I thought, to come to a final conclusion about the precise nature of the real-world effects of violence in games in order to believe that parents needed and deserved a tool to help them make their own decisions about what games were appropriate for their children. I explained this to my wife when I first told her that I was planning to write this series of articles — explained to her that I was more interested in recording the history of the 1993 controversy and its enormous repercussions than in taking a firm stance on the merits of the arguments advanced so stridently by the “expert panel” at that landmark first Senate hearing. But she told me in no uncertain terms that I would be leaving the elephant in the room unaddressed, leaving Chekhov’s gun unfired on the mantel… pick your metaphor. She eventually brought me around to her point of view, as she usually does, and we agreed to dive into the social-science literature on the subject.

Having left academia behind more than ten years ago, I’d forgotten how bitterly personal its feuds could be. Now, I was reminded: we found that the psychological community is riven with if anything even more dissension on this issue than is our larger culture. The establishment position in psychology is that games and other forms of violent media do have a significant effect on children’s and adolescents’ levels of aggressive behavior. (For better or for worse, virtually all of the extant studies focus exclusively on young people.) The contrary position, of course, is that they do not. A best case for the anti-establishmentarians would have them outnumbered three to one by their more orthodox peers. A United States Supreme Court case from 2011 provides a handy hook for summarizing the opposing points of view.

The case in question actually goes back to 2005, when a sweeping law was enacted in California which made it a crime to sell games that were “offensive to the community” or that depicted violence of an “especially heinous, cruel, or depraved” stripe to anyone under the age of eighteen. The law required that manufacturers and sellers label games that fit these rather subjective criteria with a large sticker that showed “18” in numerals at least two-inches square. In an irony that plenty of people noted at the time, the governor who signed the bill into law was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was famous for starring in a long string of ultra-violent action movies.

The passage of the law touched off an extended legal battle which finally reached the Supreme Court six years later. Opponents of the law charged that it was an unconstitutional violation of the right to free speech, and that it was particularly pernicious in light of the way it targeted one specific form of media, whilst leaving, for example, the sorts of films to which Governor Schwarzenegger owed his celebrity unperturbed. Supporters of the law countered that the interactive nature of videogames made them fundamentally different — fundamentally more dangerous — than those older forms of media, and that they should be treated as a public-health hazard akin to cigarettes rather than like movies or books. The briefs submitted by social scientists on both sides provide an excellent prism through which to view the ongoing academic debate on videogame violence.

In a brief submitted in support of the law, the California Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the California Psychological Association stated without hesitation that “scientific studies confirm that violent video games have harmful effects [on] minors”:

Viewing violence increases aggression and greater exposure to media violence is strongly linked to increases in aggression.

Playing a lot of violent games is unlikely to turn a normal youth with zero, one, or even two other risk factors into a killer. But regardless of how many other risk factors are present in a youth’s life, playing a lot of violent games is likely to increase the frequency and the seriousness of his or her physical aggression, both in the short term and over time as the youth grows up. These long-term effects are a consequence of powerful observational learning and desensitization processes that neuroscientists and psychologists now understand to occur automatically in the human child. Simply stated, “adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school.”

In a recent book, researchers once again concluded that the “active participation” in all aspects of violence: decision-making and carrying out the violent act [sic], result in a greater effect from violent video games than a violent movie. Unlike a passive observer in movie watching, in first-person shooter and third-person shooter games, you’re the one who decides whether to pull the trigger or not and whether to kill or not. After conducting three very different kinds of studies (experimental, a cross-sectional correlational study, and a longitudinal study) the results confirmed that violent games contribute to violent behavior.

The relationship between media violence and real-life aggression is nearly as strong as the impact of cigarette smoking and lung cancer: not everyone who smokes will get lung cancer, and not everyone who views media violence will become aggressive themselves. However, the connection is significant.

One could imagine these very same paragraphs being submitted in support of Senator Lieberman’s videogame-labeling bill of 1994; the rhetoric of the videogame skeptics hasn’t changed all that much since then. But, as I noted earlier, there has emerged a coterie of other, usually younger researchers who are less eager to assert such causal linkages as proven scientific realities.

Thus another, looser amalgamation of “social scientists, medical scientists, and media-effects scholars” countered in their own court brief that the data didn’t support such sweeping conclusions, and in fact pointed in the opposite direction in many cases. They unspooled a long litany of methodological problems, researcher biases, and instances of selective data-gathering which, they claimed, their colleagues on the other side of the issue had run afoul of, and cited studies of their own that failed to prove or even disproved the linkage the establishmentarians believed was so undeniable.

In a recent meta-analytic study, Dr. John Sherry concluded that while there are researchers in the field who “are committed to the notion of powerful effects,” they have been unable to prove such effects; that studies exist that seem to support a relationship between violent video games and aggression but other studies show no such relationship; and that research in this area has employed varying methodologies, thus “obscuring clear conclusions.” Although Dr. Sherry “expected to find fairly clear, compelling, and powerful effects,” based on assumptions he had formed regarding video game violence, he did not find them. Instead, he found only a small relationship between playing violent video games and short-term arousal or aggression, and further found that this effect lessened the longer one spent playing video games.

Such small and inconclusive results prompted Dr. Sherry to ask: “[W]hy do some researchers continue to argue that video games are dangerous despite evidence to the contrary?” Dr. Sherry further noted that if violent video games posed such a threat, then the increased popularity of the games would lead to an increase in violent crime. But that has not happened. Quite the opposite: during the same period that video game sales, including sales of violent video games, have risen, youth violence has dramatically declined.

“The causation research can be done, and, indeed, has been done,” the brief concludes, and “leaves no empirical foundation for the assertion that playing violent video games causes harm to minors.”

The Supreme Court ruled against California, striking down the law as a violation of the First Amendment by a vote of seven to two. I’m more interested today, however, in figuring out what to make of these two wildly opposing views of the issue, both from credentialed professionals.

Before going any further, I want to emphasize that I came to this debate with what I honestly believe to have been an open mind. Although I enjoy many types of games, I have little personal interest in the most violent ones. It didn’t — and still doesn’t — strike me as entirely unreasonable to speculate that a steady diet of ultra-violent games could have some negative effects on some impressionable young minds. If I had children, I would — still would — prefer that they play games that don’t involve running around as an embodied person killing other people in the most visceral manner possible. But the indisputable scientific evidence that might give me a valid argument for imposing my preferences on others under any circumstances whatsoever just isn’t there, despite decades of earnest attempts to collect it.

The establishmentarians’ studies are shot through with biases that I will assume do not distort the data itself, but that can distort interpretations of that data. Another problem, one which I didn’t fully appreciate until I began to read some of the studies, is the sheer difficulty of conducting scientific experiments of this sort in the real world. The subjects of these studies are not mice in a laboratory whose every condition and influence can be controlled, but everyday young people living their lives in a supremely chaotic environment, being bombarded with all sorts of mediated and non-mediated influences every day. How can one possibly filter out all of that noise? The answer is, imperfectly at best. Bear with me while I cite just one example of (what I find to be) a flawed study. (For those who are interested in exploring further, a complete list of the studies which my wife and I examined can be found at the bottom of this article. The Supreme Court briefs from 2011 are also full of references to studies with findings on both sides of the issue.)

In 2012, Ontario’s Brock University published a “Longitudinal Study of the Association Between Violent Video Game Play and Aggression Among Adolescents.” It followed 1492 students, chosen as a demographic reflection of Canadian society as a whole, through their high-school years — i.e., from age fourteen or fifteen to age seventeen or eighteen. They filled out a total of four annual questionnaires over that period, which asked them about their social, familial, and academic circumstances, asked how likely they felt they were to become violent in various hypothetical real-world situations, and asked about their videogame habits: i.e., what games they liked to play and how much time they spent playing them each day. For purposes of the study, “action fighting” games like God of War and our old friend Mortal Kombat were considered violent, but strategy games with “some violent aspects” like Rainbow Six and Civilization were not; ditto sports games. The study’s concluding summary describes a “small” correlation between aggression and the playing of violent videogames: a Pearson correlation coefficient “in the .20 range.” (On this scale, a perfect, one-to-one positive or negative correlation would 1.0 or -1.0 respectively.) Surprisingly, it also describes a “trivial” correlation between aggression and the playing of nonviolent videogames: “mostly less than .10.”

On the surface, it seems a carefully worked-out study which reveals an appropriately cautious conclusion. When we dig in a bit further, however, we can see a few significant methodological problems. The first is its reliance on subjective, self-reported questionnaire answers, which are as dubious here as they were under the RSAC rating system. And the second is the researchers’ subjective assignment of games to the categories of violent and non-violent. Nowhere is it described what specific games were put where, beyond the few examples I cited in my last paragraph. This opacity about exactly what games we’re really talking about badly confuses the issue, especially given that strange finding of a correlation between aggression and “nonviolent” games. Finally, that oft-forgotten truth that correlation is not causation must be considered. When we add third variables to the mix — a statistical method of filtering out non-causative correlations from a data set — the Pearson coefficient between aggressive behavior and violent games drops to around 0.06 — i.e., well below what the researchers themselves describe as “trivial” — and that for nonviolent games drops below the threshold of statistical noise; in fact, the coefficient for violent games is just one one-hundredth above that same threshold. For reasons which are perhaps depressingly obvious, the researchers choose to base their conclusions around their findings without third variables in the mix — just one of several signs of motivated reasoning to be found in their text.

In the interest of not belaboring the point, I’ll just say that other studies I looked at had similar issues. Take, for example, a study of 295 students in Germany with an average age of thirteen and a half years, who were each given several scenarios that could lead to an aggressive response in the real world and asked how they would react, whilst also being asked which of a list of 40 videogames they played and how often they did so. Two and a half years later, they were surveyed again — but by now the researchers’ list of popular videogames was hopelessly out of date. They were thus forced to revamp the questionnaire with a list of game categories, and to retrofit the old, more specific list of titles to match the new approach. I’m sympathetic to their difficulties; again, conducting experiments like this amidst the chaos of the real world is hard. Nevertheless, I can’t help but ask how worthwhile an experiment which was changed so much on the fly can really be. And yet for all the researchers’ contortions, it too reveals only the most milquetoast of correlations between real-world aggression and videogame violence.

Trying to make sense of the extant social-science literature on this subject can often feel like wandering a hall of mirrors. “Meta-analyses” — i.e., analyses that attempt to draw universal findings from aggregations of earlier studies — are everywhere, with conclusions seemingly dictated more by the studies that the authors have chosen to analyze and the emphasis they have chosen to place on different aspects of them than by empirical truth. Even more dismaying are the analyses that piggyback on an earlier study’s raw data set, from which they almost invariably manage to extract exactly the opposite conclusions. This business of studying the effects of videogame violence begins to feel like an elaborate game in itself, one that revolves around manipulating numbers in just the right way, one that is entirely divorced from the reality behind those numbers. The deeper I fell into the rabbit hole, the more one phrase kept ringing in my head: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Both sides of the debate are prone to specious reasoning. Still, the burden of proof ultimately rests with those making the affirmative case: those who assert that violent videogames lead their players to commit real-world violence. In my judgment, they have failed to make that case in any sort of thoroughgoing, comprehensive way. Even after all these years and all these studies, the jury is still out. This may be because the assertion they are attempting to prove is incorrect, or it may just be because this sort of social science is so darn hard to do. Either way, the drawing of parallels between violent videogames and an indubitably proven public-hazard like cigarettes is absurd.

Some of the more grounded studies do tell us that, if we want to find places where videogames can be genuinely harmful to individuals and by extension to society, we shouldn’t be looking at their degree of violence so much as the rote but addictive feedback loops so many of them engender. Videogame addiction, in other words, is probably a far bigger problem for society than videogame violence. So, as someone who has been playing digital games for almost 40 years, I’ll conclude by offering the following heartfelt if unsolicited advice to all other gamers, young and old:

Play the types of games you enjoy, whether they happen to be violent or nonviolent, but not for more than a couple of hours per day on average, and never at the expense of a real-world existence that can be so much richer and more rewarding than any virtual one. Make sure to leave plenty of space in your life as well for other forms of creative expression which can capture those aspects of the human experience that games tend to overlook. And make sure the games you play are ones which respect your time and are made for the right reasons — the ones which leave you feeling empowered and energized instead of enslaved and drained. Lastly, remember always the wise words of Dani Bunten Berry: “No one on their death bed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer!’” Surely that statement at least remains as true of Pac-Man as it is of Night Trap.

