It was summer, 1979. Fresh out of college, 21-year-old Californian Joel Billings was just months away from heading off to business school to study an MBA.
Receiving more exposure to computers through his summer job, and already a veteran table-top wargamer, he considered the possibilities of recreating strategic board games on emerging technology. With the home computer market slowly getting to its feet, Joel saw an opportunity to combine his passion for wargames with his basic computer knowledge, and decided to hold off on his MBA to start his own business, Strategic Simulations Inc.
Getting to work on realising his dream of founding a computer wargaming company, Joel put together a flyer calling for programmers interested in making computer wargames. He dropped this off at a local gaming outlet, and it wasn’t long before his strategy paid off. John Lyon, a keen wargamer and competent programmer was the first to phone up, and the two immediately hit it off. With the talent in place, development of SSI’s first title got underway, and true to Joel’s roots, it was a WWII-themed strategy game.
“My dad was in World War II and was interested in military history,” Joel says, “I remember him reading me Bruce Catton books on the Civil War when I was six or seven. I loved maths and the early Avalon Hill games all had the odds charts, where you figured out 2-1, 3-1 and so on. When I was seven I started playing Tactics II and then Gettysburg with my dad. The military history part became more and more important, and I remained interested in historical games – mostly from 1775 to 1975 – and never got into Dungeons & Dragons like some of my friends did. I even converted most of the members of my junior high school chess club to a wargame club in eighth grade.
I wanted to make a Bismarck game because it seemed relatively easy to do,” he adds. “There were only a few pieces for the AI to move and we would take advantage of the limited intelligence [of the available computers]. I had three or four games on the subject and was a big World War II naval-miniature player in high school. I came up with a design and found a computer for John to work on by getting the head of the homebrew computer club at Amdahl, a mainframe computer maker where I had a summer job, to let John come over to his house to work on the game.”
John, handling the technical side, reasoned that the first stage of development would be all about getting a ‘fox and hounds’-style game operating where a number of ‘hound’ pieces would roam the map looking for the ‘fox’ – a simplified rendition of the British fleet hunting the German battle cruiser Bismarck in the famed battle of May 1941. John was satisfied he could make it happen, and the two started looking for funding for the project.
Using knowledge gained from his economics degree, and with several marketing and quantitative analysis classes under his belt, Joel began collecting market data at the local game store as well as from the gaming convention held in the San Francisco area where he was staying. Having worked on the Bismarck idea for about six weeks and with programming of SSI’s first game already in progress, Joel spoke with Tom Shaw at Avalon Hill, but it was a meeting that would ultimately prove fruitless. “They were working on their first six games and he must have thought I was a knownothing kid,” says Joel. “I then spoke with one of the two founders of Epyx (known as Automated Simulations at the time) as I saw a tape cassette game of theirs in my local game store. I was interested in sharing market data but he was not interested. I think I was a little naive about business at this point.”
Joel admits to being a big Avalon Hill fan and says that if the wargaming giant had been interested, he would have sold SSI’s games to it. The lack of interest from Tom Shaw, coupled with the unenthusiastic response from Automated Simulations made Joel realise that SSI would have to publish its own games.
Initially developing Computer Bismarck only for the TRS-80 (which Joel himself also refers to as the Trash- 80), Joel then had a chance encounter that would result in one of the most fortuitous moves that the fledgling company would make. “I met Trip Hawkins through a venture capitalist I was put in touch with by Brook Byers of Kleiner Perkins/EA fame,” he recalls. “My uncle that I was staying with knew him from his work in biotech. Trip was working for Apple, two and a half years before he started Electronic Arts, and he convinced me that we should program our game on the Apple II.”
The coding of the fox and hound system had begun on the TRS-80 in early-August 1979, and two months later Joel’s uncle bought him an Apple II. “I was still working my summer job which was extended until December”, says Joel, “and John was working full time and would come over to my apartment in my uncle’s house and program late into the night. Then in November, John became our first full-time programmer and I would come home after work and work with him on the game. The nice thing about development then was that things were small, especially memory on the computer, and we could do things quickly. I knew BASIC from the one computer class I had taken in college and since most of the game was in BASIC, I could read John’s code. I helped enter data and do other work while John did the main coding.”
After converting their existing code to the Apple, Joel and John soon found a graphics package that enabled them to create Bismarck’s map on the newfound hardware. “Everything fell into place and Bismarck was finished by the end of January 1980 – a six month dev cycle. I remember Trip being very impressed.”
