This article appeared in the February 2008 issue of Develop magazine.

Last month, Electronic Arts took the unusual, although not unprecedented, step of permitting the release of the source code of Maxis's landmark simulation game SimCity to the public under the Gnu Public License version 3.  This is not the first time that game code has been released into the wild, but it is one of the first times that source code from a hit game that was not developed by the notorious maverick John Carmack has escaped the confines of the development house.

Now, it's far too soon to say if anyone will actually do anything interesting with the code, which is named Micropolis due to the need to protect EA's trademarks.  But even if a programmer or two manage to come up with something brilliant, it is unlikely that even a creative spin based on a genuinely great game is going to generate much attention due to that which is now the great bane of the game development industry.

To put it in a nutshell, the problem is art.  Game art, to be specific, the amount and the expense of it required in games today. 

Although my game-playing dates back to the Apple II, Akalabeth, Swashbuckler and the original Castle Wolfenstein, I didn't actually start designing my own games until the MCGA days.  There were two options then, 320x200, 256-color resolution or  640x480 with 16 colors.  Like most would-be developers, my friend and I began by copying a game that we quite liked that we thought we could do a little better, in our case, Warlords from SSG.  Our game was going to be called MythWars, wherein the player was a god from one of the various pantheons, which determined the various army types available.

With such low resolution and a 2D environment, the tiles were so small that two non-artists were perfectly capable of creating what were, at the time, very professional looking graphics.  The rolling hills gave way to majestic, snow-covered mountains and the various monstrous infantries and cavalries really looked quite good against the backgrounds.  For those who can remember those primitive days, it actually looked prettier than Warlords or QQP games like Conquered Kingdoms.  Nowadays, of course, looks crude beyond belief, something a child would be embarrassed to put on Facebook.  

We never finished MythWars, as completing college and then leaping right into the exciting new horizon of 2.5D technology turned out to be a permanent distraction.  We tried a few different approaches, especially with video capture, but we quickly learned that our art skills had reached their limits and 2.5D required hiring real artists from the local art school.  The budget for our first game was only $125,000, which paid for the two full-time artists who worked on it.  These days, that wouldn't cover the cost of the graphics used on a single game level.

The problem is that while games are visually incredible these days, they often aren't actually any more fun to play.  Consider Guitar Hero, for example.  While it's got very realistic graphics, they're really not very important to the game; the player primarily derives his enjoyment from rocking out with something that feels like a real guitar in his hands.  It's the interface that's key, not the visuals, and if you think about it, all games really are, at root, is amusement interfaces.

And art isn't only less fundamentally relevant to games than one might think, but its cost actually creates genuine design problems that are completely unrelated to the art itself.  Because budgets are so massive these days, more people have to sign off on every project and there's greater financial pressure on games to appeal to the widest possible market.  This is not the way to stimulate creativity and design brilliance, but rather imitation and design mediocrity.  This isn't anyone's fault, it's just the natural evolution of the industry.  If it weren't for the fact that a few of the industry's most innovative minds also happen to be some of its most vastly successful ones, we might all be reduced to developing clones of the latest clones of the previous clones.

Is there a way out of this artistic bottleneck?  It seems hard to imagine, since no one wants worse graphics and I don't know very many talented artists who are inclined to work for nothing.  Perhaps EA's release of “Micropolis” may hint at the way, after all, an awful lot of game art is pretty similar to the art used in other games.  What if instead of releasing game code, developers were to release their old textures and models into an online pool from which everyone could draw as needed, thus reducing the need to draw yet another space laser or oak tree?  Obviously, there would still be a need for new art, but at least everyone woudn't be constantly paying to reinvent the dying monster animation.

No doubt there are a million and one reasons why an Internet Art Pool could never come to pass, but in the unlikely event it does, I have some nice 32x32 mountains in case anyone needs them.

33 years ago, Chris Crawford explained why one should never take awards very seriously in The Journal of Computer Game Design, Volume 1, Number 5.

This is the time of year for annual awards.  The pundits gather their wits, their votes, and their courage, and they select the best products of 1987.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea;  nowadays, so many products are released that an annual review of the best products provides needed perspective.  Sadly, though, the execution falls short of the ideal.

Consider the annual awards of MacUser magazine.  I noticed in their 1986 awards an apparent bias in favor of products that appeared late in the year.  I therefore compiled data on the products that won awards and compared it with the review dates of those products.  I then carried out a statistical test of the hypothessis that awards are given with no regard for release date.  The hypothesis was rejected at better than the .5% confidence level.  For you non-statisticians, it means that the awards were grossly biased in favor of recently released products.

