Divine Right classic collector's edition

We're now delving into board-and-counter wargames as well as computer games, as Divine Right Games is in the process of planning a crowdfunding campaign for a Divine Right RPG as well as the release of Divine Right 4th Edition.

However, since this will be our first board-and-counter game, we've decided to test the production waters by first releasing a Classic Collector's Limited Edition of the original 1979 TSR 2nd edition. No more than 500 copies will be produced, and it will be a straight reproduction of the rules, map, and counters. The reason we have chosen the 2nd edition (November 1979) over the original (March 1979) is that the difference between the two editions is little more than the errata fixes that were first published in Dragon #34 and subsequently incorporated in the November 1979 release.

We'll have to do a new cover for the box, but we intend to keep the counters and map exactly the same, although the blank counter spaces will allow us to add some additional counters, such as variant King counters and extra army counters. The manual will have a glossy full-color paperback cover and feature the signature of designer Glen Rahman. Watch this space for further developments.

INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES

This was a review I wrote for Computer Gaming World, March 1995, Issue 128. You can download the issue from the CGW Museum here. I contributed two reviews to that issue, and as you can probably imagine, I enjoyed playing through the other game considerably more. What made CGW reviews much better than those of its competitors was that CGW required its reviewers to play through the entire game before writing the review, preferably without using cheat codes. Of course, this made it very hard on the reviewer who was under time constraints, or, as in this case, who had been inflicted with the task of reviewing a substandard game. 

CAN'T STAND THE HEAT?

Then You’d Better Get Out Of INFERNO’s Kitchen

I don’t know about you, but I can al­ways seem to tell when I'm watch­ing a British television show. Even without the obvious clue of the ac­cents, it’s usually something I realize immediately. I don’t know if it's the light­ing, or the sets, or the acting, but there’s always something that just doesn’t jibe with my Continental sensibilities.

My Brit sixth sense went wild when I first booted Ocean Software's INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES, an import from our friends across the At­lantic. This probably tells you more about the game than you could learn without playing it yourself, because INFERNO is more than a little different in a lot of ways.

INFERNO purports to be a space combat game with a multi­media twist—sort of  a WING COMMANDER put on by the BBC. Despite its English pedigree, it has that “Sillywood” vibe to it. a term that rather accurately describes the quirky results one has learned to expect when Hollywuddites are mated with game develop­ers. There aren’t any B-movie actors or stars from bad Fox sitcoms in­volved, but there is a Director's Cut ver­sion waiting to be played. Hey, like Bladerunner, right?!

The plot is a generic one involving hu­manity’s war with an alien race called the Rexxons, who have green skin, big tusks, and look rather like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Many years ago. hu­mans defeated the Rexxons in the first Epic game, and now their descendants are back to have another go. Fortunately, humanity has a hero and the most power­ful space fighter ever devised—the Infer­no space craft.

If this is starting to sound like some­thing you've heard before, maybe an old sci-fi movie from the 50s, you’re on to something. Not only does the manual have an actual comic book woven into it, but one dial boasts lines like: “By walking into my little trap, you have unwillingly provided us with the technology to bring about the annihilation of your species!” It was awful, though not quite bad enough to cause me to do any­thing as extreme as opening a vein.

NO JOY

However, I did find myself seri­ously contemplat­ing a first degree CD-ROMicide af­ter an hour of wrestling with the joystick configu­ration. As the proud owner of a Thrustmaster Flight Control Stick. 1 was pleased to see that there were two joystick options: normal and Thrust­master. Unfortunately, the setup pro­gram and I were apparently not reading the same astral chart, because the pro­gram insisted that I did not have a Thrustmaster, despite the convincing evidence of my naked eyes. I managed to get the game to successfully recognize the FCS as a normal joystick, but upon enter­ing the actual game itself, discovered that the joystick didn't work at all. I'm still try­ing to decide whether it’s more fun to: a) play with the keyboard, b) play with the mouse, or c) perform manual labor on U.S. Air Force bases in Japan.

Once you’ve entered your name and call sign, you're given three choices of play: Arcade, Evolutionary, and the aforementioned Director’s Cut. The Di­rector’s Cut is the “interactive movie," while the Evolutionary game offers con­trol over both the strategic direction of the war against the Rexxons as well as tactical command of the Inferno fighter. 

However, the Action option, which promises "a quick blast," is hardly that, due to an intro sequence longer and more tedious than the average dental ex­amination.

But if you grit your teeth or manage to find the ESC key in time, you’ll eventual­ly find yourself in command of your spacecraft, ready and waiting for your command to launch. At this point you may recall the great graphics on the box and in the ads, but you can forget about them. Those lovely 3D renderings are only seen in the cut-scenes, not in the playable game. Flat-shaded polygons in primary colors are pretty much what you're left with.

Believe it or not, the game itself bears more than a passing resemblance to some of the original CCA flight sims. The action is very fast and furious once you figure out what's going on, which is rather difficult because the cockpit looks as if it was designed to be displayed on an amber monochrome screen. Unfortunately, Inferno offers a remarkable ap­plication of that old saying about not judging a book by its cover.

Now yon might think that I’d be in se­rious trouble playing only with the mouse and keyboard. After all, without a joystick you’d survive about 3.2 seconds in FALCON 3.0 or TIE FIGHTER. But surprising­ly, this isn't the case at all. Instead, I found it relatively easy to take out the Rexxon fighters simply by holding down the space bar and waiting until their flight path intersected with my constant stream of laser fire. They don’t have much in the way of armor or shielding, so you can regularly take out a squadron in a single burst if you plot your trajecto­ry correctly.

ZERO GRAVITY

The flight model, such as it is, isn’t. 

Which is to say that Ocean has taken the reasonable position that by the time hu­manity has established an interstellar em­pire, we’ll probably have turned gravity into humanity’s lapdog. When flying the Inferno craft, there’s little difference between cruising through deep space and cutting through the thick particles of a planetary atmosphere. Essentially, the rule is to simply point your nose and go, without wor­rying about little things like G-forces and the like.