A programmer called Ed Williger had also been sourced through the same game store flyer as John. Working on SSI’s second game, he completed Computer Ambush, not too long after Computer Bismarck was ready, and Joel had to get to work on the next phase of computer game development: packaging and distribution of the finished product.
Taiwanese-born Louis Saekow, having moved with his family to the US in 1969, graduated in 1976 with a degree in bioscience. Louis’s love was for comic books, inspired by the work of Neal Adams of Batman and Green Arrow fame. But with the idea of life as a professional graphic artist little more than a pipe dream, becoming a doctor seemed the sensible option. After three years of testing blood and operating the computers in a local hospital, he was just about ready to head off to med school. Then one night, young Louis spoke to an older medical technician about his thoughts on packing in his graphic design aspirations in exchange for a career in medicine. ‘I’m too old to chase my dreams,’ she told him, ‘but you’re still young enough to starve for another couple of years as an aspiring artist. You’ve got no family to support, and no one depending on you at this point in your life. Don’t give up on your dreams yet.’ Louis held off on making any serious decisions. Just two months later, he got a call from a Joel Billings.
Despite Avalon Hill’s lack of interest in his work, Joel had nevertheless taken a leaf out of its book by wanting to invest in the style and design of SSI’s maps, manuals and box art. Not content to ship his games in the traditional ziplock bags so synonymous with the late- Seventies computer scene, he’d decided to pursue a more creative option.
“You can thank Avalon Hill for the inspiration, me for the idea and decision to do it, and Louis Saekow for the execution,” says Joel. “From day one, which was as soon as I knew we’d have to publish ourselves, I saw Avalon Hill as the gold standard of wargame marketing and packaging. I wanted our games to look like their games on the shelf, and have the same perceived quality throughout. I just didn’t like the idea of selling things in zip-lock bags. And for a good strategy game, especially a wargame, reading the rules was half the fun for me. Thanks to a mutual acquaintance, I met Louis Saekow who was a kid like me, just a couple of years out of Stanford University. He wanted to be a graphic artist so I contracted him to do the work, and the rest is history. In the early days, he worked by himself as hard on the packaging, advertising and marketing materials as I did on the games.”
“My girlfriend’s roommate’s boyfriend was Joel’s officemate at Amdahl,” laughs Saekow, remembering their friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend introduction. “Back then Joel didn’t know anything about packaging computer games, and I wasn’t that experienced either. Still, he was revolutionary: not only did he make computer games, which was crazy enough, but he also wanted to do, well, premium packaging, if you will. I wanted to make it as a graphic designer, but to be honest I think all I had done at that point was the artwork for a bicycle safety comic. I only had two weeks to complete the artwork for Computer Bismarck, and at first Joel did not seem keen on giving me the job, so I told him ‘if you don’t like it you don’t have to pay me’. I probably worked 500 hours in those two weeks.”
Eager not to let this opportunity pass him by, Louis got to work immediately. The first challenge, however, was figuring out just how the hell he was going to pull it off. Fortunately, his roommate at the time worked at a magazine company and had access to a stat camera – the now obsolete large-format photographic equipment formerly used in publishing. “We had to sneak in there at midnight,” Louis says, remembering his time as a printwork saboteur, “and we used up an entire box of film because we didn’t even know how to use the camera. Needless to say, we eventually got it done, and Joel really liked it. Then he looked at me and said ‘do you want cash or shares?’. I said ‘gimme the shares’ even though 500 bucks would have kept me fed for a long time back then. In hindsight, it was easily the best $500 I ever ‘spent’.”
With the box artwork done, and the printing handled by Louis’s cousin, Joel found himself holding SSI’s first completed product. But one small oversight on his part reared its head: where was he going to store the other 1,999? “I slept with my bed surrounded by 2,000 Bismarck boxes piled to the ceiling,” he laughs. “I figured if there was an earthquake they’d find me buried under game boxes.”
His graphic design a success, Louis secured himself as a permanent fixture at Strategic Simulations Inc, and would go on to be responsible for the artwork on just about every product ever released by the company.
The company’s next ‘chance meeting’ came in early-1982 when Joel, working tech-support on top of all his other responsibilities, answered a call from a player needing help on submarine sim Torpedo Fire. The two got chatting and the caller, a keen wargaming fan named Gary Grigsby, mentioned he had his own computer and was working on a wargame design of his own. His curiosity piqued, Joel suggested that Gary submit his game to SSI for possible publication.