Then there is the awards system sponsored by the Software Publisher’s Association.  The problem with the SPA awards arises from the fact that the software industry executives who vote for the awards don’t play many games themselves, and so they have no independent basis for making a decision.  Determined publishers will send free copies of their games to every elector to jog their memories.  It’s not quite the same thing as buying the election, but more than one publisher has mentioned to me the high cost of winning an SPA award.

I don’t mean to pick on MacUser or the SPA — they’re both solid organizations working to improve their systems.  I could have picked apart any of the awards systems.  These were the most convenient targets.  My point is that none of the various awards can stand up to close inspection.  

There is a fundamental reason why awards systems are such a mess:  there are just too many games coming out each year for any one person to make a fair determination.  Consider this:  each year, several dozen games companies release several hundred games to the marketplace.  It takes at least five hours of playtime to evaluate a game well enough to determine its worthiness for an award.  It would therefore require nearly a full-time worker just to play all the games.  Who’s got that kind of time to throw around?

The brutal truth is this: most of the people who cast votes for the “best game of the year” have played only a fraction of the hundreds of games out there.  Few of them have spent much time with the games for which they vote.  In short, it’s a crock.  Most of the electors for the Academy Awards have seen the movies for which they vote.  Most of the electors for book awards have read the books under consideration.  Is it too much to ask the same for games?  Apparently it is.

So what should we game designers do about it?  We certainly should not institute our own system of awards.  Let’s face it, we’re not much better equipped to select the best games of the year.  We probably spend more time playing games than most people, but I doubt that any of us are catholic enough in our game-playing to do justice to an annual award.

So I suppose the best we can do is behave graciously when we hear that we have received an award (or, more precisely, our publisher has received the award), thank everybody in sight, take the plaque or doodad home, mount it on the wall, and forget about it.  Lord help us all if we start taking these things seriously. 

That being said, the CGW games of the year were, for the most part, well worth playing. But then, as a former CGW contributor, I can testify that the editors, writers, and reviewers of CGW actually played the games all the way through.

This article originally appeared on The Escapist in December 2005. Fifteen years out, its predictions have held true: Game distribution has gone digital, and stores like Gamestop are reduced to the equivalent of used record stores.

The used game business works like this: A gamer shows up at Gamestop with a few games he’s tired of and wants to trade in. Gamestop offers him a lowball price – well lower than what he’d get if he sold his games on eBay, just high enough to keep him in the store – and since he’s already there and wants the cash, he accepts it. More than likely, since he’s a gamer in a game store with cash in hand, he spends the cash on something else, maybe something secondhand that he can pick up for $20. Meanwhile, Gamestop marks up and sells the used games it just bought for three times what it paid for them.

 

Gamestop executives describe this as a “margin growth” business – because they make a much higher profit margin on the sale of every used game than they do on the comparable sale of a new game. And in the highly competitive retail trade, margins matter. How much?

 

“Used games are keeping the entire ship afloat,” a vice-president of marketing for Electronics Boutique tells me. “EB and Gamestop make basically no money from new product.”   

 

No money from new product? But everybody knows the retailers are the real profiteers of the interactive entertainment industry, brutally extracting marketing development funds and ruthlessly returning product in the name of the all-mighty dollar.

 

Right?

 

The Savagery of Sellthrough

Throughout most of the entertainment and media industry, when publishers want to make sure first-run entertainment sells in droves to the public, they charge what’s called “sellthrough prices” – and for virtually every form of media, including books, movies, and music, that price is between $15 and $25. You can get the brand-new Feast for Crows hardcover for $16.80, the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith DVD for $17.98, and Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor for $18.98.

 

But you have to pay $49.99 for Perfect Dark Zero, or any other new release video game. In comparison to its closest substitutes from other industries, video gaming isn’t priced to sell through.

 

And yet selling through is the one thing a video game must do. Video games suffer from the shortest shelf life of any media. You can walk into a record store and buy CDs from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and today. You can visit Barnes & Noble and pick up books written in the middle ages. You can buy movies made in the black and white era. But you would be hard pressed to find a Gamestop selling more than a handful of games older than a couple years, and the vast majority of shelf space will be for titles releases in the last six months.

