Sid Meier's Memoir!

by Sid Meier's Memoir! (retail) (epub)

These pre-existing narratives were, in fact, the key to making Pirates! as immersive as it was. Players came to the game with a certain backstory in their mind already—good guys wore white shirts and colorful sashes; bad guys wore long black coats and eyepatches. Give the villain a moustache, and he would take on all the characteristics of every moustache-twirling villain since childhood. A single “Arrgh, matey!” could convey the entire feel of the game, complete with setting, characters, and a likely plot. These bits of cultural shorthand allowed the player to fill in the environment without realizing they were doing it, saving us development time and, more importantly, precious computer memory.

  Pirates! was an unusual challenge when it came to memory. Ship navigation and sword fighting were in 2D, to keep their calculations to a minimum, but this still left large portions of the game in text form. There wasn’t room to animate anything else. True, we were supposed to be skipping all the walking-around stuff anyway, but it was undeniably sparse. So we decided to try using individual illustrations, like a picture book the players were writing for themselves. Graphics cards had come a long way since the days of blocky crocodiles and lumpy monkeys, and Michael Haire’s skills had only improved with each title he’d worked on. Between technology and talent, we could manage some pretty impressive works of art on the computer these days—“some” being the operative word. I wanted lots, and it still seemed impossible to fit them all in. Fortunately, a programmer named Randall Masteller came to the rescue, with a new take on an old idea.

  Computer operating systems were always optimized to store and display fonts very efficiently, because without text on the screen nothing else could get done. Fonts were the first thing loaded into memory, and the easiest to clear and replace. Thus, programmers had known for years that if you could present information to the computer in the form of a font, it would run faster.

  Usually, this technique was applied to small images. In my original ASCII game, for example, I had used an asterisk to represent an asteroid, because standard text characters were my only option. But a font didn’t strictly have to be made up of letters and numbers. If by some anachronistic miracle my Nova minicomputer had shipped with Microsoft’s playful Wingdings font instead, that asterisk would have appeared as a small envelope. If I had used an uppercase M, it could have been a classic cartoon bomb, or perhaps a cute little rotary phone in place of a number 8. This would have rendered the rest of the computer’s functions illegible, of course, but the idea was that you could create a custom font made up of small images, and it would be faster and easier to display one of those “letters” on the screen than to use the graphics chip inside the computer to draw the same picture.

  The next step forward had been using fonts for simple animation, which was the trick I’d used in Floyd of the Jungle. Each creature had been one letter of a font, with later letters in the alphabet reserved for the slightly different versions of the same creatures. Perhaps the spot normally held by lowercase c would look like the crocodile with its jaws closed, while uppercase C would look like the crocodile with its jaws open. Tell the computer to rapidly switch between c and C on the screen, and the crocodile would look like it was moving. Add two more crocodile letters into the loop, and it could walk and chomp at the same time. Once the font was loaded into memory, you could put one crocodile on the screen, or a hundred, it didn’t matter. As long as your new alphabet stayed under the total number of characters in a font, 256, the computer’s processor would be able to rotate between them as easily as scrolling down a page of text.

  What Randall’s tool did was to analyze a large picture, and figure out the most efficient way to make each little eight-by-eight chunk of pixels into a font character. It was like paint by numbers: if the upper left corner was solid blue sky, then the “number 1” character could be a solid block of blue, and all the other big chunks of blue could be number 1s as well. Once we hit a cloud, number 2 would have to represent some angled bit of half-blue–half-white, but then we’d be off to the races again with a long series of all-white number 3s. The simpler the picture, the larger it could be before we ran out of characters to assign. Then after the player selected a menu item on that page, we could clear the font along with everything else on the screen, and load a new font containing the next screen’s picture.

  The only catch was that we still needed to display real text. The game could contain hundreds of fonts on the disk—and with a different picture on every screen, it did—but it could only load one font into memory at any given time, so the first seventy slots of every font were filled with an identical set of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and a few special characters like commas and question marks. The remaining 186 brackets, ampersands, and so on were replaced with a mashup of colored pixels that made no sense unless they were laid out in precisely the right order, at which point they suddenly resolved into a beautiful seaside town, or a governor’s buxom daughter.

  It wouldn’t have been a MicroProse game without a massive manual, so near the end of development, Arnold Hendrick joined our team to begin work on its eighty-eight pages of sepiatoned text. This was without any added bulk for copy protection, because we had graduated to providing players with a separate foldout map of the Caribbean for even greater difficulty in sharing. Physical novelties like this ran double duty as collector’s items, and were commonly known as “feelies,” a reference to the tactile entertainment featured in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. The first game to include them was Infocom’s 1982 murder mystery Deadline, which set the bar for years to come with a crime scene photo, police interviews, a coroner’s report, a letter from the family’s lawyer, and even three pills (made from candy, in reality) that had been “found” at the crime scene. The collection was originally conceived because the designer, Marc Blank, couldn’t fit all of the information inside the game, and only after piracy dropped dramatically for that title did everyone realize the potential.