(Sources: the book The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent; Edge of August 1995; GameFan of July 1995; GamePro of June 1995 and August 1995; Next Generation of July 1995; Video Games of July 1995; Game Developer of August/September 1995. Online sources include Blake J. Harris’s “Oral History of the ESRB” at VentureBeat, “How E3 1995 Changed Gaming Forever” at Syfy Games, “The Story of the First E3” at Polygon, Game Zero’s original online coverage of the first E3, “Sega Saturn: How One Decision Destroyed PlayStation’s Greatest Rival” by Keith Stuart at The Guardian, an interview with Olaf Olafsson at The Nervous Breakdown, and a collection of vintage CES photos at The Verge. Last but certainly not least, Anthony P’s self-shot video of the first E3, including the three keynotes, is a truly precious historical document.

I looked at the following studies of violence and gaming: “Differences in Associations Between Problematic Video-Gaming, Video-Gaming Duration, and Weapon-Related and Physically Violent Behaviors in Adolescents” by Zu Wei Zhai, et. al.; “Aggressive Video Games are Not a Risk Factor for Future Aggression in Youth: A Longitudinal Study” by Christopher J. Ferguson and John C.K. Wang; “Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents” by Sarah M. Coyne and Laura Stockdale; “Aggressive Video Games are Not a Rick Factor for Mental Health Problems in Youth: A Longitudinal Study” by Christopher J. Ferguson and C.K. John Wang; “A Preregistered Longitudinal Analysis of Aggressive Video Games and Aggressive Behavior in Chinese Youth” by Christopher J. Ferguson; “Social and Behavioral Heath Factors Associated with Violent and Mature Gaming in Early Adolescence” by Lind Charmaraman, et. al.; “Reexamining the Findings of the American Psychological Association’s 2015 Task Force on Violent Media: A Meta-Analysis” by Christopher J. Ferguson, et. al.; “Do Longitudinal Studies Support Long-Term Relationships between Aggressive Game Play and Youth Aggressive Behavior? A Meta-analytic Examination” by Aaron Drummond, et. al.; “Technical Report on the Review of the Violent Video Game Literature” by the American Psychological Association; “Exposure to Violent Video Games and Aggression in German Adolescents: A Longitudinal Study” by Ingrid Möller and Barbara Krahé; “Metaanalysis of the Relationship between Violent Video Game Play and Physical Aggression over Time” by Anna T. Prescitt, et. al.; “The Effects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect,Cognition, and Behavior” by Nicholas L. Carnagey and Craig A. Anderson; “Violent Video Game Effects on Aggression, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior in Eastern and Western Countries: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Craig A. Anderson, et. al.; “Violent Video Games: The Effects of Narrative Context and Reward Structure on In-Game and Postgame Aggression” by James D. Sauer, et. al.; “Internet and Video Game Addictions: Diagnosis, Epidemiology, and Neurobiology” by Clifford J. Sussman, et. al.; “A Longitudinal Study of the Association Between Violent Video Game Play and Aggression Among Adolescents” by Teena Willoughby, et. al. My wife dug these up for me with the help of her university hospital’s research librarian here in Denmark, but some — perhaps most? — can be accessed for free via organs like PubMed. I would be interested in the findings of any readers who care to delve into this literature — particularly any of you who possess the social-science training I lack.)

Comments
33 Responses

- Aula

May 21, 2021 at 5:01 pm

“decided to placed their faith”

place

“Toy “R” Us”

Toys

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2021 at 5:51 pm

Thanks!

- Jason Dyer

May 21, 2021 at 5:42 pm

Last sentence I think you intended to put “possess the social-science training I lack.”

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2021 at 5:51 pm

Thanks!

- Jogy

May 21, 2021 at 6:25 pm

Great writing, Jimmy!

I wonder – have there been any serious studies about the reverse causation – that people with already existing violent tendencies will be more likely to also play violent computer games.

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2021 at 8:06 pm

There has been a theory occasionally mooted that violent games might serve as a sort of escape valve for those with a lot of anger or aggression building up inside; it even got mentioned in the Senate hearing of December 9, 1993. But social scientists have generally been dismissive of it, as they were in that hearing. I don’t know whether there is any empirical reason for them to reject it out of hand. I certainly didn’t find any studies that addressed it.

Interestingly, more credence is generally lent to the theory that the nearly effortless availability of pornography over the course of the last couple of decades may have contributed to the marked decline we have seen in instances of rape and sexual assault in most Western countries over that time period. Indeed, those countries where the Internet is most restricted in that regard today generally have the biggest ongoing problems with rape and sexual assault.

I don’t entirely understand myself why the one theory is dismissed out of hand while the other is at least sometimes regarded as worthy of consideration. They seem to be so similar…

- Gnoman

May 22, 2021 at 12:19 am

I don’t think the “escape valve” aspect was what “reverse causation” was supposed to mean there. Rather, it is quite plausible that any studies that do find a link between virtual violence and real violence have the connection backwards.

Somebody who has violent tendencies will seek out virtual violence as easier and safer than the real variety, so any group of “violent video gamers” will have a higher percentage of people with violent tendencies. This, quite naturally, would translate to that group having a potentially higher percentage of people who will escalate to violence.

This is the exact fallacy that gave the politically motivated “gateway drug” theory a tiny fig-leaf of support. A large percentage of people taking hard drugs started with alcohol or marijuana – because those are the easiest drugs to obtain if you are craving a different mental state. The so-called “gateway drugs” did not actually make them more likely to try the harder stuff, but were simply what they could get.

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2021 at 8:04 am

As mentioned in the article, a third variable (https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/16824_Chapter_10.pdf) can be added, theoretically at least, to separate correlation from causation: i.e., to separate those who are drawn to violent videogames because they already have violent tendencies from those who develop violent tendencies from playing violent videogames. Few of the papers I looked at, however, made much of a serious, good-faith effort to do this — perhaps because it makes the final result that much less definitive, as it does in the case of the Canadian study I described in some detail. As EPG notes elsewhere, there’s tremendous pressure on researchers to show *results* after conducting an expensive, multi-year, career-dominating study. Inconclusive studies rarely lead to academic tenure.

- Fuck David Cage

May 30, 2021 at 5:09 pm

Statistics wildly contradict the idea that modern media cause violence: Crime rates have been consistently dropping; newer generations tend to be more liberal and peaceful; and a lot of the worst massacres in recent years have been caused by extremists from factions that tend to be Luddites: Religious extremists and hate groups. I thought when I young that there had been an increase in violence in the early ’90s, but I did a paper about it in school and after looking at the evidence I realized I was wrong.

- Andrew McCarthy

May 21, 2021 at 6:43 pm

An excellent article as per usual, and a postscript whose conclusions I heartily agree with.

- Keith Palmer

May 21, 2021 at 6:43 pm

A good many of the pieces here have reminded me I’ve always wound up with the “wrong” computer (for playing “big” games of their moment in quantity, anyway) and have thus kept peering in from the fringes, but bringing up video game consoles reminds me of how I’ve never owned a console at all and can wind up with an almost dubious and therefore probably altogether unfair impression of many modern games for them… which I suppose should just lead to saying it was genuinely interesting for me to read about the first days of the Sony PlayStation. I was aware to some extent of that console in university (right when everyone around me just seemed to be playing games on their PCs), but not of how it had got started. (For a few brief moments, though, a commercially available PlayStation emulator program for the Macintosh was on sale; had I bothered to scrape the money for it together in those moments, things might have wound up different for me.)

When reading the postscript, I have to admit to thinking back four decades before the concern about video games you were describing, to the concern about comic books. A casual rebuttal that may have stuck in my mind from several places, “Sure, juvenile delinquents read comic books, but so did just about every other American child in the early 1950s,” came back to me again. I can suppose, though, it would be even easier to critique the sociological studies from back then. I at least have to consider your closing comment about “not letting games take over,” anyway.

- Kevin Butler

May 26, 2021 at 3:34 pm

The birth of the Sony Playstation is a story unto itself. This article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation gives a great history of the Playstation.

- Fuck David Cage

May 30, 2021 at 5:27 pm

You should play console games, as they have a wide variety of classics. NES is my favorite classic console, and WiiU is my favorite modern console. These days, emulation gives you near-perfect copies of classic 8 and 16 bit games for systems like the NES, SNES, Turbografx, Turbo CD and Genesis. I recommend Mednafen for Turbo CD games, because I cannot get them to work on other emulators.

I recently got a Dreamcast, which I had never played; and an N64 which I had played a little but definitely had lot to learn. They are both excellent systems, although most of the Dreamcast’s games are way too short and easy.

- Lisa H.

May 21, 2021 at 8:22 pm

at a price of $399.

$700 today. *whistles* The PlayStation’s $299 price tag is a “mere” $525 in comparison.

- Sarah Walker

May 21, 2021 at 8:49 pm

Compare to the 3DO a couple of years earlier, whose already-absurd $699 launch price tag comes to a whopping $1,291.84 today.

- Lt. Nitpicker

May 21, 2021 at 9:47 pm

One minor, yet significant, omission from the article is the lack of references to the fact that IDG had been running the Macworld trade show for years at that point, thus explaining why Pat Ferrell felt that it would be a good idea for them to start a video game show.

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2021 at 7:53 am

Good point. Thanks!

- Josh Martin

May 21, 2021 at 11:55 pm

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t Ólafsson who announced the Playstation would retail for $299–towards the end of his keynote he went into a short spiel about “aggressive pricing” and asked Steve Race (the then-president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America) to take the stage for “a brief presentation,” which led to possibly the most famous mic-drop moment in the history of corporate keynotes.

- Michael Waddell

May 24, 2021 at 5:18 pm

That was a great video, especially now that this article has given me context. Thanks!

- EPG

May 22, 2021 at 12:05 am

As a trained social scientist I think you’ve got this one right. The primary studies are plagued by weak identification of the hypothetical process; experiments prove impossible to replicate with the same results, partly because finding effects is more rewarding to one’s career than finding no effects (we even refer to a “replication crisis”); meta-analyses are literature reviews that depend on which papers they choose; and sadly we can’t rule out bringing our own pre-existing views to the editing process

- Iffy Bonzoolie

May 22, 2021 at 4:54 am

This reminded me of another blog entry that I recently read: Beware the Man of One Study

TL;DR: Perfectly reasonable experimentation variance will cause a normal distribution of results. Partisans will cherry-pick studies that demonstrate the outcomes they desire, while still being able to say they are citing respectable sources.

- Josh Klugman

May 22, 2021 at 12:39 am

The last two paragraphs here are very wise. I too was thinking about the juxtaposition about 1990s concerns about violence in video games (a position which most video game pundits dismiss) and current concerns about addiction (a position which gets much sympathy from said pundits). Like Jimmy I suspect concerns about addiction and especially microtransactions are on firmer empirical ground than concerns about violence…but thinking about how games can feed addictions and compulsions makes me a bit more sympathetic to the concerns about games inducing violence behaviors.

- Alex Smith

May 22, 2021 at 2:42 am

Not to tell you how to spin a yarn, as you are far better at it than I, but I think you could pump up the Sony price reveal at E3 a little bit. Olaf Olafsson did not reveal the price of the console.
Instead, he invited SCEA president Steve Race on stage for what looked to be an extended briefing. Race walked up with a sheaf of notes, said “299,” and walked off to applause. That may seem a minor detail, but it’s a pretty legendary moment in video game marketing.

- Alex Smith

May 22, 2021 at 2:48 am

Also, this is too far in the weeds for your blog post, but as a postscript, that $299 pricetag basically got everybody fired. Japanese management was adamant the price was too low, but Olaf and Steve stood firm. Soon after, Steve was fired and Olaf reassigned within Sony. Early the next year, the next level of management below them, Angelo Pezzani, Jim Whims, and Bernie Stolar were either purged or saw the writing on the wall and left. While Japan was unhappy with a few things, the price of the system was one of the big ones. I think history would agree the US management got this one right.

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2021 at 8:41 am

I didn’t want to get too detailed on any of these events — one could easily make a book out of them — but perhaps I did miss an opportunity to inject some drama. I’ve punched it up just a bit. Thanks!

- Alex Smith

May 25, 2021 at 2:45 am

Love the new addition, but one final nit to pick: Steve Race was president of Sony Computer Entertainment America. There was also a Sony Computer Entertainment, the parent organization for this whole adventure, with its own, Japanese, president, so the distinction does matter.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2021 at 5:09 am

Thanks!

- Pingback: May 23rd – Critical Distance

- Michael Waddell

May 24, 2021 at 5:14 pm

I really appreciate your final paragraph. For myself, I found that the trick was to ask myself “Have I been enjoying this game over the last hour?” Not “Do I feel the impulse to keep playing”, but “Has this been truly enjoyable?” And that’s important for far more than videogames.

Thanks again for another truly enjoyable series!

- Ian Crossfield

May 28, 2021 at 4:26 am

Thanks for another fascinating read, as always.