 

 

Facing this short shelf life, game publishers have strategically adopted a tiered pricing model. The start the games off at the highest price point they can – right now that’s $49.99 – and they extract as much money as possible from the avid, got-to-have-it-now consumer. They then drop the price to hit the next tier of consumers and keep moving units.

 

The tiered pricing model works well for the publishers, and if they can convince enough consumers to buy at the $49.99, it works really well. Think Halo 2. It’s great for big box retailers like Wal-Mart, too. Wal-Mart only takes a title that is a proven seller, and any title that doesn’t sell gets dropped instantly. Wal-Mart doesn’t care if it has the biggest inventory of games, or covers every genre of game. It just sells the big hits.

 

For specialty retailers like Gamestop, the tiered pricing model sucks. Gamestop can’t compete on price with the likes of Wal-Mart so to differentiate itself Gamestop has to take risks on unproven new product, and keep a wider inventory of older product. But unlike music and book sellers like B&N, Gamestop has no evergreen products that it can reliably keep on the shelves. So its inventory management is a constant struggle, with price points continuously adjusted, and product constantly moved around the store depending on its age. Gamestop ultimately suffers because its shelf space is devoted to games that are, by definition, less popular and lower priced than what Wal-Mart stocks.

 

So, imagine you’re running Gamestop. Imagine you owe $36 wholesale for $50 games, leaving around $14 profit. And imagine you owe $12 wholesale for $20 games, leaving around $6 profit per sale. Obviously you’d like to sell more $50 games than $20 games, and so you’re going to organize your storefront to push the hot new product as much as possible. But to differentiate your business, you have to keep that broad catalogue of older, cheaper games around – otherwise you’re not offering anything different than Wal-Mart or Best Buy.

 

Now imagine that with used games, you only pay $3 for your $20 games. Suddenly you make more money from a $20 game then you do from that $50 copy of Perfect Dark Zero. This is the solution to all your problems. You can offer a wider inventory, stock older games, and even still profit! Set the prices right and you can even manage to do trade-in and resale of brand new games for really big profits.

 

Got that? Good. Now you understand why Gamestop is transforming itself, right before your eyes, from a specialty boutique into a secondhand store.

 

Biting the Hand

It’s a transformation fraught with peril. In adopting used games as the solution to the inexorable logic of the new game retail business, Gamestop is alienating its customers, infuriating its suppliers, and arming its competitors. 

Let’s start with customer. As a specialty retailer, Gamestop has long catered to the enthusiast. The enthusiasts’ desires are simple. He wants to be able to buy new games for a reasonable price. If the games are good, he wants to keep them. If the games are worth playing but not worth keeping, he wants to be able to trade them in. And if the games are bad, he wants to be able to return them and get new ones. 

Unfortunately, today’s retail marketplace offers no way to return bad games and limited value on trade-ins. Barnes & Noble will give you store credit for opened music and DVDs if you have a receipt, but Gamestop will just offer to buy an opened game from you for a few bucks – even though they’re going to turn around and sell it for $30… 

When used game sales were a minor aspect of the Gamestop business, it was easy for regular customers to overlook the trade-in to sale price ratios; no big deal. But as every consumer purchase is presented as a potential money-saving used game purchase, those consumers have a constant reminder of exactly how much a used game is going for – and, by comparison, how little the consumer gets on trade-in.  

Hardcore gamers are nothing if not web-savvy, and eBay is out there as a viable alternative to trading in.  Exposés on the economics of trade-ins have already begun to erect the virtual equivalent of “Keep Out” signs on Gamestop. As consumers become more informed, Gamestop will either have to increase its trade-in values, or watch its inventory supplies of desirable used games plummet. 

An even more pressing problem comes from Gamestop’s suppliers, the video game publishers. The relationship between game publisher and game retailer ranges from Détente to Cold War, with continuous low intensity conflict over “price protection,” “marketing development funds,” and “return rate.” Used game sales threaten to make the Cold War heat up – because publishers see no revenues at all from the sale of used games. 

Is it really worth fighting over? It’s interesting to note that both Activision and Electronic Arts are reporting that fourth-quarter revenues will fall well below expectations due to unexpectedly low sales. Meanwhile, Gamestop has announced “strong margin contributions supporting forecasted earnings” because “used video game sales growth continues to solidly meet our goals.” 