Other than the handy new anti-gravity technolo­gy, the Inferno fighter also boasts an impressive array of auto-assistance. There’s auto-navigation, auto-pilot, auto-docking, and auto­-combat options, which will almost let you cruise auto­matically through the game if you have the pa­tience for it. While the rest of the auto-assistance works fairly well, the auto­-combat doesn’t handle the Inferno much better than you’d expect R2D2 to handle an X-Wing against Vader. But keep in mind that you don't score points for suc­cess garnered this way, and the manual seems to consider it bad form.

And speaking of bad forms, one thing that can­not pass without being mentioned is the truly unbelievable cinematics. While the dialogue be­tween the armless Emper­or and the prosthetically- enhanced protagonist is cheesy enough to stun senseless nearly any sen­tient being, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone with a pulse can be expected to listen to over two-and-a-half straight minutes of subtitled alien grunting. Two-and-a-half! I swear, I timed it! Rumor has it that the CIA is looking into buying the rights for use in interro­gations. “HNGH GACGH GRRLLL GRAAAKCKH?” “gwo heegee krakrakrak urrnaath neeewhom!” Okay, 1'11 talk!

There are some positive aspects to INFERNO. The sound effects are quite good, as is the music soundtrack provided by Alien Sex Fiend, a British band of some renown in the mid-lo-late 80s. Fans of the band might be a bit disappointed, as the music sounds more like pop MIDI techno than the band’s traditional sound, but it’s good pop MIDI techno, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

Also, while it seems that the designers of Inferno have fallen a fair ways short of their lofty goals, they do succeed in creating a game universe with a very large feel to it. While the cheesiness of the plot and weak combat prevent one from caring much about the fate of this particular universe, it seems clear that there was the potential for a very good game in INFERNO. It’s unfortunate that the potential was left waiting at the altar.

INFERNO isn’t a bad game, just a terri­bly mediocre one. But in a world with games like TIE FIGHTER and WING COMMANDER III, it’s really impossible to rec­ommend INFERNO to anyone,

THE EDITORS SPEAK

Rating: 1/5

Pros: A CD space combat game that will run on 386 PCs.

Cons: Combines mediocre action with paralyzingly dull cut-scenes.

INFERNO: THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES

Price: $59.95 

System Requirements: IBM compatible 386-33Mhz or better, 4 MB RAM, VGA graphics, 4 MB hard drive space, CD- ROM; supports AdLib, Roland, and Sound Blaster sound cards; supports Thrustmaster FCS and WCS controllers.

Protection: None

Developer: Digital Image Design Publisher: Ocean Software San Jose, CA (408) 289-1411

WARLEADER

Nearly two decades ago, I began designing Warleader, a tactical fantasy game inspired by Advanced Squad Leader. While I never finished the design, the world I created for it turned into Selenoth, which served as the backdrop for the Arts of Dark and Light novels, including Summa Elvetica and A Throne of Bones.

Now that we're working on both computer and board game editions of Divine Right, I had a great conversation with Glenn Rahman concerning a tactical adaptation of Divine Right, tentatively called Divine General. He was enthusiastic about the concept of combining ASL-style tactical combat with his world of Minaria, which led me to the idea that Warleader could be converted from a single world setting into a generic tactical combat system for which modules dedicated to different fantasy worlds could be created. The idea is to start with the board games and VASSAL adaptations, then eventually make the transition to full-blown computer games.

It's an idea, anyhow. Here are sections 2 and 3 from the Warleader rules, which addresses the components and the sequence of play.

2.  COMPONENTS

Four 8”x11” full-color mapsheets

Four sheets of cardboard playing counters

One 30-page rulebook

One 8”x11” page of charts

Two ten-sided dice

2.1 MAPBOARDS:  The geomorphic mapboards represent the terrain.  Each mapboard is divided into hexagonal sections called hexes.  Each hex represents a piece of land approximately fifty yards across.  The various images shown on the mapsheets represent different terrain elements which can effect line-of-sight, movement, and combat results. 

 2.11 HEX COORDINATES:  On each of the four mapsheets, every hex is marked with a unique alpha-numeric identifier.  If the mapsheet is placed lengthwise, the upper-leftmost hex will be marked A1 and the lower-rightmost hex will be marked K20.  These hex coordinates are used for unit placement and reference purposes.

2.2 COUNTERS: The cardboard counters representing troop formations, individuals, and creatures are known as units.  Other counters used to provide information during the game are known as markers.

2.21 CLASSES:  Units are divided into five classes: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Individual, and Creature.  These classes are divided further into specialized types based on Allegiance.

2.22 INDIVIDUAL COUNTERS:  Counters representing Leader, Hero, and Magic-User units are known as Individual Counters.  (IC).  Counters representing Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery Counters are known as Group Counters.  (GC).  Units of the Creature class may be represented by IC or GC, depending on the specific unit.  

2.3 UNIT INFORMATION:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey specific information about the unit.

2.31 QUALITY:  Elite, Veteran, Green, and Conscript.  Units which have a Quality rating consisting of a number instead of a letter are considered to be Veteran units if the number is greater than three, otherwise they are considered to be Green.

2.32 ATTACK FACTOR:  The leftmost of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Attack Factor, (AF), which represents the unit’s ability to attack in combat, prior to any modification.

2.33 DEFENSE FACTOR: The middle of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Defense Factor, (DF), which represents the unit’s ability to defend in combat, prior to any modification.

2.34 MOVEMENT FACTOR:  The rightmost of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Movement Factor, indicating how many Movement Points may be spent by the unit in one turn.

2.34 MORALE LEVEL:  The number on the right side of the counter is the unit’s Morale Level indicating the unit’s ability to perform as a combat unit.  There are four Morale Levels, Fit, Shaken, Broken, and Fleeing.  When this number is exceeded during a DR due to a Morale Check, the unit is considered to have taken casualties and its status is decreased by one level.

