Chapter 21. Balance of Power

In March of 1984, Atari was in its death throes and I, along with almost everybody else, was laid off. The severance package I received was more than generous; it gave us so much money that I wouldn't need any income for nine months. That would be plenty of time to develop a new game; I set to work considering my options.

It was tempting to do yet another Atari game; I had mastered the platform, my name alone would sell games, and I had a number of good ideas. I built two prototypes, one that I called Western Front (1944), a simple translation of Eastern Front (1941) to France. The other I called The Last of the Incas, covering the struggle of the last Inca emperor to raise a revolt against the Spanish. I quickly rejected the first option as too derivative. Besides, I was finished doing wargames; they no longer held any creative attraction for me. This decision was, in financial terms, imbecilic. I had a big hit in Eastern Front (1941); a second game in the genre would surely make a bundle of money. Artistically, it was a sound decision: If you've mastered a problem, it's time to move on. This provides us with a useful criterion for establishing motivation (Lesson 47).

The Inca game struck my fancy, but I decided that it was time for me to make a break with the past, to look forward rather than backward. It was time to make the jump to a new machine.

LESSON 47

Sequels are for entertainment; they have no artistic content.

Three options lay before me: the IBM PC, the Macintosh, or the soon-to-be-released Amiga. I quickly rejected the first option nobody played games on the IBM PC in those days. Besides, it was a horror to program and supported only text displays. I interviewed at Amiga, and they offered me a job, but I decided that the Macintosh would do to Amiga what the Apple II did to Atari. Although the Amiga had superior hardware, the Mac's overall design impressed me. I was especially impressed by its emphasis on user interface. Here, I decided, lay the future. Choosing between the Mac and the Amiga was one of the more momentous decisions I ever made, and I made the right call.

So I signed up for the Apple Developer program and ordered a development system consisting of a Lisa computer and a Macintosh. It was very expensive; worse, I had to wait for two months to get my Lisa. I used the time to think long and hard about my design. I also collected and read a great many books on geopolitical conflict. The most influential of these were Henry Kissinger's two books on his years in power: White House Years and Years of Upheaval. You are welcome to think ill of the man's politics, but I must insist that his books are illuminating and well written. They certainly had a large influence on my design.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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