And so the war drums have started beating. In an interview with Computer and Video Games, Mark Rein of Epic Games was blunt: 

“If you walk into EB in the US, they try and sell you a second hand version of a game before a new one. I think that's bad. It would be fine if they share that revenue with us. They can also be marketing partners with us as well. We can have an official refurbished games policy. That's the problem. Those resold games use server resources, tech support. The majority of guys calling up saying "I don't have my serial number", I'm sure a lot of those are resold. It costs us money. Those customers think they paid for it, and they're entitled to support. The reality is we didn't get paid. They didn't pay us.”

Of course, Gamestop doesn’t have to.

“It is 100% legal to re-sell video games. The publishers have no leg to stand on,” explains Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Because of the First Sale doctrine, publishers have no legal right to get paid for used games, anymore than book publishers get paid from secondhand bookstores, or music companies from used record sales. This won’t stop them from finding another way to strike back at Gamestop, however.

Even as the publishers make war-plans, Best Buy and Blockbuster have joined the fray. Most Blockbuster stores now not only rent video games, they buy and sell used games, too, usually offering significantly better trade-in values and charging less. Blockbuster is largely ignored in discussion of game retail, but it needs to find a new business as TV on demand catches on, and looks willing to fight hard for games revenues.

Best Buy is still testing a pilot program for used games, but industry insiders seem to expect it to go forward. As a big box retailer, Best Buy isn’t suffering from the tiered pricing model the way Gamestop is, and it can accept lower margins on used games. And if Best Buy succeeds with used games, Target, Wal-Mart, and the rest might follow. 

What does it all mean?

 

The New Model

Gamestop’s margins in the used game business are almost certain to erode, as consumers seek alternatives, whether peer-to-peer like eBay, or from competitors such as Blockbuster and Best Buy.

At the same time, the uneasy alliance of retailer and publisher that has long dominated the interactive entertainment industry will crumble. This, in turn, will open the way for publishers to aggressively embrace digital distribution. Up until now, the publisher’s fear of channel conflict with retail has obstructed their adoption digital distribution. By “striking the first blow,” retailers open themselves up to a digital distribution counterstrike.

These two forces – used game sales and digital distribution – will have strange and conflicting impacts on consumers. A flourishing used game market will drive prices lower. The higher the price of new games, the more likely the consumer is to buy it used for less.  But the more the used game market flourishes, the more publishers will race to adapt digital distribution. With digital distribution, publishers can prevent re-sale and used game trade, both legally and technologically.

“You are already seeing with XBOx Live and Valve and these ties online, they are trying to use the online hook as a way to enforce their business model. You’re going to see more of a trend towards that,” says the EFF’s Schultz. ““It’s part of an overall battle that’s going on in all the content industries.”

Here’s what’s likely to emerge as the new business model: Publishers will release new titles exclusively in digital format at a premium price.  Big box retailers will carry the most popular titles in physical form at a sellthrough price point. There’ll be little margin left in used game sales, but it’ll survive with pricing similar to your local Blockbuster’s secondhand DVDs.

And as for Gamestop? If you want to know what’s in store, head over to your local college and find the students’ favorite used record store. There’s not a 100% profit margin in sight.

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.

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.

Teleros helpfully summarizes it from the very beginning:

1. Warcraft 1 sees the orcs ruin their homeworld through being blind to demonic interference, so they have to flee. Only by "flee" I mean "invade and conquer an innocent nation".
2. Warcraft 2 sees the orcs, now lead by someone who has an inkling of the demonic interference, try and murder their way across the other innocent nations, who are forced to band together as the Alliance to survive. The orcs meanwhile recruit money-grubbing (((goblin))) mercenaries and cannibal trolls who are pissed the Alliance races destroyed their empire & drove them out years before. The Alliance narrowly wins & proceeds to cut off the orc homeworld to stop reinforcements + demonic magic, and very emphatically do not genocide the orcs, instead putting them in camps at heavy (ie, unrest-causing) taxpayer expense.
3. Warcraft 3 sees the orcs try to flee to a new homeland. Under human-trained Thrall, they keep their violence to a minimum vs the Alliance, and ally together to defeat the demons. When an Alliance nation decides to try and solo the new orc homeland, the Alliance as a whole lets the Horde destroy their invasion force & kill their king in order to keep the fragile peace.
4. WoW basically starts with a cold war in place, with minor groups from both sides squabbling over bits and pieces (see: Battlegrounds), kind of like USA/Soviet proxy wars. Whilst Sylvanas prepares for genocide.
5. More cold war in The Burning Crusade.
6. War breaks out in Wrath of the Lich King when rogue Forsaken gas the combined Alliance/Horde army. Alliance capture Undercity, but Jaina tries for peace so teleports them out. A Horde army ambushes an Alliance army fighting the undead, resulting in an undead victory.
7. The Cataclysm happens. The war heats up. Alliance forces leave an opening for Tauren civilians to escape a besieged town, whilst Garrosh prefers killing civilians. Sylvanas gases more civilians and invades a neutral nation for ~reasons~.
8. Pandas. Alliance put neutral civilians to work to establish a base, Horde prefer to capture their children and such. Garrosh continues acting like Hitler, but is defeated and put on trial by both sides for war crimes. A treaty is made which should put an end to most of the territorial disputes.
9. Warlords of Draenor, in which we learn that the orcs were never a peaceful race before the demons came but in fact the Mongols on 'roids, and easily persuaded to go invade Azeroth for the lulz.
10. Legion, in which the 2nd nice Horde leader dies and Sylvanas takes over. Alliance forces disobey orders to attack her, but all they really do is foil her plan to enslave the valkyries.
11. Battle for Azeroth, in which Sylvanas decides on pre-emptive war to control the world's supply of plutonium - I mean Azerite - and starts this by firebombing Teldrassil without even the pretence of asking for a surrender. Later irradiates / gases her own troops to deny the Alliance control over her undead capital.