“I started with an SPI type plan,” says Joel of his early product development strategy, “by which I mean internally developed games. However, when we started getting games submitted to us within a few months of releasing Computer Bismarck, I quickly discovered that it was easier to be like Avalon Hill and publish games from the outside. I never wanted to be accused of blowing somebody off as I know how that feels.”
“That was Guadalcanal Campaign,” adds Gary, “I remember it was probably December of 1981 when I started working on it. It only took me a couple of months to get the game done, and when I was finished it was still strictly a two-player game with no AI whatsoever. It was mid-February 1982 when Joel expressed his interest in developing the product, so I drove over to Mountain View where SSI was located at the time.”
Gary met with Joel and Paul Murray, who was then SSI’s only full-time programmer, and together they mapped out a plan of what still needed to be done in order to get the game ready for publication. “We worked out some kind of AI,” says Gary, “and then the guys in the office started playtesting the game really hard right away. Four months after that, we had something we were happy to release.” Guadalcanal Campaign went on to excellent sales, commended by hardcore fans for its historical accuracy and meticulous attention to detail – two features that would become associated with Gary’s games from then on. “That was my thing at the time,” says Gary. “Historical accuracy was the reason I got into designing my own wargames. I was a frustrated wargame player, having played wargames for 12 or 13 years by the time I sent my first game in to SSI. That was my motivation for buying my first computer in 1979 – so that I could handle the book-keeping aspects of wargames, especially when playing on a tabletop with map and counters.”
Gary was far from alone in his wargaming frustrations, and Guadalcanal sold around three and a half thousand copies – an outstanding figure for such a niche market. His opening title a success, and with a solid contribution to developing the SSI brand, Gary’s future as a computer wargame developer was set in stone.
With SSI releasing a plethora of hit games and becoming recognised as a leader in strategic and tactical titles, it decided to take a new direction with a new line of products called RapidFire. “We decided we wanted to market games to customers that might not want to play the more serious and slow SSI wargames,” says Joel, “so we decided to package them differently and call them RapidFire to emphasise the speed and ease of play – some of them had real-time or action elements unlike our other games.”
RapidFire was a success and, now recognised for unique and novel titles as well as its trademark strategy fare, the company started attracting more and more outside talent, including the likes of the legendary Dani Bunten Berry, young programming mastermind Keith Brors, and a talented developer named Chuck Kroegel who would later go on to become the company’s vice president of research and development. It was a great time for Strategic Simulations Inc, a company that could seemingly do no wrong. Growing from strength to strength, Joel hired SSI’s first sales person in 1983 and by the end of the year, it had raked in a total of $1,830,000, almost doubling its 1982 figure.
In 1984, SSI branched out yet again by making its first foray into the increasingly popular computer role-playing market. With the release of Questron, developed by newcomers Charles Dougherty and Gerald Wieczorek, SSI had, unknowingly at the time, made a decision that would have a major impact on the company a few years down the line.
Due to the success of Questron (despite the fact that some gamers accused it of being a blatant rip-off of Richard Garriott’s Ultima games) SSI followed up with the release of Gemstone Warrior from Canadian-based Paradigm Creators Inc. Both titles saw the player traversing the countryside seeking their fortune, gaining experience and ultimately thwarting the plot of an evil mastermind. But at the time words like ‘generic’ simply didn’t apply – the computer role-playing scene was just too small, and fans were snatching up whatever titles they could get their hands on. Another ambitious title was 50 Mission Crush, which while having a traditional wargame look and feel, added RPG elements, by awarding individual units, experience points, which increased their capabilities.
1985 saw Strategic Simulations Inc launch its most successful role-playing game yet: Phantasie. When the first part of this excellent trilogy hit the shelves, gamers snatched it up, eager to experience more of the party-based adventuring that they had come to love in Origin’s CRPG market leader Ultima. With a number of innovative features and original twists to the genre, SSI had yet another success on its hands, and was quick to ensure that designer Winston Douglas Wood got to work on the remaining chapters in the trilogy, released over the next two years.
SSI’s biggest new boost would come in 1987, however, when the company was awarded the coveted licence to design and develop all Dungeons & Dragons computer games. A wondrous turn of events indeed, but, alas, we are getting ahead of ourselves, dear reader, and you will have to pick up the next issue of Retro Gamer to see just what became of SSI’s involvement with the hottest intellectual property in the roleplaying universe.