My first written reference to this design comes from April 1984, just after I was laid off by Atari. I called the game Arms Race, and here is the complete description:
As I set to work designing the game, I took some time to study the Macintosh and develop an appreciation of its strengths and weaknesses. I laid these down in a long letter to a publisher. I concluded that the black-and-white display would have less sensory "heat" than the color display of the Commodore 64, the dominant machine at that time, and therefore that Mac games should be more cerebral. Moreover, I suspected that the market of Macintosh owners would be a more serious, more adult group demanding a more mature style of game. I also felt that the mouse, a new input device at that time, was not ideally suited for fast action games; it was better suited to discrete choices than continuous input.
There was more in the letter, but the key point here is important: I took the time to consider the precise strengths and weaknesses of the platform on which I proposed to work. These careful considerations paid off; later, after Balance of Power was published, several reviewers complimented the game for its deep "Mac-ishness." By May I was deeply caught up in design details. I toyed around with a number of possible titles: Arms Race, Annihilation of Mankind, Stopping the Madness, Thwarting Armageddon, Man's Last Decade, The Extension of Policy, Words vs. Bombs, and Policy. Plainly, these are all lame titles compared with the final title, Balance of Power. So where did that great title come from? The CEO of Mindscape during my first meeting with him. He just pulled it out of a hat.
In accordance with my most sacred rule of software design ("What does the user do?"), I set down my verb list at the outset:
The correspondence between this list and the final list of verbs is striking. Seven of these verbs did not make it into the final verb list but some of them did make it in altered form. The primary difference between this list and the final list is that the final verb list segregated the verbs into groups organized by degree. The basic verb groups in the final version related to insurgency, government stability, and treaty relationships, with a special group of verbs related to the state of alertness of your own military. The primary area that I cut from this list was trade. The problem with trade is that it's slow and undramatic. Trade sanctions slowly strangle an enemy's economy. A python may be just as successful a predator as a lion, but we don't see many football teams named after pythons. I reluctantly decided to strike trade considerations from the design. |