From the transcript of the Devstream.

Our idea was that you were going to be interacting with artificial intelligence, so you had your squad which could be AI soldiers, which could be enemy soldiers, NPCs, etc. Yeah we really went  overboard because we were bringing in synthetic speech, we were bringing in speech recognition, so there was a surprisingly sophisticated interaction with the artificial intelligences. We actually wanted to try to make it that you couldn't tell if you were interacting with a human or an artificial intelligence you know, so kind of like what you see with the bots these days, but but even more sophisticated. And remember this is back in 1996 and 1997, and the reason that the stuff sounds so advanced is because the industry went in a less sophisticated direction.

Again not a criticism. That was the right thing to do. People have sold literally billions of dollars of games that are based on the pseudo railroad.  I mean it's not actually a rail shooter - a true rail shooter would be something like the original Rebel Assault where you're literally on a rail and you can sort of swing back and forth a little bit, but from a design perspective, it's still the same function, it's still the same thing, in order to experience the story, in order to experience the the gameplay, you have to go through in a general order generally the same way.

It was interesting to see how effective that was in the early Call of Duty games before Call of Duty turned into being primarily a multiplayer game. The original missions did a very good job of giving you a pseudo-military experience, but of course it was all heavily scripted. You had to do things in exactly the right order, you knew exactly what was coming at you eventually; in some ways it was very similar to the old arcade games. In that MMOs have opened things up, you know, the FPS MMO; no one has really truly managed to design the proper one, the ultimate one, but there have been numerous attempts. Even Richard Garriot was unable to deliver on on that idea with Tabula Rasa.

But the interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we've been fighting the tendency of a certain group of
players - who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them - and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you've played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic - yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks - what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way
that you can't even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.

And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it's a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that's ok, that's fine if that's if that's what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they've been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents - and it's obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it's not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept - it's basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, "you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!" And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that's what's different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they're trying to limit it through the level designs they're trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.

Glen Rahman's design notes concerning Divine Right, which will be DevGame Project #6.

Hardcore Gaming 101 has a very cool summary of retro Japanese computer gaming:

Japan has long been viewed by the West as a console-centric country, ever since Nintendo and the NES. But there is another, mostly forgotten world of Japanese gaming history, in which thousands of games were developed for various Japanese computers over an 18 year period that stretches from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. For all that Nintendo started, it was the open hardware of NEC and other companies that allowed small groups to form and become giants. In fact, some of Japan's most recognizable franchises, such as Metal Gear and Ys, actually began as computer games. The early Japanese computing scene was an intense flurry of creativity that launched the careers of many prominent figures in the video game industry, while also establishing some of the most famous video game companies, such as Square, Enix, Falcom, and Koei.

Japanese computer games were also exempt from any of the licensing and content restrictions that all console makers have imposed in various forms. These early games give us a rare glimpse into a world of Japanese creativity unfettered by censorship and outside pressures, which has never since been replicated. The content ranges from rampant drug use and presidential assassination (XZR), to tender explorations of love, sex, and relationships (Dokyusei), to mature and suspenseful horror (Onryo Senki), and even to one of the first rape simulators (177), predating the infamous RapeLay by 20 years. The content is not always tasteful, but the lawless atmosphere resulted in some of the most unique titles in video game history....