And with this, I’m finally — after three months (or ten years) — caught up with the Digital A. Time for me to head over to the Analog…

- Ross

May 28, 2021 at 10:52 pm

The link between video games and violence is something I struggle with my position on a lot. Twenty years ago, I’d have reflexively said “Of course video games don’t cause violence and anyone saying so is stirring up a moral panic to make themselves feel virtuous,” but what we’ve seen since then is that even to this day there’s a (overwhelmingly male) percentage of games who are STILL so angry about the possibility of having their games taken away that they CONSISTENTLY side with racists, misogynists, and even outright fascists in the face of anyone saying something as innocuous as “There might possibly be some issues with some of these things”, and even now, the most common “woman in games journalism” career arc ends with “Then she said something negative about the latest edgelord simulation, and had to leave the field due to the death threats.”

- Fuck David Cage

May 30, 2021 at 5:19 pm

CES was the show that introduced the NES to America? This is interesting, because that system saved the industry, made many great games and companies popular and killed the Atari era by showing how much more we could do with video games. It has hundreds of great games, endless creativity, sometimes indie games still come out for it–I recommend the Haunted Halloween games–and is my favorite classic system. Its library ranges from the obvious choices like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Chip and Dale, Bionic Commando and Castlevania to obscurities like Otocky, Ai Senshi Nichol, Bucky O’Hare, Layla, Recca, Crisis Force and Gun Nac.

- Alberto

June 4, 2021 at 7:43 pm

Thanks for the great read! I like this blog’s “sagas”, and this is one of the best. You mentioned sometimes that the post-Doom history of digital entertainment is not so dear to you as the Infocom era, but I hope you will continue your narration for a long time to come.

Bob Stein and Voyager
June 4, 2021

Voyager tends to be overlooked in almost every survey because we didn’t really fit into anybody’s category. Librarians didn’t really pay much attention. The computer world never cared. Hollywood never really cared. We touched all these industries, but because we weren’t central to any of them and didn’t really ally with any of them in particular, we were in fact always an outlier.

— Bob Stein

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, an advisor to the American government on the subjects of engineering and technology, published his landmark essay “As We May Think,” which proposed using a hypothetical machine called the memex for navigating through an information space using trails of association. In the decades that followed, visionaries like Ted Nelson adapted Bush’s analog memex to digital computers, and researchers at Xerox PARC developed point-and-click interfaces that were ideal for the things that were by now being calling “hypertexts.” Finally, in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, created the World Wide Web, which moved hypertext onto the globe-spanning computer network known as the Internet. By the mid-1990s, a revolution in the way that all of us access and understand information was underway.

So runs a condensed history of the most life-changing invention in the realm of information transmission and retrieval since Gutenberg’s printing press. But, like any broad overview, it leaves out the many nooks and crannies where some of the interesting stories and artifacts can be found.

Tim Berners-Lee himself has told how the creation of the World Wide Web was more of a process of assembly than invention from whole cloth: “Most of the technologies involved in the Web had been designed already. I just had to put them together.” To wit: a very workable implementation of hypertext, eminently usable by everyday people, debuted on the Apple Macintosh in 1987, two and a half years before the first website went live. Over the course of that period of time, Apple’s HyperCard was used weekly by millions of people. When combined with the first CD-ROM drives, it gave those lucky people their first heady taste of what computing’s future was to hold for everyone. Even long after the Web had started to hum in earnest, locally hosted experiences, created in HyperCard and similar middleware environments like The Director, were able to combine hypertext with the sort of rich multimedia content that wouldn’t be practical over an Internet connection until after the millennium. This was the brief heyday of the CD as a publishing medium in its own right, a potential rival to the venerable paper-based book.

These CD-based hypertexts were different from the Web in some other, more fundamental or even philosophical ways than that of mere audiovisual fidelity. The Web was and is a hyper-social environment, where everyone links to everyone else — where, indeed, links and clicks are the very currency of the realm. This makes it an exciting, dynamic place to explore, but it also has its drawbacks, as our current struggles with online information bubbles and conscious disinformation campaigns illustrate all too well. Hypertextual, multimedia CD-ROMs, on the other hand, could offer closed but curated experiences, where a single strong authorial voice could be preserved. They were perhaps as close as we’ve ever come to non-fiction electronic books: not paper books which have simply been copied onto an electronic device, like ebooks on the Amazon Kindle and its ilk, but books which could not possibly exist on paper — books which supplement their text whenever necessary with sound and video, books consciously designed to be navigated by association. How strange and sad it is to think that they only existed during a relatively brief interstitial period in the history of information technology, when computers could already deliver hypertext and rich multimedia content but before the World Wide Web was widely enough available and fast enough to do everything we might ask of it.

The gold standard for electronic books on CD-ROM were the ones published by the Voyager Company. These productions ooze personality and quality, boasting innovative presentations and a touching faith in the intelligence of their readers. I would go so far as to say that there’s been no other collection of works quite like them in the entire history of electronic media. They stand out for me as some of my most exciting discoveries in all the years I’ve been writing these chronicles of our recent digital past for you. I’m delighted to bring you their story today.

The founder and head of Voyager was one Bob Stein. He was surely one of the most unlikely chief executives in the annals of American business, a man immortalized by Wired magazine as both “the most far-out publishing visionary in the new world” and “the least effective businessman alive.”

Stein was born in New York City in 1946, the son of a wealthy jewelry importer. His upbringing was, as he described it to me, “extremely privileged,” with all the best schools and opportunities that his parents’ money could buy. In high school, he imagined becoming an accountant or a lawyer. But he wound up going to Columbia University as a psychology undergraduate instead, and there he was swept up in the radical politics of the hippie generation. He found a home in the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group which hewed to the China of Chairman Mao in the internecine split that marked the international communist movement. Stein:

I was a revolutionary. I am not a revolutionary anymore, but, although my ideology has shifted, it hasn’t changed. I think we’re still many, many years away from making a judgment about the [Chinese] Cultural Revolution. Anything that is that broad, that encompasses a billion people over a ten-year period, is going to have so many facets to it. I will go to my grave saying that, from one perspective, the Cultural Revolution was the high point of humanity at the point when it happened. We’d never seen a society that was so good for so many of its people. That doesn’t mean it was good for everybody; intellectuals in particular suffered if they were not onboard with what was happening. And intellectuals are the ones who tell the story. So, a lot of the stories are told by intellectuals who didn’t do well during the Cultural Revolution. It was a hard time in China for a lot of people — but I don’t fault the Chinese for trying. Whether they failed is not as interesting to me as whether they tried.

Stein spent the late 1960s and most of the 1970s as a committed communist revolutionary, even as he was also earning a graduate degree in education from Harvard and working as a teacher and grass-roots community activist. Over the years, however, he grew more and more frustrated as the worldwide communist revolution he had been promised failed to materialize.

By the time I was in my early thirties, it became clear that revolution was much, much further away than I had thought when I signed up, as it were. So I made the extremely selfish decision to go do something else with my life. I did that because I could. With degrees from Columbia and Harvard, the world was my oyster. If a white guy like me wanted to come in from the cold, nobody looked askance. I remember walking down the street in New York with my daughter just after I left the Party, heading to some meeting I had set up with the president of CBS, whom I didn’t know, but I knew how to write a letter. She turned to me and said, “You know, you couldn’t be doing this transition if you didn’t have the background you have.”  And that was right. It wasn’t that I had any illusion that I was suddenly doing from the inside what I couldn’t do from the outside, it was that I was going to do something interesting and of value to humanity. I wasn’t making revolution anymore, but I would do things that had social value.

The question, of course, was just what those things should be. To the extent that he was aware of it at all, Stein had been unimpressed by the technological utopianism of organizations like Silicon Valley’s People’s Computer Company and Homebrew Computer Club. As a thoroughgoing Maoist, he had believed that society needed to be remade from top to bottom, and found such thinking as theirs naïve: “I didn’t think you could liberate humanity by doing cool shit on computers.”

Stein’s eureka moment came in the bathroom of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Propaganda Headquarters in Chicago. (Yes, a place by that name really existed.) Someone had left a copy of BusinessWeek there, presumably to help the party faithful keep tabs on the enemy. In it was an article about MCA’s work on what would become known as the laser disc, the first form of optical media to hit the consumer market; each of the record-album-sized discs was capable of storing up to one hour of video and its accompanying audio on each of its sides. Unlike the later audio-only compact disc, the laser disc was an analog rather than digital storage medium, meaning it couldn’t practically be used to store forms of data other than still and moving images and audio. Nevertheless, it could be controlled by an attached computer and made to play back arbitrary snippets of same. “It just seemed cool to me,” says Stein.

Shortly afterward, he and his wife Aleen Stein left the Party and moved to Los Angeles, where he spent his afternoons in the library, trying to make a plan for his future, and his nights working as a waiter. The potential of random-access optical media continued to intrigue him, leading him in the end into a project for Encyclopedia Britannica.

I failed Physics for Poets; I’ve never been technically oriented. I read an article where the chief scientist for Encyclopedia Britannica talked about putting the entire encyclopedia on a disc. I didn’t realize he meant that you could just do a digital dump; I thought he meant you could put it on there in a way that was interesting. So I wrote a letter to Random House asking if I could buy the rights to the Random House encyclopedia, which I quite liked; it was much less stodgy than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

A friend of mine asked me what I was into these days, and I sent her a copy of the letter, forgetting that her father was on the board of Encyclopedia Britannica. A few weeks later, I got a call from Chuck Swanson, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica. “If you know so much,” he said, “why don’t you come and talk to us?” I didn’t know anything!

I found this guy at the University of Nebraska who had made a bunch of videodiscs for the CIA, and I convinced him to come with me to Chicago to provide the gravitas for the meeting. We did a demo for Chuck Swanson and Charlie Van Doren, who was the head of editorial; he was like a kid in a candy store, he fell in love with this shit. They hired me to go away for a year and write a paper.

Stein was fortunate in having made his pitch at just the right time. Traditional print publishers like Encyclopedia Britannica were just beginning to reckon with the impact that the nascent personal-computer revolution was likely to have on their businesses; at almost the same instant that Stein was having his meeting, no less staid a publishing entity than the Reader’s Digest Corporation was investing $3 million in The Source, one of the first nationwide telecommunications services for everyday computer users. In time, when such things proved to catch on slower than their most wide-eyed boosters had predicted, print publishing’s ardor for electronic media would cool again, or be channeled into such other outlets as the equally short-lived bookware boom in computer games.

Stein’s final paper, which he sent to Encyclopedia Britannica in November of 1981, bore the dizzyingly idealistic title of “Encyclopedia Britannica and the Intellectual Tools of the Future.” He still considers it the blueprint of everything he would do in later years. Indeed, the products which he imagined Encyclopedia Britannica publishing would have fit in very well with the later Voyager CD-ROM catalog: Great Moments in History: A Motion Picture Archive; Please Explain with Isaac Asimov; Space Exploration: Past, Present, and Future; Invention and Discovery: The History of Technology; Everyday Life in the American Past; Origins: Milestones in Archaeological Discovery; Computers: The Mystery Unraveled; A Cultural History of the United States; Britannica Goes to London; The Grand Canyon: A Work in Progress. He pleaded with the company to think in the long term. From the report:

The existing [laser-disc] market is so small that immediate returns can only be minimal. To put this another way, if only the next couple of years are considered, more money can be made by investing in bonds than in videodiscs. On the other hand, the application of a carefully designed program now can minimize risks and put Encyclopedia Britannica in a position to realize impressive profits in a few years when the market matures. Three years from now, when other publishers are scrambling to develop video programs, Encyclopedia Britannica will already have a reputation for excellence and enjoy wide sales as a result. Furthermore, the individual programs we have described are designed to be classics that would be sold for many years.

As we’ll see, this ethic of getting in on the ground floor right now, even though profits might be nonexistent for the nonce, would also become a core part of Voyager’s corporate DNA; it would be a company perpetually waiting for a fondly predicted future when the financial floodgates would open. Encyclopedia Britannica, however, wasn’t interested in chasing unicorns at this time. Stein was paid for his efforts and his report was filed away in a drawer somewhere, never to be heard of again.

But Stein himself no longer had any doubts about what sorts of socially valuable things he wanted to work on. His journey next took him to, of all places, the videogame giant Atari.