2.36 RANGED ATTACK CAPABILITY:  Each unit counter is marked with numbers and/or symbols that convey information about the unit's ranged attack capabilities.

2.37 LEADERSHIP:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey information about the unit's ability to rally itself without the benefit of a Leader counter.

2.38 MAGICAL CAPABILITY:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey information about the unit's magical capabilities.

2.4 BLOOD AND BONE DICE:  The ten-sided red die is henceforth referred to as the Blood Die.  The ten-sided white die is henceforth referred to as the Bone Die.  The significance of these distinct identities will be explained later in the rulebook.

2.41 THE DOUBLE-ZERO:  A roll of the Blood and Bone dice resulting in a matched pair of zeros equals zero, not one hundred.  The highest possible unmodified roll is a ninety-nine.  However, the double-zero is a special roll that may lead to some unique results. 

3.  SEQUENCE OF PLAY

3.1 PLAYER TURN:  Each Game Turn is divided into two Player Turns.  The player who controls the current Player Turn is designated the Attacker for the duration of the Player Turn; the other player is designated the Defender.

​ 3.11 ORDER PHASE (OP):  Broken and disrupted troops are rallied.  Spell point counters are distributed.  Prayers are made. Existing spells are updated. Supernatural beings make Planar Checks.

​ 3.12 SKIRMISH PHASE (SP):  Attacker’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s range troops may fire. Attacker’s cavalry may declare charge.

​ 3.13 MOVEMENT PHASE (MP):  Attacker’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s cavalry charges executed. Attacker may move troops. Attacker may build field defenses.  Defender’s range troops may fire.

​ 3.14 DEFENSE PHASE (DP):  Defender’s range troops may fire. Defender’s magic users may cast spells.

​ 3.15 BATTLE PHASE (BP):  Melee combat resolved. Attacker’s magic users may cast spells.  Defender’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s range troops may fire

​ 3.16 RETREAT PHASE (RP):  Broken troops must retreat. Fleeing troops must flee.  Units marked with a Retreat counter must retreat.  Supernatural beings removed from board

​ 3.17 ADVANCE PHASE (AP): Attacker’s Fit troops may advance one hex into adjacent, open hexes in their Front facing.  Attacker’s non-Broken troops may rotate one hexside.

3.18 SECOND PLAYER TURN: Upon completion of the Attacker’s Advance Phase, the first Player Turn is ended.  The Attacker now becomes the Defender, the Defender becomes the Attacker, and a new Player Turn begins, repeating the above sequence.  Upon the completion of the second Player Turn, the current Game Turn is ended and a new Game Turn begins.

A Conversation with Chris Crawford

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him.

Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone? 

Is he Don Quixote, a dreamer slaying dragons that exist only in his own imagination? Is he Albert Einstein, an unsurpassed genius fruitlessly spending his winter years chasing an impossible grand theory while his peers reap high praise for incremental improvements in proven fields? Or is he Miyamoto Musashi, a peerless master soon to emerge from the wilderness of his isolation with brilliant insights into his craft?

I’ve hunted him down to find out.

A Portrait of the Designer as a Young Man

I didn’t know where to start, so I started at the beginning and asked Crawford about his life before games. He didn’t say much.

“I studied physics, got my masters in physics, and then I taught physics for two years. Then I moved back to California and had a teaching job that was kind of crazy. I did high school assemblies on the Energy Crisis.” He was quick to add that “I was working on games pretty hard, even then. I built my first computer game back in 1976 on an IBM 1120.”

Crawford joined Atari in 1979, where he created two educational simulation games, Energy Czar and Scram, for the Atari Home Computer System, before he was promoted to manage programmer training. n his spare time, he created Eastern Front (1941), which went on to become his first best-seller.

Eastern Front (1941) was one of Crawford’s most noteworthy creations so I decided to press him for details. “Eastern Front was a creative implementation of an obvious idea. ‘Let’s do a good wargame on a computer!’” he said. “Pulling it off involved an awful lot of creativity, but it required tactical creativity as opposed to strategic creativity.”

I was puzzled by what he meant. Crawford has a reputation for being outspoken, but it’s a cryptic sort of outspokenness, profound to the point of incomprehensibility. Talking to him can be like reading A Brief History of Time at 120 words a minute. You always feel like you’re missing something.

“Tactical creativity is implementation creativity. How do we build a good map? How do we move units around? How do we build a good AI system? You already know where you are going and you are just figuring out how to get there.”

“So would you say in today’s game industry we have a lot of tactical creativity and less strategic creativity?” I asked.

“Nowadays the stuff we call creative is tiny, tiny stuff. It’s hard to even call it creative at all. Technically, yes, I see a lot of creativity. But I see almost no design creativity in the stuff that’s coming out there.”

I decided we should review the rest of his work before we moved into philosophy. We got back to the details. After Eastern Front, Crawford created Legionnaire, Gossip, and Excalibur, and wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, the first of his many books. His reasons for the book were intensely introspective.

“I wrote Art of Computer Game Design really as a self-education exercise. The best way to figure something out is to write a book. You don’t realize how ignorant you are until you try to write it down,” he explained. “The book took me a year to write and there isn’t that much prose in it, and that’s because it took me so much time to sort things out.”

The intellectual self-development paid off, as Crawford’s following game, Balance of Power, was his most successful. It sold 250,000 units in 1984 – a staggering number for the time, more so given it was in the Dark Age after Atari had imploded and before Nintendo came onto the scene.

In 1987 Crawford founded the Game Developers Conference, which he would chair for the next seven years. He also created Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot. “It’s the game of which I’m most proud,” he said. “Trust & Betrayal went further beyond games than anything else I had done. It had major innovations. If we think of an innovation or creativity as a leap, then Eastern Front had some good sized jumps, Balance of Power some very good sized jumps, and Trust & Betrayal had a bunch of truly mighty leaps. It was completely alien.”

