Production, Marketing, and Sales

I had a few hundred copies of the map printed up, and I made cardboard counters using blank counters and rub-on numerals. I copied cassette tapes on my PET and labeled them by hand. I typed up a manual and had it photocopied. For the cover I drew a cute little picture of a PET with tank treads and a cannon emerging from its screen. The PET was so big and bulky that the rendition looked pretty good. I can't draw, but I can use a ruler and compass, which were all I needed for this simple line drawing. I folded the 34x22" map into quarters, and stuffed everything into a Zip-Lock bag. That's how software was made in the late 1970s.

For marketing, I prepared my own ad (see Figure 13.4).

13.4. The ad for Tanktics.

There weren't many actual computer magazines in those days; BYTE, Kilobaud, and Creative Computing were the only ones I knew and they covered all kinds of computers. I found two user-written newsletters for the PET and put full-page ads in each; I think I paid $50 for the privilege. Then I sat back and waited for the orders to pour in.

And pour in they did! I sold my first copy of Tanktics on December 31, 1978, and over the next year, I sold 150 copies of Tanktics! At $15 a copy, that represented over $2000 in gross income. Marketing and cost of goods sold came to under $1000, so I ended up making over $1000 on this, my first software endeavor. By today's standards, that's not much, but back then, it was impressive.

The game even garnered a review. Robert Purser's Computer Cassettes Review had a two-page review of the game; he spiffed up his review with a professionally-drawn picture of a sexy girl wearing a beret, straddling the cannon of a tank (ahem!). Although Robert liked the game and recommended it, he ranked it below another game he had seen, Android Nim. This TRS-80 program was nothing more than the game of Nim implemented with little robots built out of the TRS-80 character set. The robots were constantly in motion, turning their heads this way and that. When the player eliminated a robot, it disappeared in a cute graphic. Robert was enchanted by the graphics of Android Nim; while he confessed that Tanktics offered richer gameplay, he still preferred Android Nim.

Thus began the bane of my career as a game designer: graphics versus gameplay. From the very beginning, I was a gamer seeking ever-richer and more interesting gameplay, fighting a world more interested in cute graphics. This conflict plagued every single project I worked on; in some cases, I managed to satisfy the graphics crowd without compromising gameplay, but most of the time, it was a frustrating battle.