At the time, the first wave of videogame mania was in full swing in the United States, with Atari at its epicenter, thanks to their Atari VCS home console and their many hit standup-arcade games. They quite literally had more money than they knew what to do with, and were splashing it around in some surprising ways. One of these was the formation of a blue-sky research group that ranged well beyond games to concern itself with the future of computing and information technology in the abstract. Its star — in fact, the man with the title of Atari’s “Chief Scientist” — was Alan Kay, a famous name already among digital futurists: while at Xerox PARC during the previous decade, he had developed Smalltalk, an object- and network-oriented programming language whose syntax was simple enough for children to use, and had envisioned something he called the Dynabook, a handheld computing device that today smacks distinctly of the Apple iPad. Reading about the Dynabook in particular, Stein decided that Alan Kay was just the person he needed to talk to. Stein:

I screwed up my courage one day and contacted him, and he invited me to come meet him. Alan read the [Encyclopedia Britannica] paper — all 120 pages of it — while we were sitting together. He said, “This is great. This is just what I want to do. Come work with me.”

Stein was joining a rarefied collection of thinkers. About half of Kay’s group consisted of refugees from Xerox PARC, while the other half was drawn from the brightest lights at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Architecture Machine Group, another hotbed of practical and theoretical innovation in computing.

Atari’s corporate offices were located in Silicon Valley, while both Stein and Kay lived in Los Angeles. In a telling testimony to the sheer amount of money at Atari’s disposal, they allowed the two to commute to work every day by airplane. Kay would sit next to Stein on the plane and “talk at me about two things I didn’t really know much about: music and computers. But I knew how to nod, so he thought I was understanding, and kept talking.”

Amidst this new breed of revolutionary dreamers, Stein found himself embracing the unwonted role of the practical man; he realized that he wanted to launch actual products rather than being content to lay the groundwork for the products of others, as most of his colleagues were. He took to flying regularly to New York, where he attempted to interest the executives at Warner Communications, Atari’s parent company, in the ideas being batted around on the other coast. But, while he secured many meetings, nothing tangible came out of them. After some eighteen months, he made the hard decision to move on. Once again, his timing was perfect: he left Atari just as the Great Videogame Crash was about to wreck their business. Less than a year later, Warner would sell the remnants of the company off in two chunks for pennies on the dollar, and Alan Kay’s research group would be no more.

Working independently now, Stein continued to try to interest someone — anyone — in pursuing the directions he had roughed out in his paper for Encyclopedia Britannica and refined at Atari. He got nowhere — until a spontaneous outburst set him on a new course: “At a boring meeting with RKO Home Video, I said off the top of my head, ‘How about selling me a very narrow right to Citizen Kane and King Kong? They said, ‘Sure.'” For the princely sum of $10,000, Stein walked away with the laser-disc rights to those two classic films.

Now all those hours spent hobnobbing with Warner executives paid off. Being idea-rich but cash-poor, Stein convinced a former Warner senior vice president named Roger Smith, who had been laid off in the wake of the Atari implosion, to put up his severance package as the capital for the venture. Thus was formed the Criterion Collection as a partnership between Bob and Aleen Stein and Roger Smith. The name is far better known today than that of Voyager — for, unlike Voyager, Criterion is still going as strong as ever.

The Criterion Citizen Kane and King Kong hit the market in November of 1984, causing quite the stir. For all that our main interest in this article is the later CD-ROMs of Voyager, it’s impossible to deny that, of all the projects Stein has been involved with, these early Criterion releases had the most direct and undeniable influence on the future of media consumption. Among many other innovations, Criterion took advantage of a heretofore little-remarked feature of the laser disc, the ability to give the viewer a choice of audio tracks to go with the video; this let them deploy the first-ever commentary track on the King Kong release, courtesy of film historian and preservationist Ron Haver. Stein describes how it came about:

At that time, and I don’t think it’s all that different today, transferring an old film to video meant sitting in a dark room (which cost hundreds of dollars per hour) making decisions about the correct color values for each individual shot. That was Ron’s job, and somewhat coincidentally, King Kong was his favorite film, and he kept us entertained by telling countless stories about the history of the film’s production. Someone said, “Hey, we’ve got extra sound tracks… why don’t we have Ron tell these stories while the film is playing?” Ron’s immediate reaction was “Are you kidding, NO WAY!”  The idea seemed too perfect to pass up, though, so I asked Ron if being stoned might help. He thought for a moment and said, “Hmmm! That might work.”  And so the next day we recorded Ron telling stories while the film played.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/KingKong.mp4

Criterion also included deleted scenes, making-of documentaries, and other materials in addition to the commentary. In doing so, they laid out what would become standard operating procedure for everyone selling movies for the home once the DVD era arrived twelve years later.

Still, Stein himself believes that the real bedrock of Criterion’s reputation was the quality of the video transfer itself. The Criterion name became a byword for quality, the brand of choice for serious aficionados of film — a status it would never relinquish amidst all the changes in media-consumption habits during the ensuing decades.

So, when Bob Stein dies, his obituary is almost certain to describe him first and foremost as a co-founder of the Criterion Collection, the propagator of a modest revolution in the way we all view, study, and interact with film. Yet Criterion was never the entirety of what Stein dreamed of doing, nor perhaps quite what he might have wished his principal legacy to be. Although he had an appreciation for film, he didn’t burn for it with the same passion evinced by Criterion’s most loyal customers. That description better fit his wife Aleen, who would come to do most of the practical, everyday work of managing Criterion. “I’m a book guy,” he says. “I love books.” The Criterion Collection made quality products of which he was justifiably proud, but it would also become a means to another end, the funding engine that let him pursue his elusive dream of true electronic books.

The company known as Voyager was formed already in 1985, the result of a series of negotiations, transactions, and fallings-out which followed the release of the first two Criterion laser discs. The shakeup began when Roger Smith left the venture, having found its free-wheeling hippie culture not to his taste, and announced his determination to take the Criterion name with him. This prompted the Steins to seek out a new partner in Janus Films, a hallowed name among cineastes, a decades-old art-film distributor responsible for importing countless international classics to American shores. Together they formed the Voyager Company — named after the pair of space probes — to continue what Criterion had begun. Soon, however, it emerged that Smith was willing to sell them back the Criterion name for a not-unreasonable price. So, the logic of branding dictated that the already established Criterion Collection continue as an imprint of the larger Voyager Company.

Stein’s dreams for electronic books remained on hold for a couple of years, while the Criterion Collection continued to build a fine reputation for itself. Then, in August of 1987, Apple premiered a new piece of software called HyperCard, a multimedia hypertext authoring tool that was to be given away free with every new Macintosh computer. Within weeks of HyperCard’s release, enterprising programmers had developed ways of using it to control an attached laser-disc player. This was the moment, says Stein, that truly changed everything.

I should note at this juncture that the idea of doing neat things with an ordinary personal computer and an attached laser-disc player was not really a new one in the broad strokes. As far back as 1980, the American Heart Association deployed a CPR-training course built around an Apple II and a laser-disc player. Other such setups were used for pilot training, for early-childhood education, and for high-school economics courses. In January of 1982, Creative Computing magazine published a type-in listing for what was billed as the world’s first laser-disc game, which required a degree of hardware-hacking aptitude and a copy of the laser-disc release of the 1977 movie Rollercoaster to get working. Eighteen months later, laser-disc technology reached arcades in the form of Dragon’s Lair, which was built around 22 minutes of original cartoon footage from the former Disney animator Don Bluth. When the Commodore Amiga personal computer shipped in 1985, it included the ability to overlay its graphics onto other video sources, a feature originally designed with interactive laser-disc applications in mind.

Nevertheless, the addition of HyperCard to the equation did make a major difference for people like Bob Stein. On the one hand, it made controlling the laser-disc player easier than ever before — easy enough even for an avowed non-programmer like him. And on the other hand, hypertexts rather than conventional computer programs were exactly what he had been wanting to create all these years.

Voyager’s first ever product for computers began with an extant laser disc published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which included still images of the entirety of the museum’s collection along with scattered video snippets. From this raw material, Stein and two colleagues created the National Gallery of Art Laserguide, a tool for navigating and exploring the collection in a multitude of ways. It caused a big stir at the Macworld Expo in January of 1988: “We became stars! It was fucking magic!” Shortly thereafter, Stein demonstrated it on the television show The Computer Chronicles.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Gallery.mp4

Exciting as experiments like this one were, they couldn’t overcome the inherent drawbacks of the laser disc. As I noted earlier, it was an analog medium, capable of storing only still or moving images and audio. And, as can be seen in the segment above, using it in tandem with a computer meant dealing with two screens — one connected to the computer, the other to the laser-disc player itself. The obvious alternative was the compact disc, a format which, although originally developed for music, was digital rather than analog, and thus could be adapted to store any kind of data and to display it right on a computer’s monitor.

After a tortuously protracted evolution, CD-ROM was slowly sputtering to life as at least a potential proposition for the commercial marketplace. Microsoft was a big booster, having sponsored a CD-ROM conference every year since 1985. The first CD-based software products could already be purchased, although they were mostly uninspiring data dumps targeted at big business and academia rather than the polished, consumer-oriented works Stein aspired to make.

Moving from laser discs to CDs was not an unmitigated positive. The video that an attached laser-disc player could unspool so effortlessly had to be encoded digitally in order to go onto a CD, then decoded and pushed to a monitor in real time by the computer attached to the CD-ROM drive. It was important to keep the file size down; the 650 MB that could be packed onto a CD sounded impressive enough, but weren’t really that much at all when one started using them for raw video. At the same time, the compression techniques that one could practically employ were sharply limited by the computing horsepower available to decompress the video on the fly. The only way to wriggle between this rock and a hard place was to compromise — to compromise dramatically — on the fidelity of the video itself. Grainy, sometimes jerky video, often displayed in a window little larger than a postage stamp, would be the norm with CD-ROM for some time to come. This was more than a little ironic in the context of Voyager, a company whose other arm was so famed for the quality of its movie transfers to laser disc. Suffice to say that no Voyager CD-ROM would ever look quite as good as that National Gallery of Art Laserguide, much less the Criterion King Kong.

Still, it was clear that the necessary future of Voyager were CDs rather than laser discs. Looking for a proof of concept for an electronic book, Stein started to imagine a CD-ROM that would examine a piece of music in detail. He chose that theme, he likes to say only half jokingly, so that he could finally figure out what it was Alan Kay had been going on about in the seat next to his during all those airplane rides of theirs. But there was also another, more practical consideration: it was possible to create what was known as a “mixed mode” CDs, in which music and sound were stored in standard audio-CD format alongside other forms of data. These music tracks could be played back at full home-stereo fidelity by the CD-ROM drive itself, with minimal intervention from the attached computer. This usage scenario was, in other words, analogous to that of controlling an attached laser disc, albeit in this case it was only sound that could be played back so effortlessly at such glorious fidelity.

Thus it came to pass that on January 1, 1989, one Robert Winter, a 42-year-old music professor at UCLA, received a visitor at his Santa Monica bungalow: it was Bob Stein, toting an Apple CD-ROM drive at his side. “I thought it was the strangest-looking thing,” Winter says. He had known Stein for some seven years, ever since the latter had sat in on one of his classes, and had often complained to him about the difficulty of writing about music using only printed words on the page; it was akin to “dancing about architecture,” as a famous bit of folk wisdom put it. These complaints had caused Stein to tag him as “a multimedia kind of guy”; “I had no idea what he meant,” admits Winter. But now, Stein showed Winter how an Apple Macintosh equipped with HyperCard and a CD-ROM drive could provide a new, vastly better way of writing about music — by adding to the text the music itself for the reader to listen along with, plus graphics wherever they seemed necessary, with the whole topped off by that special sauce of hypertextual, associative interactivity. The professor took the bait: “I knew then and there that this was my medium.”

Robert Winter became such a star that he was hired by a company called Chinon to pitch their CD-ROM drives.

The two agreed to create a meticulous deconstruction of a towering masterpiece of classical music, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Winter:

I simply asked myself, “What is it I would like to know?” It occurred to me that I would like to know what is happening as the piece is playing. I start [my users] at the bubble-bath level, then the score, then the commentary, and a more detailed commentary.

The heart of the program was the “Close Reading,” where one could read a description of each passage, then listen to it from the same screen — or flip to the score to see what it looked like in musical notation, or flip to a more detailed, technical explanation, always with the chance to listen just a button-click away. Lest the whole experience become too dry, Winter sprinkled it with the wit that had made him a favorite lecturer at his university and a frequent guest commentator on National Public Radio. He equated stability in music with “an apartment you can make the rent on”; conflict in music was “sparring with a boss who doesn’t know how to give strokes.” When it came time for that section of the symphony, the one which absolutely everyone can hum — i..e, the famous “Ode to Joy” — “We’ve arrived!” flashed in big letters on the screen. The text of the poem by Friedrich Schiller which Beethoven set to music for the choir to sing was naturally also included, in the original German and in an English translation. Winter even added a trivia game; answer a question correctly, and Beethoven would wink at you and say, “Sehr gut!” aloud.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Beethoven2.mp4

“I don’t think anything is any good if it doesn’t have a point of view,” said Bob Stein on one occasion. In being so richly imbued with its maker Robert Winter’s personality and point of view, the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was a model for all of the Voyager CDs to come. “You don’t set his CD-ROMs aside when you’ve exhausted the gimmicks,” wrote Wired magazine of Winter’s interactive works years later. “You keep coming back to them. There always seems to be more intellectual matter – more substance – to uncover.” This too would be case for Voyager’s CDs in general. They would really, earnestly engage with their subject matter, rather than being content to coast on the novelty of their medium like most of their peers. “It is one of the few producers to offer actual ideas on CD-ROM,” wrote Wired of Voyager itself.