Alien indeed. Trust & Betrayal put the player in the role of an alien acolyte competing against six computer-controlled acolytes of other species for the title of Shepherd. Each of the computer-controlled competitors had a distinct personality and the core of the gameplay was figuring out which ones to ally with and which to oppose. It was a pioneering attempt to put real characters into computer games, relying on artificial personality and language parsing solutions that were innovative or clumsy. No one had ever made a game like it before, nor since.

It sold only 5,000 copies.

Trust & Betrayal was the beginning of the end of Crawford’s pursuit of computer game design. In the eight years prior he had designed twelve games. In the next four, he did just four, and two of them were sequels (Balance of Power II and Patton Strikes Back). The other two were global simulations, both released in 1990: Guns & Butter and Balance of the Planet.

When I asked Crawford about Balance of the Planet all he said was “it was good, but it was not one of my best.” A few years ago, he was not so circumspect. In a 1997 essay, Crawford spoke of his reaction to the release of Balance of the Planet: 

I was so proud of that design! …I wanted to create a game that honestly addressed environmental policy problems, something to show just how powerfully a computer could present a complex issue. I did just that… Yet when I released it to the world, the reaction of industry, press, and consumers was unenthusiastic. Perhaps their reaction is best summarized by a review of Balance of the Planet appearing in Computer Gaming World. The reviewer noted that ‘it is the closest thing to art to be sold as computer entertainment...but it is just not fun...if the game is not fun, it simply wouldn't be right to endorse it...’ Here we have an acknowledgement that Balance of the Planet is some kind of art, yet the review refuses to endorse it because it isn't fun! …perhaps our reviewer would react to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony like this: "Gosh, Mr. Beethoven, your symphony made my heart soar in awe at the majesty of the universe, but you know, it's just not fun. We need some tunes we can dance to, or catchy jingles we can snap our fingers to.

Ulysses

Crawford, I believe, could have endured commercial failure for his artistic work, if he had received critical acclaim as a visionary. But critical condemnation for lack of “fun factor” was too much for him to endure. He left the game industry in 1993, beginning a decade-long odyssey of false starts and fresh ideas that continues to this day.

Crawford announced his departure in a famously histrionic lecture known as the Dragon Speech. “It was the greatest lecture I’ve ever given in my life,” Crawford told me. “It talked about my pursuit of games as an art form, and how I had seen the industry moving away from that dream in the pursuit of money. It had completely discarded any pretense of doing anything worthwhile. It was just pure money-grubbing of the most short-sighted kind. And the industry had no real future with that sort of an attitude. So I decided to just go off and do my own thing.” 

I asked him why it was called the Dragon Speech. “Throughout the lecture I used the rhetorical device of the Dragon as the artistic ideal, with me as Don Quixote – the fool who defies all industry logic and imposes his own reality.”

“I concluded the lecture speaking as Don Quixote. ‘All right, I am leaving the industry. And by leaving the industry I can see the Dragon. I can see him now. Yes, yes, you frighten me, Dragon. You hurt me! I can feel your claws ripping through my soul.’ I almost screamed the words out. It really scared the audience. I pulled out my sword—a real, leaf-bladed sword—held it up, and shouted “Come Dragon, I shall fight you! CHARGE!’ And went galloping down the lecture hall, ran right out of the door, and never came back. That was how I announced my departure from the games industry.”

If Crawford’s departure was larger than life, his post-departure ambitions were even larger. Crawford’s goal was to create a new art form: Interactive storytelling. “I thought it would take me eighteen months, maybe two years, to put together interactive storytelling. I’ve been working on this for eleven, or twelve years now.”

What exactly is interactive storytelling? “Games about people instead of about things,” explained Crawford. “It’s very difficult to understand. It’s just like the problem they had with the cinema – it took them about fifteen years to figure out what cinema really is. Around the turn of the century, the thought was that cinema was like a play with the camera sitting where the audience sits. That’s where we are with interactive storytelling – people can’t conceive of it.”

The closest anyone has come, said Crawford, is an interactive story called Façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/), by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. Façade has been broadly praised by mainstream commentators such as the New York Times, which called it “the future of video games,” as well as by Crawford, who called it “without a doubt, the best actual working interactive story world yet created.”

Crawford is somewhat more grudging in his praise of Façade in private. “Façade is the only genuine interactive story-telling thingamob out there, but it only demonstrates just how difficult the problem is. The story has only three characters, takes place on a single stage, has a limited repertoire of behaviors… It’s still very good – And it works, which I can’t claim the Erasmatron does. But they defined The Problem more narrowly.”

The Erasmatron is Crawford’s own interactive storytelling technology. And The Problem is the richness of human social interaction.

“Social interaction can’t be built in incrementally,” he explained. “Take romance. You can’t just permit a gesture called Kiss and expect to get some romance in your game. Because romance involves a hell of a lot more than just kissing, it’s a huge array of behaviors. Real social interaction is one giant step that has to be taken at once. You can’t approach it a tiny step at a time.”

Crawford, in other words, seeks to create a platform that encompasses all real human interaction in a computer environment. “I want to bring the whole set of human behaviors in at once, complete in a mathematical sense, covering all dramatically important activities. And the set must be closed, not open ended.”

I asked for more details, and Crawford really started talking. He was theorizing at Faster Than Light speeds, and my note-taking went from inadequate to moot.

“My first solution with Erasmatron was inadequate. I asked too much of storybuilders. The solution I have now is to create a language, ‘Deikto.’ It’s a small language that has only around a thousand words, it’s very skeletal. But it permits you to do anything, describe any human behavior.”

We were looking at samples of Deikto code for a bit when I suddenly realized I’d been interviewing Crawford for almost two hours. I decided to press him for a self-evaluation: “You remind me of Albert Einstein, post-relativity. Have you, like Albert, lost your way?”

