Conclusions

Siboot was published in 1987 by Mindscape under the title Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot. It was not a commercial success; I believe that only 5,000 copies were sold, and Mindscape never ported the game from the Mac to the PC or any other platform. Nevertheless, I consider Siboot to be my best game design. No other game has ever leapt so far out into unknown regions of game design and actually worked. No other game boasted as many significant innovations as Siboot: intransitive combat relationships, an inverse parser, a working language of interaction, dream combat, an information economy, general-purpose deal making, and functional, dynamic emotional relationships among characters. Indeed, in the fifteen years that have passed since the publication of Siboot, there have been just a handful of games that have successfully implemented any of these innovations, and none that have done so with a majority of these innovations.

If Siboot was indeed such a hot design, why was it a commercial failure? I believe that Siboot's failure can be attributed to several factors. First was Mindscape's decision not to port Siboot to the PC platform. This was a borderline judgment call. At the time, PC games outsold Mac games by about four to one, so we would likely have sold some 20,000 copies for the PC. Given the economics of computer games at the time, this would have been only slightly profitable, and if it did worse, Mindscape could have lost money. Mindscape's worries about the unconventional nature of the game combined with Siboot's poor initial sales to yield a pessimistic estimate of its chances. Had Mindscape been bolder, they would probably have made a little money on the deal, but they decided to cut their losses with the Mac version.

The killer question, of course, is, "Was it fun?" Innovation doesn't make a game great; it still has to entertain. There is no simple answer to this question. There is no denying that many people were enchanted by Siboot. This was the first computer game with characters who were emotionally real, characters you could relate to, understand, and interact with emotionally. One player wrote me to tell me how upset she had been to betray Locksher. He was such a nice fellow, and she felt so guilty about doing it. Another fellow posted a message on a bulletin board expressing his deep anger that Kendra had betrayed him. How could she do that to him, he raged, after all he had done to help her! There's no question that a good number of people found the game immensely entertaining. But the geekier players who revel in man-to-man shootouts were frustrated by the lack of violence. "There's no action in the game," one fellow complained on a bulletin board. "All you do is run around talking to people!"

The decisive factor, though, was the unconventional nature of the design. Now, 1987 was the most crucial year in the history of computer games. In 1984, the industry had collapsed and many companies went out of business. During 1985 and 1986, the industry reconstituted itself in a new image. The simple hand-eye coordination games that had been the foundation of the first games boom of 1979 1983 were out of fashion. The industry needed to find a new identity, and during the crucial years of 1985 1987, it tried on a number of hats, examining itself in the mirror of the marketplace to see what hats looked best. At first, the industry veered away from the childish videogames and experimented with a broader range of possibilities. The Infocom adventure games, while still puzzles, offered a richer experience and more mature themes than traditional adventure games. Dan Bunten's M.U.L.E. offered great fun without an iota of violence. My own Balance of Power showed that a deep game about geopolitics could become a huge hit. Games were reaching out to new and considerably larger audiences.

It seemed that computer games were about to emerge Phoenix-like from the ashes of videogames and blossom into a true mass medium. Siboot pushed this trend to its most extreme limit, and Mindscape, the distributors, and retailers lost their nerve. Siboot went too far; there were easier sales to be made with more traditional products. The failure of Siboot marked the end of the wildly experimental phase following the collapse of Atari in 1984. I did not recognize it at the time I don't think anybody did but the industry was committing itself to becoming a smaller, high-profit hobby rather than a mass medium.

That's where it is today. Computer and videogames are now a narrowly defined entertainment form avidly pursued by a subset of the mass market. It's easier this way for everybody. Marketing people know exactly whom to advertise to, what the ads should look like, and so forth. Retailers know exactly how to stock their shelves. Producers know precisely what sells, and designers don't have to sweat being innovative; they need only apply the latest technology to the time-honored standard designs. It's a comfortable arrangement, and it works well. Thousands of satisfied employees grind out products for millions of happy, well-defined customers. The system works; everybody makes money.

LESSON 65

Limit yourself to one major innovation per game.

But it's not a mass medium, and it never will be.