Stein and Winter brought their finished product to the Macworld Expo of August of 1989, where it caused just as much of a sensation as had the National Gallery of Art laser disc nineteen months before. “People stood there for thirty minutes as if they were deer in front of headlights,” says Winter. He claims that many at the show bought CD-ROM drives just in order to run the CD Companion to Beethoven. If it was not quite the first consumer-oriented CD-ROM, it was among the most prominent during the format’s infancy. “We’ve finally seen what CD-ROM was made for!” said Bill Gates upon his first viewing of the program. Like all of its ilk, its initial sales were limited by the expensive hardware needed to run it, but it was written about again and again as an aspirational sign of the times that were soon to arrive. “It takes us up to Beethoven’s worktable and lays bare the whole creative process,” enthused the Los Angeles Herald. Voyager was off and running at last as a maker of electronic books.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.CD Companion to Beethoven, which eventually sold 130,000 copies on the back of all the hype and a version for Microsoft Windows,[1]This version bore the title of Multimedia Beethoven.

During the first couple of years, Robert Winter’s CD-ROMs remained the bedrock of Voyager; in time, he created explorations of Dvorak, Mozart, Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Stravinsky in addition to Beethoven. By 1991, however, Voyager was entering its mature phase, pushing in several different directions. By 1994, it was publishing more than one new CD per month, on a bewildering variety of subjects.

In the next article, then, we’ll begin to look at this rather extraordinary catalog in closer detail. If any catalog of creative software is worth rediscovering, it’s this one.

(Sources: the book The DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker; Wired of December 1994 and July 1996; CD-ROM Today of June/July 1994; Macworld of November 1988; New York Times of November 8 1992; the 1988 episode of the Computer Chronicles television show entitled “HyperCard”; Phil Salvador’s online interview with Bob Stein. The majority of this article is drawn from a lengthy personal interview with Bob Stein and from his extensive online archives. Thank you for both, Bob!)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

This version bore the title of Multimedia Beethoven.

Comments
34 Responses

- Antilegomena

June 4, 2021 at 5:53 pm

I know that they’re not non-fiction, but I would feel remiss if I didn’t note that Visual Novels are still going strong in Japan, the internet has not totally killed off the multimedia book.

- Zed Banville

June 4, 2021 at 10:32 pm

The commercial and critical success of Disco Elysium, released near the end of 2019, shows that the visual novel genre also enjoys considerable popularity in Western countries, with the right packaging.

- Petter Sjölund

June 5, 2021 at 10:52 am

Classifying every text-heavy computer game as a “multimedia book” seems to me a bit like calling a textless picture book an “analog computer game”. But you shouldn’t argue over semantics, I guess.

- Saint Podkayne

June 30, 2021 at 12:05 am

Japan’s visual novels are definitely not ergodic texts: they require no effort to traverse, they just substitute clicking for page-turning. They’re definitely more book-like than the cd-roms discussed here. I think it’s worthwhile to bring them up in this context.

- Aula

June 4, 2021 at 8:13 pm

“having sponsered a CD-ROM conference”

sponsored

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2021 at 8:33 pm

Thanks!

- Martin

June 4, 2021 at 10:26 pm

Cool, a subject I know absolutely nothing about. Jimmy, you continue the ideals of the works of Voyager!

- Ross

June 5, 2021 at 12:51 am

Voyager may never have hit it big, but there WAS a hot second there where there was enough optimism about it that when I was in middle school (This would be early 90s but certainly using books that were a few years old) our education on citing references included how to cite a Voyager disc.

- Brian

June 5, 2021 at 12:29 pm

I haven’t seen the Computer Chronicles in years!

A blast from the past…

Interesting article… I remember hearing about CD-ROMs for years before they really showed up.

- scutdog

June 5, 2021 at 2:29 pm

“These complainsts had caused”

complaints

- Jimmy Maher

June 5, 2021 at 4:06 pm

Thanks!

- John Smith

June 6, 2021 at 12:25 pm

> I will go to my grave saying that, from one perspective, the Cultural Revolution was the high point of humanity at the point when it happened.

Jimmy – I used to really enjoy your blog, before the inevitable politics started to always creep in, as I guess they tend to do these days. But – this was the final straw for me. There is no ambiguity about the Cultural Revolution.. it has killed tens of millions of people. Communist revolutions everywhere were and continue to be a bane on humanity. My family is a survivor of one. Saying that it was a “high point of humanity”, regardless of context, is exactly like saying that the Holocaust was a high point of humanity.

The fact that you cover this guy sympathetically – compared to your coverage of someone like Piers Anthony, not a great person but much less evil than Bob Stein – is mind blowing and makes your blog extremely hard to read.

- Neil

June 6, 2021 at 2:17 pm

Your reading comprehension seems to be lacking, John Smith.

- John Smith

June 6, 2021 at 5:50 pm

Which part did I get wrong?

- Sniffnoy

June 6, 2021 at 8:33 pm

That’s a quote. It’s part of a blockquote (which you can tell because it is formatted like a blockquote —

- Randy

June 7, 2021 at 8:23 pm

“The fact that you cover this guy sympathetically – compared to your coverage of someone like Piers Anthony, not a great person but much less evil than Bob Stein – is mind blowing and makes your blog extremely hard to read.”

I think the quoted text is the pertinent John Smith’s post. The fact that Jimmy can quote this guy as saying what he did, and then not excoriate him as the despicable human being he obviously was, says a lot.

- stepped pyramids

June 8, 2021 at 10:28 pm

@Randy: Are you accusing Jimmy of being a Maoist himself?

- John Smith

June 10, 2021 at 12:37 pm

@stepped pyramids

I’m not Randy, and I’m not accusing Jimmy of being a communist – but the fact that Jimmy presents this quote and continues to cover this guy sympathetically – without mentioning what a terrible human being he is for sincerely believing that killing tens of millions of people is “good for humanity” – is pretty telling. If Jimmy extended this luxury to every subject he covers – hence the Piers Anthony comparison – it would be one thing, but he doesn’t.

The quote is presented as more of an amusing anecdote, maybe even intended to endear Bob to the reading audience. and it’s clear that Jimmy doesn’t think that Bob Stein is a bad person because of it… which is the most horrifying thing to me.

- GeoX

June 10, 2021 at 3:51 pm

without mentioning what a terrible human being he is for sincerely believing that killing tens of millions of people is “good for humanity”

Citation needed, dude. You can say he’s naive, you can say (as I would) that he’s overly cavalier in hand-waving away suffering, but when you make shit up that he didn’t say, one has to doubt that you’re arguing in good faith.

- stepped pyramids

June 8, 2021 at 10:26 pm

The comparison to Piers Anthony would make more sense if Voyager had been publishing digitized versions of the Little Red Book. I’m not sure I would have included that quote myself, but only because it serves as a distraction and doesn’t really have any bearing on the following review of his career. It’s unreasonable to expect Jimmy to formally denounce anyone he covers for their politically incorrect opinions before moving on to cover their work.

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

June 11, 2021 at 10:25 am

I agree. We’re presumably all adults here and can think for ourselves. Speaking personally, I share John Smith’s perspective on communism, but that doesn’t mean I want Jimmy to belabor the point in an article on educational CDs.

- Sniffnoy

June 13, 2021 at 7:12 am

Agreed, well said.

- sdenheyer

June 13, 2021 at 6:56 pm

Presumably we could also think for ourselves on the matter of HP Lovecraft’s racism, but that point was pretty belaboured – even though not strictly relevant to how his work influenced video & board games – which focus more on his horrific monsters then his racist stories or opinions.

It’s his blog, Jimmy is allowed to have a left-wing bias if that’s how he sees the world, but I kind of see John Smith’s point – it’s a bit of a double-standard. Millions of deaths due to the Maoist regime Stein defends could be mentioned in passing, without belabouring.

- Bernie

June 16, 2021 at 1:36 pm

Dear J.S. :

In my humble opinion, you’re mistaking Jimmy’s high or low opinion of someone’s work for political bias. He has been doing this since day one of the blog and you can’t blame him for liking some authors’ works more than others. For example, I’m a big a fan of Lovecraft’s tales and Jimmy criticized his work profusely, and I expressed my dissaproval in a comment but didn’t go as far as calling Jimmy a leftist even though he mentioned that Lovecraft was some kind of closet nazi. Just like in this article, Jimmy was only providing us with some background on the author’s polictical views so we can better understand this person’s motivations.
And yes, Jimmy has strayed from the blog’s main subject many times (WWI flyers, soviet-era computing, …) and for me those have been the articles where he has been most careful about political bias.
If it’s of any comfort to you, I’m as right-wing as they come and am currently experiencing communism first-hand in a certain southamerican country, and none of Jimmy’s “political coverage” has managed to offend me in the least.
So, if an author’s political background makes Jimmy’s blog hard to read for you it’s sad because you’re missing out on this outstanding resource on the history of interactive entertainment. Believe me J.S., this blog is as good as it gets !

- Lisa H.

June 7, 2021 at 6:50 pm

Ugh, Dragon’s Lair. What a money-sucker of an arcade game (I mean moreso than arcade games already tend to be). It’s interesting, though, that it and Space Ace have somehow stuck around in cultural memory so that even today many people have heard of them, whilst other LaserDisc games have dropped out of sight other than for those interested in the niche — at least, I was surprised how many such titles there were when I came across Cube Quest on “The Cutting Room Floor” (a site about unused resources, debugging modes, etc. things left buried in game code) and decided to look into it a little bit.

- Josh Martin

June 8, 2021 at 3:43 am

At the time, virtually everyone making laser discs used what was known as the CLV format, which could pack a full hour of video onto each side of a disc, thus allowing most movies to ship on a single disc — but at a severe cost to the image quality.

The quality difference between CAV and CLV was very minor (nothing comparable to, say, SP vs. SLP on VHS) and came down to CLV’s greater susceptibility to crosstalk as the pickup moved towards the outer edge of the disc, which would mostly manifest as chroma errors. This was such a big problem in the early years of the format that CLV discs were rare and at least one player didn’t even support them, but around 1981 Pioneer quietly replaced CLV encoding with an improved version that managed to minimize the problem, at least on a properly-aligned player. The big remaining advantage of CAV was that it permitted freeze-frame and frame-step functions that on CLV were only possible with expensive digital frame buffers that weren’t an option before the ’90s. This meant diehard film buffs could use CAV discs it to study a particular frame in detail; Criterion’s Jason and the Argonauts actually boasted on the jacket copy that all the film’s stop-motion animation was on sides encoded in CAV. (The first side, which included no stop-motion content, was in CLV). Criterion also used CAV’s still-frame feature to include illustrated essays, production stills, concept art, and in some cases even the full screenplay of the movie. Voyager and some other companies released laserdiscs that were nothing but still frames, like collections of art from the Louvre and no less than six discs of photos from the archives of the National Air & Space Museum.

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2021 at 7:01 am

Thanks for these details. I’ve excised the discussion of CAV versus CLV from the article, as I now realize I’d have to get considerably further into the weeds than I’d prefer. Nevertheless, much appreciated.

- Josh Martin

June 8, 2021 at 7:06 pm

That’s cool, didn’t want to be too nit-picky but it did tie in with some of Voyager’s own laserdisc content.

For anyone who’s wondering, those still-frame-only laserdiscs I mentioned were basically a less convenient version of what’s shown in that Computer Chronicles clip: instead of navigating the disc contents with a computer, you’d have a booklet that listed all of the individual images and the corresponding frame number, which you would type in on your remote. Images were also sorted by section, so if there was a particular type you wanted to look at, like “French Romantic paintings,” you could jump to that section and browse with the frame-step buttons.

- Ross

June 9, 2021 at 1:30 am

I gather a factor in magnetic drives being CAV rather than CLV is that the variable speed motors were much more failure-prone and had a shorter operational life. Would that have been a concern for Laser Disc makers as well?