A forgotten era

The personal computer industry in Japan began much like everywhere else: as a response to Intel's creation of the world's first microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. Both NEC and Toshiba successfully developed their own microprocessors in 1973, and over the next few years a number of personal computer kits and homebew packages were released by companies such as Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Toshiba, and Sharp. Much like in the West, these early computers were primarily for electronics tinkerers and enthusiasts, and had to be programmed by the users themselves.

The early 80s saw the release of the first fully-fledged 8-bit computers designed with average users in mind, rather than amateur programmers (although there were still plenty of those). Three companies eventually shared the 8-bit crown: NEC, with its PC-8800 series; Fujitsu, with the popular FM-7; and Sharp, with the X1. NEC would later come to dominate the Japanese computing scene for over 10 years with another computer, the 16-bit PC-9801, but Fujitsu and Sharp were able to maintain a small but loyal following by staying competitive and eventually releasing two incredible 16-bit machines of their own: the Fujitsu FM Towns, and the Sharp X68000.

One important thing to note is that much like the early computers produced by Western companies such as Apple, Commodore, Atari, and IBM, almost all Japanese computers were incompatible with each other. This led to intense competition among the computer makers, with each vying to establish its own architecture as the dominant standard. Once NEC, Fujitsu, and Sharp took the majority of the market, the remaining computer makers banded together around the MSX, a shared computing standard developed by Microsoft Japan and ASCII. Despite being fourth place in the Japanese computer race, the MSX and its successor eventually achieved popularity in South America and Europe, while the Big Three never found success outside of Japan.

A fascinating interview with Toru Iwatani about what went right and what went wrong in designing and developing Pac-man:

Unlike the large-scale projects most developers work on today, our team consisted of a mere five members, so it was easy to control workflow. Communication problems and team chemistry were not an issue, since we were all so close. In order to effectively manage a large project, everyone on the team needs to think somewhat along the same lines—to work toward a common goal.

If you leave out the communication aspect, your team will fall apart. The process of making games today is much more complicated than it was in the Pac-Man days, so we were able to thrive with a very lean development team.

If there is one thing I have learned to prioritize in 25 years in the game industry, it is communication. When in doubt, communicate! Never, ever, leave your team members in the dark. Even if you're busy, even if you have nothing new to report, even if you're feeling guilty or ashamed that you haven't completed something on schedule, communicate!

A Russian fan dug out an old preview of Rebel Moon Revolution from a Polish magazine called Secret Service:

Games being shown lately are not entirely original. They are usually more clones of Command & Conquer or Quake. No different is the game freshly announced by GT Interactive on Friday, Rebel Moon Revolution, which will expand the circle of FPS:

Rebel Moon Revolution is the third part of the successful Rebel Moon series, although in this case the title is to be fully adequate to what we see on the monitors. First of all, the game will be based on the new graphic engine, which according to the developers will be able to easily compete with the Quake 2 engine. In general, the people in the RMR in the statements repeatedly compare their work with the boys from ID Software, claiming that their project will be qualitatively similar to the king, and in some respects, even better! Hard to believe, but hopefully it will be.

However, not graphics, and the layer itself merits a place in the forefront of RMR games of this genre. This time we will no longer participate in the senseless butchery, where we murdered everything all around, not knowing who were victims, and what otherwise. The RMR this issue will be explained at the beginning of the game by using eye-catching intros. Not only that, all missions will be linked for each thread feature, which in the opinion of the authors will allow for a better empathy in the form of a hero. Levels to beat will be about 16, perfectly designed and divided into squad action. On each board has a swarm of opponents who use excellent artificial intelligence algorithms written specifically for the game. To make the player's chances more equal, the player will be able to benefit from the impressive arsenal of weapons: grenades, mines, machine guns, lasers and plasma.

RMR promises to be a great title, and if the producers fulfill their promises, they will undoubtedly make a name for themselves.

Sadly, that never happened, as GT Interactive imploded and took down Fenris Wolf with it. A few screen shots remain, including this one of a rescue mission. One thing important to understand about game development is that for every game that is ever finished and shipped, there are probably ten more that fail at some step of the process from initial conception to what we used to call gold master.



As it happens, Rebel Moon Revolution was doomed from the moment that we signed with GT. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't have made different choices that might have allowed the game to survive the implosion of the publisher.