  Along with crafting the manual, Arnold also injected a healthy dose of realism into Pirates! to counterbalance the cinematic bravado. He pushed for accuracy in the historical campaign mode, and argued against the use of famous pirates who hadn’t been alive during the time frame I’d chosen, like Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte. If anything, though, these underpinnings of realism ended up bolstering the larger theme of romanticized adventure. As Arnold explained in the designer’s notes, “those men were psychotic remnants of a great age, criminals who wouldn’t give up. . . . There was no political intrigue or golden future to their lives, just a bullet or a short rope. We found them unattractive and uninteresting compared to the famous seahawks and buccaneers that preceded them.”

  That was one tricky thing about seahawks and buccaneers, though: they never died. Errol Flynn couldn’t be killed in battle or sentenced to hanging, because that would shatter everything about the universe he hailed from. And yet, a game where you can’t lose is not a game; there has to be some form of failure at risk. To make things worse, I had accidentally eliminated any clear moment of victory to end the game on, either. Military games had a set number of missions, with a satisfying explosion to end each one. But a pirate is always ready to set off on another adventure—it’s “a pirate’s life for me,” not “a pirate’s singular objective for me.” I’d given the player the freedom to choose which adventures to pursue, and in doing so, I’d abdicated the high ground of declaring which one was the best or hardest to complete. You could win a particular battle or quest for treasure, but there was no way to win the game as a whole, and no way to lose at all.

  Fortunately, the two problems came together neatly to solve one another.

  With regard to losing, it was really just a question of how much punishment a player would tolerate while continuing to believe in the fantasy we had created. Death was out of the question, as was starting over with nothing. Errol Flynn may lose his treasure, his ship, even his crew for a time, but he doesn’t lose his reputation. He can always stagger ashore from the s
hipwreck and rally the men once more. So that was precisely what we did: when your pirate lost a battle at sea, he was left stranded on an island for a time, until being miraculously rescued by his loyal crew, minus any extra ships and gold.

  Still, the stranding took only an instant in the real world, which amounted to practically no punishment at all. Time had no real value in the game—unless time was running out. Suddenly, the end point became clear.

  This game was not about life and death, I realized. It was about a lifetime. A pirate’s career would last about forty years between childhood and old age, and his goal was to accomplish as much as he could in that window—to have an adventurous life with no regrets. Rack up the gold, rack up the victories, rack up the wild stories to tell at the tavern. As in real life, success could only be measured as a combination of your exploits, and how much value you put on those particular exploits yourself.

  I decided we would let the player choose when to retire, and instead of a numeric score, we would display a tally of successes, and an appropriate seafaring rank. We even factored in the character’s age when it came to fencing skill and ship maneuverability, by slowing the responsiveness of the controls and increasing the probability of a miss. Players could judge for themselves when the risk was too great, and aim to go out on top—or else stubbornly refuse to quit, risking battle after battle as a hunched old seadog until they had handed over their last doubloon. Just like the rest of the game, the decision to end it was theirs alone.

  Ironically, our shunning of realism had led to something more realistic than any game had yet attempted. Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value, and when you fail, you don’t just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a deserted island a few times, well, that makes for a good tavern story, too.

  7

  AND THEN BILL BOUGHT AN AIRPLANE

  Red Storm Rising (1988)

  *

  F-19 Stealth Fighter (1988)

  THOUGH PIRATES! WOULD EVENTUALLY become one of our most popular titles, the flight sims we were famous for always saw a big burst of sales up front, while my “action adventure simulation” was a slow, steady burn. It took a while for feedback to spread, both laterally through word of mouth and also upstream back to us. When we did hear from someone who had bought our game, it was usually in the form of a mailed letter. Sometimes, they would call our corporate phone number, which Bill often answered himself even though it was no longer routing straight to his kitchen like in the early days. He never complained back then when callers forgot to consider time zones, and he was just as happy to speak to a fan now. It helped that the comments were usually positive—very few people would waste a stamp or a phone call just to tell us they didn’t like a game. Sometimes I think we’d be better off going back to a time when communication took at least a minimal amount of investment.

  In any case, once I had sent my genre-Frankenstein out into the world, there was nothing to do except wait for a few months to find out if other people thought it was as fun as I did. In the meantime, I figured I should settle back into more traditional topics for my next game, at least until we had some sales figures and reviews. Bill told me he had just the project: a new submarine simulation, based on Tom Clancy’s hit novel Red Storm Rising.