- Josh Martin

June 9, 2021 at 5:41 pm

Quite possibly. The replacement encoding that I mentioned above (which was called CAA for “Constant Angular Acceleration,” but the term CLV was already so entrenched that everyone kept using it) might be less taxing on the mechanism than true CLV, since with CLV the rotational speed is constantly decreasing whereas with CAA it remains constant for most of the playback and then sharply drops near the outer edge of the disc. But my understanding is that the crosstalk/picture quality issues with the original CLV format was the main reason for CAV’s early dominance. Whatever the reasons, CLV/CAA mostly displaced CAV by the end of the ’80s except for super-deluxo special editions or films split across two discs because they were too long for a single CLV disc, in which case it was common for the last side to be CAV because 30 minutes was enough. By the early ’90s even Criterion was mainly CLV-only, and the occasional CAV editions they continued to release would usually be followed in a few months by cheaper CLV editions with fewer special features.

- Nate

June 10, 2021 at 5:52 am

Good article and I learned a new word, “unwonted”. Though wouldn’t “unusual” be a simpler way to say it?

The abbreviation “MB” not being clearly plural made this read as a subject/verb agreement problem. The problem is your brain has to commit to singular or plural before the context is clear.

> the 650 MB that could be packed onto a CD sounded impressive enough, but weren’t really that much at all when one started using them for raw video

Is there a recommended way to clarify besides spelling out “megabytes”? I know “MBs” isn’t correct.

- Jimmy Maher

June 10, 2021 at 6:14 am

“Unusual” has a universal implication, as if people taking the role of practical man in general was a rare event, while “unwonted” indicates that the role of practical man is unusual *for this individual*. “Unhabitual” might be the closest synonym.

- Bobby Impollonia

June 11, 2021 at 11:15 pm

This is the first time I’ve seen the famous “dancing about architecture” quote attributed to Lester Bangs. I just looked it up and several pages list quite a lot of people as potential originators, but none mention Bangs

For example:

https://londonmusicacademy.com/who-said-writing-about-music-is-like-dancing-about-architecture/

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/

- Jimmy Maher

June 12, 2021 at 6:16 am

I was working from memory. It seemed like the sort of gonzo thing he would write. ;) Thanks!

The Best of Voyager, Part 1
June 18, 2021

This article contains capsule reviews of ten of the discs that I most appreciate from the early years of The Voyager Company, along with some additional notes on their origins, courtesy of Bob Stein. As the “Part 1” in the article’s title would imply, I’ll be reviewing more of the Voyager standouts later, although not right away; I’m still making my slow way through a rather large catalog. I anticipate that there will come at least two more articles of this sort over the course of the next few years.

Before starting in earnest on this first one, however, some explanations are in order:

I’ve always envisioned this history of digital interactivity as something of an interactive experience in its own right for its readers. I’ve always hoped that some percentage of you will be inspired to check out some of the artifacts I write about for yourself, inspired to go on your own journey through digital history and form your own judgments about what you find there. I’ve always done my best to facilitate that.

In the early years, that sometimes meant rolling up my sleeves and getting down in the weeds with the often-cranky emulators of now-obscure old computers, sharing ROM files and the like and even on one occasion packaging up a whole obsolete computer system in a (virtual) box. In the middle years, things got a bit easier, as I could generally just share disk images of the software I wrote about for you to try out on the more mature emulators of slightly later computers. And still more recently things have gotten easier yet, as most of the stuff I write about these days can be purchased as ready-to-run downloads from digital storefronts like GOG.com. (Indeed, the emergence of a permanent back catalog in a games industry that used to make a policy of forgetting its past is one of the most welcome developments I’ve had the pleasure to witness since I started this site.)

But when it comes to exploring the fascinating catalog of The Voyager Company, we’re kind of back to square one. The sad fact is that classic Macintosh emulation is far less mature than that of MS-DOS, early incarnations of Microsoft Windows, or even the Commodore 64 or Amiga. This isn’t, I rush to add, because the people who work on the three most prominent classic Mac emulators — each focusing on a distinct era of the long-lived platform — are any less capable than those working on other emulators, but just because it’s a big job and there aren’t a lot of people doing it in comparison to those endeavoring to preserve the more popular retro-gaming platforms.

The Voyager oeuvre has a particular knack for finding the weaknesses in the current generation of Mac emulators. Many of Voyager’s early releases are what’s known as “mixed-mode” CD-ROMs: CDs which combine a computer-specific “data track” with multiple other tracks of sound and/or music, readable by any audio-CD player. All of the extant emulators tend to choke horribly on these. Even the later Voyager releases, which generally aren’t mixed-mode, are often a tall order for the emulators, having been built using fiddly middleware like HyperCard or The Director, and being loaded to the gills with multimedia content to be played back using equally fiddly libraries like QuickTime. One usually can get them to work in the emulators, after a fashion, but they’re all too often glitchy and crash-prone.

I’m therefore going to recommend a radical solution to anyone interested in experiencing the Voyager discs I highlight below: don’t try to do it on an emulator. Get yourself a real vintage Macintosh instead.

Specifically, I recommend picking up a G3 iMac or iBook of the turn-of-the-millennium era. Apple sold millions and millions of these little machines, and they can still be found all over the place in North America and Europe: on online marketplaces, at swap meets, in charity shops, in your neighbors’ attic — or perhaps in your own. I bought a 1999-vintage iMac  here in Denmark — not exactly the cheapest country in the world — for the equivalent of $100 US a year and a half ago. I suspect that most of you can do much better than that if you’re willing to look around a bit.

These models have several other advantages beyond their ubiquity and cheapness. They’re easy to set up and take down, for one thing. And they’re just new enough to sport some very useful modern conveniences, like an Ethernet port and a USB port that can handle thumb drives, both a godsend for transferring files. Most importantly, they will run the entire Voyager product line more or less flawlessly. You just need to be sure you have some incarnation of MacOS 8 or 9 installed — the exact version really doesn’t matter — rather than OS X.

With your trusty iMac or iBook running MacOS 8 or 9 and a stack of blank CDs for burning to hand, there are only a couple of other things you need to know in order to dive into the Voyager catalog. All of the discs I describe below are hosted by The Macintosh Garden, a site which performs an invaluable service but which does have its idiosyncrasies. One of these is the use of the Mac favorite Stuff-It rather than a more universal standard as its compression tool of choice. If you use a modern Mac, you probably already have this software; if not, you’ll need to download it and install it on your everyday computer.

The files you’ll find inside the archives will be either ISO disc images, Toast images, or bin/cue images. The first can be burned to a physical CD-ROM for use on your vintage Mac directly from most modern operating systems. The second can be renamed with the extension “.iso” and burned the same way, if you don’t happen to own a modern Macintosh with Roxio Toast installed. The third is the most complicated, as it generally indicates one of the aforementioned mixed-mode CDs; you’ll need to have or acquire third-party software capable of burning these types of discs.

I must say that I’ve been immensely enjoying the tactility of using real hardware to explore the Voyager catalog. Perhaps you’ll feel the same. But the diehards among you can of course still try your luck with emulators; feel free to describe any information or solutions you discover in the process in the comments below. Note as well that a minority of the Voyager discs were also released in versions for Microsoft Windows, or as dual-platform discs that can run on either Mac or Windows. So, that might be another direction of inquiry for some of you in some cases.

And now on to what I really want to tell you about today…

AmandaStories (1991)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AmandaStories.mp4

AmandaStories is one of those quietly influential works that can sometimes make my job so interesting. It’s the creation of a woman named Amanda Goodenough, who was the wife of HyperCard creator Bill Atkinson’s marriage counselor circa 1987. When the latter brought home a pre-release version of HyperCard, courtesy of his client, his wife started to use it to chronicle the adventures of her little black cat Inigo in the form of an interactive picture book.

Amanda Goodenough’s personal story — that of a thoroughly non-technical housewife who was able to create something remarkable thanks to the magic of HyperCard — made her a minor celebrity in the Macintosh world, a living symbol of HyperCard’s ethos of egalitarian creative empowerment. Bob Stein and his colleagues from Voyager first met her at the January 1988 Macworld show, where she was demonstrating her latest stories at the same time that they were demonstrating their HyperCard-and-laser-disc-driven exploration of the National Gallery of Art. They soon inked a deal to release her first four stories on floppy disk under the Voyager imprint. A second collection of stories followed a little later, this time starring a good-natured camel known simply as My Faithful Camel. The CD-ROM version featured here adds two more Inigo stories and supplements the silent black-and-white originals with colorized versions featuring occasional sound effects and music swells.

Yet what these AmandaStories led to is ultimately more important in the context of history than what they were. Among the people who admired them in those heady early days of HyperCard was a professional programmer and amateur Macintosh enthusiast named Rand Miller. They became a profound influence on The Manhole, the interactive picture book he created with his brother Robyn Miller; both works employ the same literally transparent interface, where everything happens as a result of clicking directly on the pictures on the screen rather than on buttons, menus, or other widgets. Voyager came very close to publishing The Manhole as well — “It was clear these guys were going somewhere,” says Stein — but was outbid in the end by Mediagenic.

After making a few more children’s titles, the Miller brothers decided to bring the same minimalist approach to an adventure game for adults. The result was 1993’s Myst, which sold at least 6 million boxed copies during the remaining years of the decade and created a whole sub-genre of adventures in its image. “We might have gotten Myst, and the world might have been very different,” muses Stein today of what is perhaps Voyager’s most obvious missed opportunity.

But they did at least get these stories which did so much to inspire Myst, and we can feel fortunate for that. AmandaStories remains as sweet and clever as ever, suitable for children and adults of any age.

I Photograph to Remember (1991)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Photograph.mp4

I Photograph to Remember by the Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer tells the story in pictures of the last three years of his parents’ lives, a period during which both were diagnosed with cancer and died of the disease. It engages with the essentials of human life and death in a way that very few digital works dare to do. Meyer’s photographs of his parents’ decline are not always easy to look at, but the unflinching honesty of the presentation makes it a necessary antidote to the escapist entertainments that usually dominate our monitor screens. Anyone who has been a caregiver or even just a witness to someone approaching the end of all ends will recognize the story that unspools here, so unique to Meyer’s family but also so universal.

Once one looks beyond the sadness at its core, the origin story of I Photograph to Remember turns out to be rather amusing. Bob Stein:

I’m at a party talking to a guy I don’t know, and he’s telling me about this amazing CD-ROM he’s gotten, about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When I tell him that I had a hand in making it, he invites me to his home and he shows me these 90 photographs that he took during this period of his parents’ lives. I realize that what’s he just done in effect is to give me a narrated slideshow, and that, because we can now show a high-resolution photograph on a computer screen with audio, we could publish that. It’s completely different from showing it on a television set, which just doesn’t have the resolution. And Pedro says, “Of course we should publish it on CD-ROM.” In retrospect, having known Pedro for years, I think he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what was going to come out of that meeting; he’s very sly.

There was no question about which photographs we were going to show. And Pedro has this beautiful voice. All of that was a no-brainer. He hired a young man named Manuel Rocha to write the music. The first version was the most god-awful European synth-pop. I heard Pedro literally screaming at Manuel about this, telling him how terrible it was. I thought to myself, you can’t treat somebody like that; there’s no way that’s going to get the intended result. But he comes back a week or two later with a gorgeous soundtrack: minimalist and perfect. Who knows how you motivate people?

This is 1991. Up until that moment, as far as I know, nobody has used a computer to present deep emotional content. We showed it for the first time at this fancy conference that took place every year in Los Angeles. There were 500 people in the room, probably 95 percent men, all executives in suits. You could have heard a pin drop. People were stunned: “Oh, my God! This is what we can do with a computer?” That was exciting.

If there’s a complaint to be made about I Photograph to Remember today, it must be that the piece is hardly interactive at all, and could work just as well as a short film presented on a high-definition screen; once you’ve chosen whether you wish to hear Meyer’s narration in Spanish or English, it quite literally plays itself. But no matter: while I might quibble with Bob Stein’s claim that no computer-based work prior to this one attempted “to present deep emotional content,” there is no question that this one positively trembles with the ineffable joys and pains of our feeble mortal existences. If you’ve come to Voyager’s catalog looking for Art, you will most definitely find it here.

Last Chance to See (1992)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LastChance.mp4

In the late 1980s, the BBC sent the humorist and novelist Douglas Adams and a zoologist named Mark Carwardine on a series of journeys to remote regions of the world in order to seek out some of our planet’s most unusual and endangered forms of wildlife. The 1989 television series which resulted became a book the following year, and finally this CD-ROM production two years after that. Bob Stein doesn’t think that highly of it, for perfectly coherent reasons: it’s little more than the raw text of the book read aloud by Adams, with occasional embedded sidebars to click on. It is, in other words, more of an ebook than an electronic book of the sort Stein was always trying to create.