Crawford thought for a moment. “I think it’s a fair comparison, me to Einstein, post-relativity theory. I am searching for a grand, unified theory – a grand wonderful solution to all of our problems, and I have not produced an answer yet. The difference is that Einstein really was groping the entire time. He never showed a major step forward. Whereas I am much more confident that Erasmatron will solve the problems. And Mateas and Stern have published a tiny version of Unified Field Theory – so we know it can be done. But it’s weird and immensely difficult. I may not have the strength to pull it off, but I retain great confidence in the likelihood of success.”

It is the peculiar tragedy of genius that the greatest minds of any generation find themselves drawn to challenges that are beyond the limits of their era. Tesla invented the radio and the alternating current before embarking on a fruitless quest for broadcast power. Einstein gave us the special and general theories of relativity before turning his attention to the unified field theory that eluded him to his death. It is quite possible that Chris Crawford, perhaps the most gifted designer of his generation, is destined for a similar fate.

But I actually think not. When Crawford emerges from the wilderness of his isolation, like Musashi with the Book of Five Rings, count me as unsurprised.

This interview was originally published on The Escapist on 27 September 2005 under my pseudonym Max Steele.

Interview with Brad Wardell of Stardock

This interview with Brad Wardell of Stardock, designer of Galactic Civilizations and publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire and Sorceror King, took place as part of the DevGame course on March 4, 2016:

VD: Today we're talking with Brad Wardell. He is the founder and CEO of Stardock. He is one of the industry's leading designers of what we call 4X strategy games, which I will let him explain what they are. He is the designer of the Galactic Civilizations series and the publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire. He has also worked with our old friend Chris Taylor on Demigod and his latest game is Sorcerer King. 

Brad: Hi, glad to be here.

VD: First of all, I want to point out that Brad is an excellent designer. I've got several of his games. I've played both Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, which PC Gamer just last week recently named two of the 25 all-time top strategy games. Brad, congratulations for that.

Brad: Ah, thanks.

VD: Now what exactly is a 4X strategy game? Why has that become a category in its own right?

Brad: A 4X game follows a very specific pattern. If you think of chess, or any number of common strategy genres, they all have their own style. 4X has a very specific style which stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. So the beginning of the 4X is always about starting with very little, you grow into something, you find your opponents and then you use what you have to try to beat them. There are a lot of other terms for them, such as “empire builders”, for example, but overall 4X has come to mean a specific strategy genre that includes not just Galactic Civilizations, but Master of Orion, Civilization, and various other titles.

VD: Now, we have studied the history of games throughout the course, so I'm interested in knowing which strategy games were most influential on you in developing Galactic Civilizations.

Brad: Well, clearly Civilization. When I did Galactic Civilizations, I was still in college and very naïve on IP laws, clearly. It was a different time in 1992, and I wanted something like Civilization, but in space. So, I came up with the radical name of Galactic Civilizations. That, obviously, had a pretty tremendous impact on the initial start up of the game. And over the past 20 years, numerous other titles have had influences here and there on the development of the series.

VD: You and I are pretty close in age, so what were some of the strategy games that you were playing back in 1992?

Brad: There was Spaceward Ho, certainly Empire.

VD: Were you ever into the board-and-counter wargames or were you more of a computer strategy guy?

Brad: There was always Risk, but back in those days when I would be playing a non-computer game it was usually Dungeons & Dragons.

VD: So you're more of a role-playing game guy rather than a war gamer?

Brad: Yeah. I'm less into the Panzer General sort of thing, I like history and all, but I'm not into it just for fighting wars.

VD: So, getting outside the strategy genre, what were some of your favorite games when you were younger?

Brad: I would say Archon. This was the Commodore 64 era. There was Zork and the Ultima series. When I got to PC, it was Star Control and the Wing Commander series.

VD: What system did you usually play on?

Brad: Well I started on the Commodore 64. That was my first computer.When I got a PC in 1989,  I got a 286 which was just a PC clone.. I'm trying to think of the very first games for the PC I might've played. It would've been an Ultima.

VD: How did you go from doing 4X strategy to designing business games like Business Tycoon and Entrepreneur? It's a little unusual to just hop into the business-type of games. What inspired you to do that? Was it your own experience as entrepreneur?

Brad: Running a business is often like a strategy game because you have very finite resources; you have competitors and you have to win "territories" in the form of physical geography or market share. So, it ironically just worked out that those kinds of games or those businesses lend themselves to turning into strategy games.

VD: You've moved from doing science fiction with Galactic Civilizations into doing 4X fantasy with Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. What were some of the challenges that were involved in moving from science fiction to fantasy?

Brad: The biggest one for us was going from a space-based game like Galactic Civilizations II to a land-based game like Fallen Enchantress. Specifically, the terrain. You are dealing with the ground. And that turned out to be a huge challenge for us because we had never had to deal with it before. We had never really run up against things like video memory or the limitations of DirectX in terms of how to make a mountain. You think about it, of course, but how you make something like a mountain can be limiting based on DirectX, because there's only so many points you can put on there. So that turned out to be a huge hurdle for us, and that really bit us in the butt, because, at the time, we didn't do our homework on what we could and couldn't do with the current technology.

VD: Interesting. That's very timely because we're going to be getting into things like polygon count and so forth when we talk about art later today. Now, in the publishing world, the market for fantasy is considerably larger than the one for science fiction. Is that true in games as well, or do you find that science fiction usually outsells fantasy?

Brad: I read mostly science fiction myself. In the game arena, I would say science fiction tends to be a bit ahead of fantasy, only because the problem people run into with fantasy is that they think fantasy means medieval Europe with magic. And that's not a just a problem in terms of the designer's limits, it's more the expectations of the public. If you move too far outside the box, you are punished for it in the marketplace. Whereas in science fiction, you have a little bit more room to breathe.

VD: Speaking of moving outside the box, I was really fascinated to see how you took a crowdsourcing approach to the Sorcerer King quests. How did that work out, and what were some of the challenges that came about from doing it that way?

