Confessions of an RPG Developer

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We’re getting ahead of ourselves. While Garriott was off injecting philosophical and moral depth into videogames, the RPG genre continued to advance in different directions. A year after Quest of the Avatar hit shelves, New World Computing released the first chapter in its highly influential Might and Magic series, Might and Magic: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum (1986). Featuring a ridiculous number of NPCs, monsters, and treasures, and much more importantly, a vast, open world to explore – well, as ‘open’ as tile-based, maze-like graphics could allow – M&M arguably became the first torch-bearer for open-ended RPG design. (Said torch would be passed on to the far more successful Elder Scrolls series just shy of ten years later.) And, as an interesting contrast to M&M’s fluffy fantasy, Interplay Productions released Wasteland (also ‘86), the game that would go on to inspire Interplay’s later hit and one of the greatest CRPGs ever made, Fallout. Set in a post-apocalyptic Nevada, Wasteland had players venture out into an inhospitable desert, fighting hideous mutants and working alongside NPCs whose goals often conflicted with theirs.

And then there was SSI. The small company was enjoying incredible success with the release of each Gold Box title – Pool of Radiance (1988), Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990) – all the while pausing occasionally to develop wargames and take on other RPG franchises. The weirdest? Buck Rogers. The ancient comic strip hero had recently made a comeback with TSR’s Buck Rogers pen and paper setting, and, as TSR was under new management, SSI was tasked with making a game none of the D&D-playing crew could have ever expected.

Below: Vampire: Bloodlines combined guns, magic and undeath all in the one game.

‘That was TSR’s decision,’ Billings laughs. ‘The woman who owned TSR at the time, Lorraine Williams, was the granddaughter of the creator of Buck Rogers. And when she bought – well, basically, she took control of the company in a very interesting power play with Gary Gygax. She sort of bought the company out from under the guy one day; it was real Machiavellian stuff. Anyway, she ended up owning the company outright, and wanted to bring Buck Rogers back, because of her family history; that’s where her family’s money came from. We did it because we were trying to keep in good with TSR. It wasn’t necessarily because we thought Buck Rogers was going to be this big thing. We sort of reluctantly went along with it, and had we ever done it over again and known that the D&D thing was going to go away, we probably wouldn’t have done the game. Although we thought it might keep them happy for a while longer, ultimately, we didn’t go any longer with the license than our contract allowed us. So we just took the Gold Box engine and slammed out a clone.’

If Billings’ cynicism is any indication, it should be fairly obvious that the relationship between SSI and the company that sold it the winning D&D license was beginning to fester. Before the Gold Box empire truly fell, though, the company published a very interesting property – the first graphical MUD, the Gold Box-based Neverwinter Nights. MUDs had first appeared on college mainframes in 1977, and grew in popularity throughout the ‘80s as online spaces where players over the world could participate in one giant RPG – basically, the first MMORPGs. Until NWN, though, all of them were text-based. The game ran on AOL from 1991 to 1997 – coincidentally, the year Garriott released his groundbreaking foray into Web RPGs, Ultima Online.

Sadly, even NWN’s relative success wasn’t enough to save the Gold Box empire from collapsing. By the time SSI’s attempt at digitising the Dark Sun setting, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, was released in 1993, interest in the property had faded, and the game itself – unfinished and bug-ridden – earned SSI its first real dose of negative press. Billings remembers how it all happened: ‘We had a seven-year license; it went from ‘86 to ‘93. And from about ‘92 onwards, with the Dark Sun fiasco, we were looking to sell the company, because the investments to make the game were getting too large. It was way beyond what we could do, and we were looking to sell. We had a deal with EA in ‘92 that fell through at the last moment, and I think that was probably because they’d just bought Origin.

‘At this time, TSR was getting really difficult to deal with, to be honest. It wasn’t clear what they wanted going forward; we were paying them a lot of royalties as the years went on, and yet they were looking for ways to get even more out of it. And they ended up in a situation where they let the rights with us go away, with no real encouragement for us to do any more work with them, what with the way they were acting. That was a mistake – there was nobody like SSI back then; just a bunch of guys in the development department who loved RPGs and wanted to do D&D games. I think TSR just wasted the opportunity with us by basically thinking they could get more, and trying to keep their options open. At one point, they were even thinking about trying to do it themselves, but they gave up on that. So D&D was doing great with the Gold Box games, but then it just stopped. Dark Sun was a disappointment, so we didn’t have a clear reputation going forward.’

The end of the Gold Box series didn’t just signal the death of a powerful game franchise; it brought a black cloud over the D&D property that wouldn’t subside until Interplay, the Wasteland gurus, plucked the license in the late-nineties.