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Making It a GameThe game took shape during the fall and winter of 1984; by early 1985, it had reached an early alpha stage. All the important features were in place, considerable debugging and polishing remained, and some housekeeping functions still needed work. But one problem towered above all others: The game just wasn't entertaining. It functioned well as a simulation, but it didn't grab the player. I struggled with this problem from January until it was completed in July. The problem broke down into several sub-problems. First, there was too much information for the player to assimilate, and little of that information was truly significant to the player's decisions. The solution to this problem was to simplify the game by lobotomizing all countries save the two superpowers. My original intent had been that the petty wars between minor countries could drag the two superpowers into a nuclear war, but in practice, I found that minor countries generated lots of petty activity in addition to their minor wars. The only way to clean up the game was to reduce the minor countries to the status of pawns. Note, however, that in the process, I concentrated activity onto the two superpowers. That sharpened the conflict and improved the game.
Another problem was that the critical information wasn't immediately obvious to the player. Fortunately, an easy solution to this problem presented itself: instead of expecting the player to go looking for it, I shoved it into his face. At the beginning of each turn, the news display popped up unsolicited and presented the most important news item. This required that I develop a criterion for the "importance" of each news item. It wasn't difficult; all I had to do was assign a native importance to each verb and then adjust that native importance by the intrinsic importance (power) of the countries affected. The third sub-problem was the most subtle: The information needed to be organized for the player. Months of effort went into sorting it out, adjusting font sizes, reorganizing screen layouts, and, most importantly, layering the information by priority. My proclivities as a control freak were to give the player as much information as possible, but I failed to realize that too much information can be just as uninformative as too little. And so I struggled through the basic problems of graphic design. In the end, there was no breakthrough. No single idea or alteration transformed the game into the award-winning design that we shipped. A slow, tedious process of playtesting, polishing, and tuning, spread over six months, was required. For reasons outside of my control, publication of the game was delayed by four months, during which time I continued to polish, polish, polish. I now believe that this extra polishing was the most important factor in the success of the game. Publisher WoesI had no publisher when I began work on Balance of Power. 1984 saw the collapse of the videogames business, and publishers were dropping like space invaders. They were too terrified to take a game like Balance of Power. Months dragged by and my agent couldn't find any takers. Our savings were running low and I was beginning to worry about making ends meet. Fortunately, in early January of 1985, Random House agreed to take the game. I met with the publisher and we saw eye to eye. We signed a contract, I got an advance, and my financial troubles were over. But then the publisher handed the project off to an editor and things started to go downhill fast. That editor and I had been preordained in some distant past to do battle. He was a good person, but his particular weaknesses found perfect syntony with my own, and together our clash reverberated to ever-greater amplitude. At one point, I fixed him with a cold eye and asked: "You don't know anything about games, computers, or geopolitics. Why are you the editor for this project?" My question was right on the mark, but he didn't blink. "Because that's my job," he shot back. We were both right, and in our incompatible correctness, we failed spectacularly. After just three months, Random House pulled out of the deal, and I was suddenly in worse financial straits than before. That was the second-worst period of my life. We were facing financial ruin. My wife, losing patience after I had played freelance game designer for a year, demanded that I get a "real job." Nobody wanted the game. At this point, any rational person would have coldly calculated the odds and taken my wife's advice. But I was possessed by my noble ideals and absolutely certain of the greatness of the design. I ignored all advice to the contrary and pushed on. The angel that descended upon me was Scott Mace, a columnist for InfoWorld. Somehow he learned of my predicament and did a two-part story on Balance of Power. That story in turn was read by a junior producer at a new startup in Chicago, Mindscape. That producer knew me from my reputation and forwarded the Infoworld story to his boss with a strong recommendation that Mindscape acquire the game. And they did. I was saved. I Get by with a Little Help from the PressBalance of Power was published in September of 1985. It attracted a great deal of press attention. In particular, the New York Times Sunday Magazine assigned David Aaron, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 1977 to 1981, to write a story about the game. Aaron wrote a long piece that concluded as follows:
That story was reprinted in newspapers all over the country, and sales started climbing. By the time the IBM PC port was ready in the fall of 1985, publicity had grown and sales really took off. My game became a big hit, generating some $10 million in sales—this at a time when total sales of all video and computer games put together amounted to about $500 million. I earned huge royalties on it and my wife, who had urged me to get a real job, never questioned my career choice again. The Wheel of FortuneDuring my latter years at Atari, I became known as "Mr. Atari" among user groups and developed quite a reputation. I was a big shot and, as befits my youth, it went to my head. I actually started to believe the adulation that splattered all over me. But then Atari collapsed, and overnight I became Mr. Nobody. I couldn't understand why I was so suddenly passé. For two years I labored in solitude, ignored and unadulated. But then Balance of Power became a big hit and I was Mr. Bigshot again. This time I was a little more suspicious of the capriciousness of fame; this round lasted about eight years, largely because I added a number of games and the Computer Game Developers' Conference (CGDC) to my fame portfolio. But once I left the CGDC, the crowd turned its back on me and once again I find myself bereft of the screaming masses of nubile nymphs. Miser me! I suspect, however, that once interactive storytelling gets rolling, I'll be back up there in the spotlight with flashbulbs popping and a starlet on each arm. And if that does happen, I'll remember Lesson 57.
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