Brad: Yeah, that was a very fun and interesting experience. It is one that I would like to do again in the future because it worked out so well. Essentially, the problem we ran into came down to the budget. We are an independent developer, the team size for Sorcerer King was like six people, so it was pretty small. It had a relatively small budget, but we needed to have lots and lots of quests. So one of the ways to do that was to say, look, here's a tool, let's make quests, and we will hang out on Skype together and you send in your quests and I'll sort through them, and we will put them in the game then come up with some way to give goodies or some sort of reward in exchange. There was no competition because there was no budget for any of this.

VD: Right, but you are able to compensate them by in-game rewards and that sort of thing.

Brad: And there were credits, of course, as a lot of people are trying to build up their portfolios. But most the time, for most of them, it was obviously just for fun. What I'd like to do in the future - and I actually just came back from Valve where we discussed this - is that I'd like to see a system, an apprentice/journeyman/master system on Steam where novice developers can start selling their stuff and work their way up. It would be a marketplace that didn't only consist of premium stuff but rather, people worked their way towards that if they want to do something more than just casual modding. With that sort of marketplace for user-created content, I think players would end up with so much more content for their favorite games.

VD: That sounds similar to what we're doing where with DEVGAME. We've got six different dev intern teams in the group here as part of this course.

Brad: Cool.

VD: So you've already answered my next question, which is how large your development teams are compared to the past. It sounds as if  they are actually much the same size they used to be back in the day. What sort of range are your budgets these days?

Brad: It depends on the game. Sorcerer King was an unusually small project, but I would say on the minimum side, four developers are required. Every game you need an engineer, preferably two. You need at least a couple of artists to make the kind of games that we like to make. And on the high-end, you can get into over a dozen people but we don't have any games that involve dozens and dozens of people or anything like that.

VD: And how long are your development periods normally?

Brad: We try to aim for somewhere between 24 and 36 months.

VD: That long? I didn't realize that.

Brad: Yeah, we have games and development that won't ship until 2018.

VD: Wow, fantastic. Now, this is something that I'd like to ask every designer or producer, what do you consider to have been your best design or development decision, and what was your worst one?

Brad: The worst ones are always easier for me. I would say the best one was actually The Political Machine. The original Political Machine was supposed to be a game like You Don't Know Jack, which was a trivia game of some years ago. 

VD: I remember that one.

Brad: The game was mostly political trivia.We were committed to ship this game at retail in June with Ubisoft, and a couple of months before, we were playing our internal beta and it was just not any fun. It was terrible. So at the last second, we redesigned the game into more of a strategy game, with each state being a territory that you had to capture for its electoral votes. We did all that right at the end and rewrote it in about a month. I don't recommend that as a good thing in general, but that was what saved that game. 

On the bad side, Elemental from start to finish was just a disaster. That was the game that preceded Fallen Enchantress and people don't usually hear about it except for when people are trying to criticize me on the Internet. That was a project where we were so in love with all of the things that we wanted to do with the game. We wanted to do all this stuff, and we tried, but it turned out the engine just couldn't handle it. It wasn't even a matter of the hardware, it just turned out that DirectX could only have so many vertices and you could only do so much with it. We ran into all of these artificial problems because we had never dug deeply enough into DirectX at the time. At the end, we were chopping this project that was originally going to be a Master of Magic-style game into something that was nothing like what we intended to make, but was what we could get in there and still have the engine work with it.

VD: Yeah, I can imagine where that would be a problem. Sorcerer King is your most recent game and you have two more games coming out soon, can you tell us about those?

Brad: Sure. We shipped Galactic Civilizations III last May. Sorcerer King came out in July. Just this past week, we shipped Galactic Civilizations: Mercenaries and we released Political Machine 2016 last week too. So it's been a pretty busy few months. The next game on the line is Ashes of the Singularity. I'm out here in Maryland working on it until it ships. It's a massive real-time strategy game where you are dealing with thousands of units and you're trying to conquer a world. That is supposed to come out this spring. Also this spring is Offworld Trading Company where you start a company on Mars and are competing with other corporations for dominance of the Martian colony.

VD: Okay, cool. We will keep an eye out for those. Brad, thanks so much for stopping by DEVGAME. I really appreciate it, and we will look forward to speaking again with you soon.

Brad: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot!

A glimpse into gaming history

Over the last few weeks, I've been going through the extensive series of posts by The Digital Antiquarian, who has written a history of computer games dating back to 1966, with a particular focus on interactive fiction games of the sort popularized by Infocom. The author, an American living in Denmark, is intelligent and often does an excellent job researching his subjects through a variety of sources, and makes very good use of the industry magazines of the time. It's a rich resource for game designers and players interested in the history of computer games, especially thanks to the way he has provided ebooks containing all of his posts devoted to the games and technologies being introduced that year. He even attempts to write personal histories of some of the more important figures of the era, such as Richard Garriot and Sid Meier.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend the site without reservations, because TDA repeatedly makes two fundamental mistakes that no historian should ever make. First, he doesn't hesitate to demonstrate his own temporal bias, loftily dismissing the attitudes and social mores of previous times and criticizing both games and people on the basis of his current SJW standards. It's particularly annoying that he insists on ungrammatically and unrealistically substituting "her" for "he" as the standard third person singular subject when describing situations in which the latter was statistically far more appropriate. Consider the example of her - see how misleading and annoying that is, Jimmy - example of the multicolor character mode of the Commodore 64:

In its default mode, the 64 subdivides its screen into a grid of character cells, each 8 X 8 pixels. Thus there are 40 of them across and 25 down, corresponding to the machine’s standard text display. Elsewhere in memory are a set of up to 256 tiles that can be copied into these cells. A default set, containing the glyph for each letter, number, and mark of punctuation in addition to symbols and simple line-drawing figures, lives in ROM. The programmer can, however, swap this set out for her own set of tiles. This system is conceptually the same as the tile-graphics system which Richard Garriott used in the Ultima games, but these tiles are smaller (only the size of a single character) and monochrome, just a set of bits in which 1 represents a pixel in the foreground color, 0 a pixel in the background color. The latter color is set globally, for the whole screen. The former is specified individually for each cell, via a table stored elsewhere in memory.