Personally, though, I find that its formal limitations do little to diminish its impact. Douglas Adams was a unique mind who left us far too soon and wrote far too little even while he was with us. The Last Chance to See project was particularly welcome for giving him a chance to set aside silly two-headed aliens and towels in space in favor of things that really matter to our world. It’s poignant to hear him read his own words here, knowing that, although he would live for almost nine years after the release of this CD-ROM, he would never complete another book. Listening to his wit and wisdom, dealing not only with the ofttimes bizarre natural world but with the equally bizarre human foibles of the countries the two men visited, one can’t help but lament that fact.

But equally poignant are the fates of some of the strange animals Adams and Carwardine pursue. Few things can better bring home to you what we are losing than the act of listening to this CD-ROM and then looking up the current status of its subjects. The Yangtze river dolphin is probably extinct now; the northern white rhinoceros soon will be, given that the only two specimens that are left are both female. The title of Last Chance to See proved prophetic in those two cases at least, making it all the more precious for us today and those who will follow us as a document of wondrous creatures that used to be.

Poetry in Motion (1992)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Poetry.mp4

Poetry in Motion repurposes footage captured for a 1982 documentary film of the same name, itself a work that occupies a special place in the history of Voyager: it was in fact the company’s very first product, published as a videotape in the short interim between Bob and Aleen Stein’s split with their Criterion Collection co-founder Roger Smith and their subsequent re-acquisition of the Criterion name. Bob Stein believes the film is better than the CD-ROM, but the latter does feature performances and interviews that the former lacks. Whichever format you choose to view it in, it’s a riotously good time, capturing the elder statesmen of the Beat Generation in a dialog of sorts with literary and musical up-and-comers, all set against the backdrop of the New York City and Toronto New Wave and No Wave scenes. Here you can see Allen Ginsberg belting out a spirited if harmonically challenged reading with a punk-rock backing band, and Tom Waits captured just as he is making the transition from his 1970s boozy-troubadour persona to the raucous cacophony of his 1980s records.

The Achilles heel of the CD-ROM Poetry in Motion, the primary source of Bob Stein’s dislike for it, is the usual one for Voyager products of this ilk: poor video quality. The film footage is a grainy postage stamp, so much so that it’s often difficult to determine exactly what it is you’re actually looking at. And yet the performances themselves are so bracing that they manage to carry you away anyway. Poetry in Motion is an indispensable snapshot of an instant in literary and musical history.

A Hard Day’s Night (1993)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Hard.mp4

The CD-ROM version of the classic 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night was Voyager’s most successful single product after the CD Companion to Beethoven, selling 100,000 copies in all — i.e., at least an order of magnitude more than the typical Voyager disc. And indeed, I can remember seeing it in software stores regularly during the mid-1990s, a memory I don’t have of any other Voyager product. This disc’s lodging in my brain may have something to do with my personal predilections; I’ve been a rabid Beatles fan ever since my cool big sister introduced them to me while my age was still in the single digits. But I do think that it also reflects the unusual reach of this particular Voyager CD-ROM, which was widely reviewed in such mainstream-media bastions as Entertainment Weekly magazine.

I won’t say too much about the film itself here, other than to note that it’s brilliant, the sights and sounds and excitement of a cultural revolution — thankfully not the kind advocated by Chairman Mao! — distilled into 87 potent minutes. More relevant for our purposes is Voyager’s approach to adapting the movie to this new medium of CD-ROM — if, that is, “adaptation” is even the right word. This is far from the ideal way to view A Hard Day’s Night for pleasure, whether for the first or hundredth time, given the absolutely awful video quality. But by way of compensation, it’s an innovative new way of studying the film. “Nobody was going to take this seriously as film,” Bob Stein says of the Voyager disc, “but we could do something fun with it.”

At first glance, the CD-ROM of A Hard Day’s Night might seem to have much in common with the laser-disc version of the film which Criterion had released earlier: the movie accompanied by a host of extras meant to deepen one’s understanding of it and to lend it context. Look closer, however, and differences quickly emerge. The CD-ROM’s approach is fundamentally textual, making it closer to an electronic book than the notion of a film on CD-ROM might initially imply: its core features are an extended essay by the respected Australian pop-culture journalist Bruce Elder and a complete copy of the shooting script. The latter is especially interesting, offering up the unique opportunity to watch the film in a window as one follows along in the script.

So, rather than being an early, technologically unsatisfactory example of what DVDs would later become, as one might be tempted to assume, the Voyager A Hard Day’s Night is in fact an example of a road not taken in film studies. DVDs and Blu-ray discs are able to combine what Voyager does here with superb video quality, and yet this capability has gone almost entirely unexplored. “To this day, it drives me crazy that Criterion has never tried to merge what we did with A Hard Day’s Night into their usual approach,” says Bob Stein. “Given that all the Criterion stuff is digital at this point, why can’t they associate the script of a movie with the movie itself?” Chalk it up as just one more symptom of our increasingly post-textual culture.

Who Built America? (1993)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/America.mp4

Who Built America? is a CD-ROM adaption of a paper book of the same name by Roy Rosenzweig and Steve Brier: a history of the United States from 1876 to 1914. Bob Stein explains how one of Voyager’s most earnest attempts to realize the ideal of the electronic book came to be:

I was browsing the history section of the Harvard bookstore one day and this book popped out at me. It was from Knopf, so I figured it was somewhat credible, and the authors had a point of view which I liked. So, I got on the train to New York the next day and found the authors at Hunter College. I showed them the Beethoven CD-ROM, and said, “Let’s do something together.” They were techie kinds of guys; they were excited about it. We spent a year just talking, trying to figure out what the sweet spots were and what we could add to the equation by making their book electronic.

The breakthrough came for me when I realized that all history books are syntheses of the authors’ readings of documents, conversations they have, etc. Wouldn’t it be interesting to publish a history book including not just the synthesis that the book itself represents, but also with the documents that the synthesis was based on? In effect, let the readers participate as historians, reading the documents for themselves. That’s how we came up with these things we called “excursions”: at most points in the book, you can click on a link and see the original associated documents.

It’s not hard to grasp why Stein would find this particular history book so compelling, what with his own background as an activist for the workers of the world. Both its authored text and the many primary sources that branch off of it emphasize, almost to the exclusion of all else, the experiences of those marginalized and less empowered souls who do not tend to garner much attention in traditional narrative histories: immigrants, ex-slaves, racial and ethnic minorities, the working poor, etc. This determination to focus on the stories that are not usually told prevents the book from being a truly complete chronicle of Gilded Age America; the assassinations of two separate presidents are only a couple of the earthshaking events that it barely even bothers to mention.

And yet, if you go into it understanding the limitations imposed by the authors’ philosophy and perhaps ideology of history, you may just find what is present here extraordinarily compelling. I read literally every word over the course of many evenings, clicking on every link to read the primary-source documents, to view photographs and newspaper cartoons, to watch film clips and listen to songs, interviews, and other audio snippets. So very much of what you find in these excursions is, dare I say it, heartrending. A priceless cache of letters from Polish immigrants to the United States, writing to family members back in the Old World whom they will almost certainly never see in person again, is just one example. Who Built America? is a deeply empathetic social history of a fraught era whose legacy is still an inescapable reality of modern American life.

Baseball’s Greatest Hits (1994)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Baseball.mp4

Voyager’s one foray into the world of sports was prompted to a large extent by the rediscovery of an artifact that’s sometimes been called “baseball’s Zapruder film”: a piece of 16mm footage shot by a fan during the 1932 World Series. It shows Babe Ruth hitting what is arguably the most famous home run in baseball history: his “called shot” home run, which receives its name from the tale that he pointed to exactly what corner of the park he planned to hit it to before taking the pitch. While the film is ultimately inconclusive — it appears to show Ruth making some sort of gesture, but it’s impossible to say more than that — it’s tremendous fun to watch it and to speculate about what one might be seeing.

But Baseball’s Greatest Hits has much more than one film clip to offer. It serves as a fine example of what made Voyager different from most of the others rushing to put content onto CD-ROM during the 1990s. Baseball fans’ love of statistics is famous; this made the sport a natural subject for any number of unimaginative encyclopedic CD-ROM data dumps from companies such as Microsoft.

Baseball’s Greatest Hits, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Rather than focusing on the numbers, it’s interested in the legends and lore of America’s Pastime, making it as legitimate a form of social history as the likes of Who Built America?. The heart of this curated collection is a timeline of “Great Moments,” stretching from the 1932 called-shot game to the 1993 World Series. Each great moment is introduced by the unmistakable voice of Mel Allen, the longstanding announcer for the New York Yankees, who died just a few years after this disc appeared. The great moment then goes on to feature radio and/or television clips from the day in question, excerpts from newspaper accounts, and score cards and the like for the stats-heads. The end result is not only a wonderful celebration of baseball, that most lore-rich of all American sports, but also a window into the 60 years of American history that’s reflected by these fields of dreams. Bob Stein:

It’s a fantastic disc.  I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I loved that disc. How come there’s nothing that good now on the Internet, 25 years later? It’s one of the things we did that you look at and wonder… it was great then, how come nobody’s done it since?

I don’t know, Bob. I can say only that Baseball’s Greatest Hits is one of my favorites too of all the Voyager discs, and one I’d encourage everyone to try, baseball fan or no.

People: 20 Years of Pop Culture (1994)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/People.mp4

“We wanted to experiment with something that you could theoretically sell at a supermarket check-out,” says Bob Stein of what appears at first glance to be the cheesiest disc Voyager ever published. “I wasn’t embarrassed that we did it, but I wasn’t particularly proud of it.” Certainly no one would ever accuse People magazine of being any bastion of hard-hitting journalism, nor of reflecting anything but the most conventional of mainstream conventional wisdom.

And yet this archive of the magazine’s cover stories between 1974 and 1994 is by turns nostalgic, funny, surprising, and informative when revisited today. The magazine’s very ethos of hewing so firmly to the middle of the road in all matters makes it a telling barometer of which way the cultural winds were blowing on any given week. Often this archive serves to illustrate how much the world has changed, as when it treats the virulent white suprematism and segregationism of the former Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace as little more than a minor personal foible. For people of a certain age like your humble writer here, it’s constantly bringing on a burst of remembrance, of some actor or television show from your childhood that you haven’t thought of in ages. Flipping through the pages reveals a cornucopia of the petty scandals that once kept people talking in those supermarket-checkout lines — Gary Hart and Donna Rice, Vanessa Williams — and the equally inescapable, “heart-warming” human-interest stories of the moment — the boy in the bubble, the girl down the well — all chronicled in delightfully awful purple prose. From time to time amidst it all, the magazine manages to transcend itself, as in a 1987 piece on the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, describing the lives and deaths of some of the disease’s victims with compassion and a notable lack of judgment. (Of course, that same lack could be taken as an indicator of American society’s glacially shifting attitudes toward homosexuality in general. Again, People magazine is nothing if not a faultless barometer of the mainstream.)

This disc may be the closest thing to a guilty pleasure in Voyager’s catalog. If so, I plead guilty as charged: I love it unashamedly.

Ephemeral Films: 1931 to 1960 (1994)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Ephemeral.mp4

Ephemeral Films collects 38 pieces of celluloid flotsam and jetsam, the sort of movies that will most definitely never be considered for the Criterion Collection: promotional films, corporate training films, educational films for the classroom, etc. They come from the collection of Rick Prelinger, a tireless archiver of pop-culture ephemera who was toiling in obscurity when Bob Stein first met him. “When I saw what he was doing,” says Stein, “which was basically dumpster diving outside some of the most important producers of educational and inspirational films, I started calling him a media archaeologist. I convinced him to work with me to publish some of the films. We chose them and edited them so they would be more compact and interesting.” Prelinger would go on to an important career, working with organizations like the Internet Archive and his and his wife’s own Prelinger Library.

The highlights (lowlights?) here are legion: an Oldsmobile advertisement from 1931 that’s stuffed from top to bottom with sexual innuendo; the 1940 film where a creepy male doctor teaches women how to “relax”; the 1946 promo reel pushing mass-produced homes made out of steel of all building materials on the country’s returning GIs; the 1956 celebration of consumerism known as “Two-Ford Freedom,” which promises that housewives never again will need to feel like “prisoners in their own homes.” (It seems the 1950s were not big on public transport, cycling, or even walking…)

But my personal favorite is the timeless classic A Date with Your Family, a stultifying “social-guidance film” made for the classrooms of 1950. “The women of this family feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested, and attractive at dinnertime,” says the narrator approvingly; tellingly, the sons have spent their time before dinner doing homework while the daughter spent hers with her mother in the kitchen. “The boys greet their dad as though they were genuinely glad to see him, as though they really missed him and are eager to talk to him,” the narrator continues without a trace of irony. “Pleasant, unemotional conversation helps digestion,” we learn. “Let Father and Mother guide the conversational trend. After all, they made all this possible.”