So, let’s look at what all this means in terms of memory. Each cell on the screen consumes one byte, representing the number (0 to 255) of the tile that is placed there. There are 1000 character cells on a 40 X 25 display, so that’s about 1 K consumed. We need 8 bytes to store each tile as an 8 X 8 grid of on-off pixels. If we use all 256, that’s 2 K. Finally, the color table with the foreground color for each cell fills another 1 K. We’ve just reduced 32 K to 4 K, or just 2 K if we use the default set of character glyphs in ROM. Not bad. Of course, we’ve also introduced a lot of limitations. We now have to build our display, jigsaw-puzzle style, from our collection of tiles. And each cell can only use two of our total of 16 colors, one of which can be unique to that cell but the other of which must be the same for the entire screen. For someone wishing to make a colorful game, this last restriction in particular may just be too much to accept.

Enter multicolor character mode. Here, we tell the 64 that we want each tile to be not monochrome but drawn in four colors. Rather than using one bit per pixel within the tile, we now use two, which allows us to represent any number from 0 to 3. One of these colors is still set individually for each cell; the other three are set globally, for the screen as a whole. And there’s another, bigger catch: because we still only devote eight bytes to each tile, we must correspondingly reduce its resolution, and that of the screen as a whole. Each tile is now 4 X 8 (horizontally elongated) pixels, the screen as a whole 160 X 200. Even so, this is easily the most widely used mode in Commodore 64 games. It’s also the mode that Scott Nelson (little brother of Starpath co-founder Craig Nelson) chose for Summer Games‘s flag selection screen.

This is detailed and pertinent information. And were there female Commodore 64 programmers? Sure. Were there very many of them? No. It is ungrammatical, politically-biased, historically-misleading, and distracting nonsense. It's particularly jarring when, as in the example quoted above, TDA uses the female pronoun to describe the general situation while the specific example provided is almost invariably male.

But this temporal bias can be easily ignored, since no one really cares if TDA believes Ultima II is sexist or that Mikhael Gorbachev was the true hero responsible for ending the Cold War while Ronald Reagan was a stupid warmonger who just happened to be there. Opinions, right or wrong, are obviously subjective. Who is to say that a future Digital Antiquarian should not similarly lambast The Sims for failing to have covered the female characters' faces and thereby tempting the male characters to sin? Who is to say that the late, great Dan Bunton aka Danielle Bunton Berry should not be erased from gaming history along with his games if the future historian happens to disapprove of his sexual-identification choices?

Well, I, for one, most certainly do. History is what happened, not what we wish would have happened.

A more serious problem is the Digital Antiquarian's decision to play SJW history police. As a game developer since 1990, who has been personally acquainted with many of the figures mentioned on his site, and who was professionally involved in the transition from 2D to 3D graphics, I thought that he would welcome some of the historical information I possessed as a 3D technology evangelist, a nationally syndicated game reviewer, and game designer. And indeed, he was interested in the information I was willing to provide... until he consulted Wikipedia, decided that I was a criminal badthinker, and concluded that he did not wish to engage in further communications with me.

Now, let's face it, I am not a central figure in the history of computer gaming and this decision to wilfully ignore a single minor source of information for the 1992-1998 era is not exactly akin to eliminating Steve Meretzky from the history of Infocom. But the problem is this: now we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Digital Antiquarian is intrinsically biased and unreliable. Who else is he refusing to talk to, who else - and what else - is he refusing to write about? I very much doubt I am the only historical figure in the computer gaming industry of whom he does not approve. This embrace on his part of SJW history policing is particularly egregious in light of his advice for those who consider themselves to be historians in this field to "really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words". 

I’m not the first one to reveal the true story of Escape from Mt. Drash. John Williams has occasionally tried to correct the record in the past via comments to other blog posts and the like that repeated the legend. Recently it has begun to seem that word is finally getting out. Blogger Pix had the opportunity to interact with Garriott personally last year, and asked him directly about the Mt. Drash legend. Garriott at last confirmed to him that he had known about the game and duly authorized its release.

So why should I take up the cause now? Well, there are still plenty of online sources that repeat the legend. I’d thus like to add this blog’s weight — to whatever extent it has weight — to the true story. This I partly do as a favor to John Williams, who has gifted me (and you) with so many memories and insights on the early days of Sierra and the industry as a whole. John is, understandably enough, annoyed at the persistence of this falsehood, as it directly impinges the honor of Sierra and by extension himself.

More generally — and yes, I know I rant about this more than I should — this can serve as a lesson to people who consider themselves historians in this field to be a bit more rigorous, and not to substitute easy assumptions for research. I won’t get into the original source of the false legend here, only say that I’m disappointed that it was repeated for so long without ever being seriously questioned. When you are thinking of saying something that directly accuses people of unethical dealings you really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words. Frankly, that’s a lesson that Richard Garriott himself could learn; despite my admiration for his vision and persistence as a gaming pioneer, I find his glib dismissal of the folks at California Pacific and Sierra who launched his career as dishonest, “stupid bozoos,” and “heavy drug users” to be unconscionable. It’s a lesson his fans should also take to heart.

If you do have one of those websites that repeats the legend of Escape from Mt. Drash… hey, it happens. I’ve made a hash of things myself once or twice in public. But maybe think about taking a moment to make a correction? I’m sure that at the very least John Williams and the others who built Sierra would appreciate it.

However, there is a positive consequence to our brief and disappointing exchange. It was the Digital Antiquarian's dismissive reaction to me that led me to realize that if future generations of gamers are going to know how things actually happened and what it was really like, the histories need to be written by those of us who were actually there, not by those who weren't there, especially when they are inclined to improperly impose their values, their interpretations, and their opinions on people and events of the past.

So that is why I have decided to not only revive this blog and post old interviews with acquaintances like Johnny Wilson, Doug TenNapel, John Romero, Kurt Busch, and Chris Taylor but also begin conducting new interviews with important figures from the last 30 years.

The Art of Imitative Design

Why does one game succeed brilliantly while another game vanishes into obscurity? Why is one game an absolute blast to play while another, very similar game, simply isn't that much fun? It is often easy to understand why a game fails, but it is usually more difficult to ascertain why one game becomes a hit when another does not, epecially when the hit does not feature better features, prettier art, faster performance, or a most distinctive brand than other games in the same genre.

In most cases, success comes down to superior game design, by which I mean the use of game concepts and mechanics that provide the player with a more enjoyable gameplay experience. Game design should never be confused with game development or with production, as it is the aspect of game development that consists of conceiving and articulating ideas that are subsequently turned into functional reality through the process of production.

There are four types of game design.

• Original
• Evolutionary
• Synthetic
• Imitative

While most discussion of game design revolves around its highest form, original design, the fact is that very few game designers will ever rise to the level of a Sid Meier, a Will Wright, or a Peter Molyneux. Most successful games – and most good games – involve either evolutionary or synthetic design. And the reality is that most games that are developed and released are best characterized as the lowest form of game design, imitative design.

There are several reasons for this to be the case. First, imitative designs are easier to conceive, for both the novice game designer as well as the experienced professional. Most of us possess considerably less creative originality than we would like to imagine, and even in the game industry, true originality is as likely to be greeted with skepticism and dismissal as with enthusiasm and support. Second, imitative design is easier to articulate, as it takes considerably less time and effort to write a game design document that can be largely cribbed from another game's manual, or from notes taken while playing another game, than it does to start from scratch with original research, algorithms, and arbitrary values.

Third, imitative design is easier to sell to the development team, to the investors, to the publisher, and often, to the public. Fourth, imitative design is safer. The imitative designer is able to have confidence in the game's mechanics because he has already seen them work.

And yet, even when two or more games are designed in imitation of a successful game, and developed with a reasonably equivalent level of production competence and resources, they often meet with widely varying results. So, in light of the uncomfortable fact that most game developers will, sooner or later, find themselves working on an imitative game, what separates a successful imitation from an unsuccessful one?

Consider the case of the various imitations of one of the most widely imitated games in computer game history, Doom. Doom was revolutionary for its time, is considered to be one of the ten greatest games in computer game history, which sold 2 million copies, distributed another 20 million, and spawned a host of “Doom clones” between 1993 and 1997, including Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces, Heretic, Rebel Moon Rising, Rise of the Triad, and CyClones.(1)

All of these games were 2.5D shooters that were, more or less, functionally identical to Doom. Yet the most commercially successful, Duke Nukem 3D, sold 3.5 million copies; considerably more than the 50,000 copies sold by the least successful, CyClones. To understand why these very similar games had such dissimilar results requires understanding the challenges of imitative design.

The primary problem with designing an imitation is that there is often no intrinsic need for the imitation to exist in the first place. Unless the imitation reaches a platform the original cannot reach, or the imitated game cannot fulfill the existing demand it has created, there is no market for the imitator. Why should a gamer play the imitation when the original is available? Space Armada sold one million copies on Intellivision because Atari refused to port Space Invaders to its competitor; would Sonic the Hedgehog have sold as well as it did on the Sega Genesis if Nintendo had made Super Mario World available on the Genesis rather than keeping it exclusive to the SNES?

Exacerbating this problem today is the ability to retroactively add more content to existing games through DLC and updates, which now makes success by imitation even more difficult. After Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning came out, it was not long before Blizzard added an achievements system to World of Warcraft, thereby rendering moot one of the few distinctions between WAR and WoW.

The secondary problem with imitative design is that the imitator seldom understands either the internal game mechanics involved or the necessary tradeoffs that were required in deciding upon them. Even fairly small alterations, made in ignorance, can disrupt the well-honed flow of the original gameplay and make the game feel less fun than the original.

That being said, imitative design can succeed if:

1. the imitator is able to take advantage of a brand that creates independent appeal or creates a market for the game. Example: Dark Forces. Who didn't want to see what Doom-style action in the Star Wars universe would be like?
2. the imitator fully understands the internal workings of the design imitated and is careful to only change superficial elements that don't disrupt or otherwise interfere with the internal mechanics. Consider how different the superficial elements were in Duke Nukem 3D  in comparison with Doom.(2)

DUKE NUKEM 3D

• Character: colorful personality
• Dialogue: sardonic vulgarity
• Genre: cheesy science fiction
• Mood: silly and cocksure
• Environment: Earth and familiar

DOOM

• Character: nameless Doom guy
• Dialogue: shrieking and wailing
• Genre: eldritch horror
• Mood: dark and frightening
• Environment: Hell and alien

The same was not true of the less successful Doom clones; despite having new features like an independent reticule and the ability to look up and down, the generic nature of CyClones meant that, unlike Duke Nukem 3D, first-person shooter fans had little interest in playing it.

Imitative design may not be glamorous of game development, but it has its place in the industry. And if you're going to imitate a successful game, don't settle for a lame and lazy ripoff. Take the trouble to think it through, do it right, and with a little luck, your efforts will be rewarded.

(1) Full Disclosure: I had personal involvement with three of these games. I designed and co-produced Rebel Moon Rising, my company Power of Seven did the music and sound effects for CyClones, and I reviewed Heretic for Computer Gaming World in 1994. 

(2) It has been argued that the addition of features such as swimming and flying permit Duke Nukem 3D to be considered an evolutionary design, but all of the various Doom clones had a number of minor new features that did not fundamentally change the core gameplay mechanics. The fact that the developer was unable to build on the huge success of the game after the technological shift to true 3D graphics also tends to argue against the idea that it was evolutionary.