Films like these are as hilarious as they are horrifying; The Stepford Wives has nothing on them. Taken as a whole, Ephemeral Films explains in the course of an evening or two why the country needed Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

The Complete Maus (1994)

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Maus.mp4

Maus by Art Spiegelman is a landmark in the history of the comic as an art form, being the first graphic novel to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. It’s based upon many hours of interviews which Spiegelman conducted with his father, a survivor of Auschwitz who immigrated to the United States from his native Poland after the war. In translating his father’s harrowing stories to the comics medium, Spiegelman turned the Jews into mice — thus the title, which is German for “mouse” — and the Nazis into cats. It took him some twenty years in all to complete the work, which was published in its final form in 1991, long after the death of the man whose travails it chronicled. Bob Stein:

The Museum of Modern Art in New York did an exhibit on Maus. I went to see it. It had a lot of audio of his father and sketches. I said, “This should be a CD-ROM.” Then one day out of the blue we got a phone call from Art’s agent, saying, “Art wants to make a CD-ROM out of Maus.” Obviously, we said yes.

But it turned out that Art did not give a flying fuck about CD-ROM. He wanted somebody who was stupid enough to take on the task of digitizing the 20,000 sketches he had made when he was creating Maus. That was what he wanted, to preserve the sketches. We did that, of course, in return for the right to make the Maus CD-ROM.

The CD-ROM contains the graphic novel in its entirety, supplemented by many of those concept sketches, by film clips and photographs of the places mentioned in the novel, by interviews with Art Spiegelman, and, most intriguingly of all in my opinion, by some of the recordings he made of his father telling the stories that later became the comic. I’ve heard it said that this is not the ideal way to read Maus for the first time, that the work was designed for the paper page and is best experienced there. That may very well be, but this CD-ROM was my own first encounter with it, and I found it a very affecting experience indeed. Real aficionados of comics — I’m afraid I’m not one of these; my wife is the reader of graphic novels in our family — will doubtless find deeper layers of interest than I did, what with all of the insight on process to be discovered here. One might go so far as to say that this CD-ROM is what the Criterion Collection might have been if it had focused on books rather than movies.

Comments
29 Responses

- Stefan

June 18, 2021 at 9:12 pm

For comfortable access to Last Chance to See there is a reader for modern macOS at http://www.classics-for-x.info/csx/lastchance/index.htm

- Keith Palmer

June 18, 2021 at 9:52 pm

Not that many weeks ago I brought my own G3 iMac (bought new early in 2002, near the end of that computer’s evolution) up from my basement, but after loading a CD-ROM into it the disc almost didn’t make it back out of the slot-loading drive, which left me a bit concerned about the effects of time (although at least it’s not quite yet like the early-1990s Macs that have to have the electrolytic capacitors on their circuit boards replaced). Going on from there to trying to get a Voyager CD-ROM image running inside SheepShaver then reimpressed on me your comments about the benefits of using actual hardware, even if I’ve pondered reports MAME’s Macintosh emulation has been improving (although trying that myself has had me running into it being that much fussier than the three emulators you mentioned about the proper format for disc images).

I only had one Voyager CD-ROM back in the day, “For All Mankind” (I already had the documentary on videotape, but appreciated how the CD-ROM identified the Apollo astronauts left nameless representatives for us all in the film). Your narrowing in on “A Date With Your Family” on “Ephemeral Films” does remind me of having seen that short with the that much more pointed commentary of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which also sourced its one-reelers from Rick Prelinger), and of my understanding the show’s creators had worked on a Voyager CD-ROM that had never been completed (which you may get to in time).

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2021 at 6:44 am

I had the same problem with my iMac. Once or twice I had to tip the whole computer forward to get the disc to eject. I found, however, that the mechanism seemed to loosen up again with use, and I haven’t had the problem in a long time. Perhaps you might be equally lucky.

I didn’t know about any Mystery Science Theater 3000 CD-ROM. I’ll have to ask Bob Stein about that. Thanks for the tip!

- Keith Palmer

June 19, 2021 at 2:22 pm

That’s a halfway encouraging comment about your disc drive recovering; I’d been contemplating whether an external DVD-writer bought years later (for an iMac without such a mechanism) would work plugged into a much older computer’s slower USB port and whether the internal drive depended on a now-worn rubber drive belt much dismantling would be required to get at. A bit of information about the MST3K CD-ROM explained two shorts would have been included; “Best Brains” later released “Assignment: Venezuela” on video, but could never quite find their working copy of “Mylar: What’s It To You?”

- Nate

June 19, 2021 at 5:32 am

The Prelinger films also made great subjects for MST3K, who did not at all miss the irony. My favorite is Hired!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aWIQuvbxu0E

Typo: “most most”

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2021 at 6:38 am

Thanks!

- LittleMac

June 19, 2021 at 12:20 pm

Thanks for this writeup, Jimmy.

During the late 90s I was vaguely aware of the Voyager products on the Mac but I never really experienced them when they were current.

I now own a copy of MAUS which runs fine on my Performa 475 (recapped, with an external SCSI CD-ROM attached, also runs MYST just fine). It is one of my most treasured pieces of media sitting on its own special spot on the shelf somewhere between books and software.

I’d love to explore more of the Voyager catalogue but at present both work and live intrude too much on my time, preventing me from “playing” in such a manner. Thus your writing is much appreciated.

Looking forward to the next part.

- Leo Vellés

June 19, 2021 at 2:28 pm

“When the the latter brought home a pre-release version of HyperCard, courtesy of his client,…”
A double “the” there Jimmy

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2021 at 2:34 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

June 19, 2021 at 3:20 pm

“We might have have gotten Myst, and the world might have been very different…”
And a double “have” here

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2021 at 4:28 pm

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

June 19, 2021 at 7:30 pm

And a last one, I think: “Whichever format you choose to do it view it in,…”
Seems a verb must be taken off, i suppose “do it”

- Jimmy Maher

June 19, 2021 at 8:08 pm

And thanks again!

- whomever

June 20, 2021 at 1:07 am

Mostly off topic, but I remember when the book “Last Chance To See” came out and Douglas Adams did the standard book tour. I went and saw him (at the Tattered Cover in Denver for those who know it), and I thought he did a great job of reading from it, telling amusing anecdotes etc. I still have my copy signed by him on a shelf somewhere.

Hadn’t thought about how that was the last of his books, but yes…it was. A shame.

- Aula

June 20, 2021 at 10:47 am

“the three most prominent classic Mac emulators”

I’d say that MAME is the most prominent one, now that its Mac emulation has been declared officially supported. In any case, MAME has the advantage that it runs actual MacOS on emulated hardware instead of trying to replicate the MacOS API in emulator code, which means that things like QuickTime are far more likely to behave correctly. Not that I have personally tried to run the Voyager discs with it, because I just don’t find them that interesting, but I would recommend it over the other emulators to anyone who wants to try.

“he would never write another book”

Maybe it would be better to say “he would never get another book published” since he was writing The Salmon of Doubt but didn’t get it finished.

“it also reflect”

reflects

- Jimmy Maher

June 20, 2021 at 10:57 am

Thanks! I haven’t looked at MAME in years, not since I was struggling with its TRS-80 emulation. It was in a pretty rough state at that time. I’ll have to check it out again. That would be great if it’s more compatible than the Mac-only emulators.

- Josh Martin

June 20, 2021 at 9:28 pm

As an analog medium, the laser discs that were Criterion’s specialty in 1993 were incapable of presenting textual content like this…

Criterion actually did a lot of laserdiscs with large amounts of textual content, using the freeze-frame and frame-step capabilities of CAV encoding. Weirdly enough, they opted not to do this on their CAV edition of A Hard Day’s Night, but their release of The Magnificent Ambersons included a “reconstruction” of the lost original cut using the shooting script, augmented by storyboards and production stills; the first pressing of Dr. Strangelove included a very different early draft of the script (removed from later pressings because Kubrick hadn’t authorized its presence); Blade Runner catered to the film’s hardcore following with “A Fan’s Notes” (a long essay covering the movie’s various iterations), a bibliography of reviews and articles, and even some trivia questions; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Robocop reproduced articles from the now late and lamented magazine Cinefex covering the films’ special effects in exhaustive detail, while leveraging the LD format to interpolate excerpts of, say, raw SFX footage before it had been composited into the finished films. Given that laserdisc had no support for fancy things like menus or scrolling text, navigating through this content was much more of a chore than it would be on a CD-ROM, with the screenplay on Criterion’s CAV Ghostbusters requiring 452 still frames of text that had to be paged through one at a time.

I feel Criterion’s early embrace of this sort of on-disc material and their shift away from it in the late ’90s (even though DVD and now Blu-ray offer much more robust possibilities for its presentation) reflect the general trajectory of the ’90s multimedia wave, where experiments like the CDTV, CD-i, Pippin, and WebTV all pinned their hopes to one degree or another on the expectation that people would happily use the same TVs they used to watch ER or Lawrence of Arabia to browse the web or consult an encyclopedia. One sign of the shift: Criterion’s laserdisc of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts presented the Raymond Carver source stories using CAV still frames; the DVD released a decade later also included these stories, but as a conventional book bundled in the package.

- Josh Martin

June 20, 2021 at 9:37 pm

Oh, also, not related to Criterion, but an updated version The Complete Maus was eventually released on DVD-ROM (with much higher-fidelity assets than the earlier CD-ROM version) as part of MetaMaus, a book/DVD package released in 2011.

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2021 at 5:37 am

I didn’t know that. It sounds like it was quite awkward. Edit made. Thanks!

- plam

June 20, 2021 at 11:41 pm

The New Zealand Department of Conservation is trying quite hard to rescue kakapos (though they certainly don’t help their own cause!) The number of 200 is a bit more than double the population in 1999 and four times the all-time low near 50; they’re not quite dead yet, but still critically endangered and under extremely intensive management. There was an indie doc about them by Scott Mouat that came out last year: https://www.elwin.co.nz/bravenewwilderness. Kakapo don’t breed every year but are projected to breed next year, which will hopefully go well.

I also checked up on the mountain gorilla, whose population is higher than that reported in the segment.

Having said that, yes, animals that are less charismatic aren’t doing quite as well. But that’s another issue.

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2021 at 5:49 am

Some corrections are delightful. I’m so glad to hear that the kakapo population is going in the right direction. Thanks!

- Trn

June 22, 2021 at 12:33 am

I have a better suggestion than the bulky g3: iBook G3 800mhz M8758LL

The last iBook g3, fully capable of booting OS9 natively. 32 mb vram Radeon, max 640mb pc100 sodimm ram, uses standard 2.5 ide drives of any size. People even still sell batteries for them.

- Jimmy Maher

June 22, 2021 at 5:06 am

A bit more expensive solution, and perhaps a bit harder to find, but certainly a great one otherwise. I envy you. ;)

- Trn

June 22, 2021 at 11:09 pm

To be honest, that iBook is surely more common than a surviving g3 all-in-one in the US now, and far less expensive when purchasing on eBay. Particularly when factoring in the cost of shipping.

There is currently one in working order on eBay right now for $90 USD all in, for example. The only complete G3 All-in-one appears to be $600 plus shipping.

Those iBooks were sold to college kids at the same time the iPod came out.

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2021 at 5:24 am

That’s great to know. I’ve updated the prologue to this article. I might even have to look for an iBook myself; it would certainly be more convenient than the iMac I have. Thanks!

- Michael

June 22, 2021 at 5:55 pm

As a trained digital archivist, I’m astonished that Bob Stein felt it would be profitable to undertake a digitization project of 20,000 images using the technology of the early 90s, in order to sell a CD-ROM in the limited market of the time. I hope it was! The last laugh was probably on Spiegelman – no digital format that existed at that time would have been of much value for preservation for more than a decade or two. Presumably he’s had to re-scan it all since.

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- Crashman

June 24, 2021 at 5:15 pm

Having once worked at an educational publisher that produced a lot of books with primary sources, I shudder to think of what the permissions process would have been for some of these projects, particularly the baseball one. Then again, maybe this was earlier enough in the digital revolution for MLB et. al., to give the rights without exorbitant hassle or cost!

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2021 at 5:14 am

I do think a lot of them benefited from the novelty of the medium, and a feeling on the part of the rights-holders that “well, we don’t really understand this, so might as well take a flier!” It doubtless would be more difficult today.

Bob Stein did tell me that he doesn’t believe Voyager would ever have gotten the rights to A Hard Day’s Night if the video quality had been better. As it was, the CD-ROM was clearly something categorically other than rather than a direct competitor to VHS releases, so why not? (Another thing that amused me: Voyager licensed the film from Imagine Home Video, who were best known for pornography. Bob has no idea how they got the rights themselves, or even if their rights were legitimate. Sometimes it’s all about plausible deniability…)