  I was not entirely comfortable doing a licensed property. On the one hand, a game can hook players more profoundly if someone has already done the work of establishing the shorthand—in pirate-land the baddies have twirlable moustaches, for example, but at Hogwarts moustaches† are okay, because at least it means you have a nose. Players familiar with that universe will come to the game with an emotional framework in place, ready to be manipulated for the sake of drama. On the other hand, as a designer you will be sharing in someone else’s creation, and they may not like your interpretation. The nightmare scenario is to realize that for the next year, you’ll be contractually obligated to make a game you don’t want to make, or that isn’t as good as it could be, due to restrictions from the copyright holder.

  Bill assured me that we would make sure everyone was on the same page before we agreed to anything. After all, Tom Clancy still had to be convinced that we weren’t going to ruin anything, either. And that is how I found myself in the car with Bill in the summer of 1987, driving out to Tom Clancy’s house on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turned out Tom was a very down-to-earth guy. The Hunt for Red October had been a huge success, but as a debut author he hadn’t been able to command the greatest deal with his publisher, and he was still working at his day job selling insurance even as Red Storm Rising was flying off the shelves. We sat in Tom’s living room chatting, which is to say, Bill talked and I nodded politely as needed. Despite his business attire, I could practically see the aura of Bill’s flight suit on him as he leaned forward on his knees and gesticulated enthusiastically, in the same full-bore conversational style he used at trade shows.

  Tom had been in the Army ROTC himself, and he and Bill happily compared military anecdotes well into the afternoon. Eventually it became clear that we’d earned Tom’s seal of approval, and the question was tentatively floated: how much control did he hope to exercise over the final product?

  “None,” he answered cheerfully. “The person you need to talk to is Larry.”

  Larry Bond had been Tom’s coauthor for Red Storm Rising, and he was generally reported to be the technical side of the team, the one who kept the details accurate when Tom’s plot veered toward the melodramatic. This made him an even more daunting figure, to me, because nothing killed fun faster than a stickler for realism. I’d thought for the briefest of moments that we were in the clear, but if Larry were slated to be our point man instead of Tom, the whole project might be doomed after all.

  We had a phone call with Larry, and it seemed to go well, but he insisted that we should come over to his house for a game night with some of his friends. Now, I was more concerned than ever. The only thing worse than an overbearing license-holder would be one who fancied himself an expert on games as well. Bill found a way to get out of it, but the gathering was clearly meant in my honor, and I had no choice but to go.

  Larry’s wife answered the door as soon as I knocked, but the living room was empty. Not a deck of cards or a pair of dice to be seen anywhere, let alone any guests. I could faintly hear voices coming from somewhere, though. I should have understood immediately what this meant, but it wasn’t until she guided me down the basement stairs that my heart lifted.

  Strewn across a folding table, in an array too large for any surface upstairs, was a mess of papers, pencils, and plastic figurines. Larry and his friends greeted me heartily, then went right back to the business of setting up. This was not a dog-and-pony show for my sake. I had been invited to a genuine nerd night, and I felt immediately at home.

  I took a seat at one end of the table, eyeing the strategy game laid out before me. It was military-themed and set at sea, just like the project Larry and I would soon be working on together, but it turned out that wasn’t the only reason it had been selected for this evening. The game, called Harpoon, was Larry’s—not just by possession, but by invention. In addition to writing best-selling military thrillers, Larry Bond had published his own gaming system, which could be adapted to different campaigns and allowed players the freedom to wrap their own story around the numbers.

  Larry didn’t just fancy himself a game designer. He actually was one.

  I think I might have known about Harpoon before arriving, but I hadn’t had time to seek it out since talking to him on the phone—perhaps because I’d been afraid of what I’d find. Besides, it’s one thing to read a rule booklet, and quite another to see a game in action. The demonstration was so successful that I soon forgot I was being won over at all. Larry was confident and creative with his scenarios, and his gameplay mechanics wer
e finely tuned: ships maneuvered realistically, weapons inflicted accurate levels of damage, and proper naval tactics were rewarded. It occurred to me that in many ways the relationship between Tom and Larry was analogous to Bill and myself, with one effusive advocate to bolster the brand, and one studious craftsman to keep the thing humming. Larry and I would get along just fine.

  Still, there were hiccups with our early prototypes, as there almost always are. Much of the inspiration for our last submarine game, Silent Service, had come from a book called Clear the Bridge! by Richard O’Kane, about the heroic but doomed patrol of the USS Tang against the Japanese in World War II. In the introduction, O’Kane noted, “As I wrote this chronicle and replotted the courses, all of the time knowing the actual fate awaiting my crew and ship, it became necessary time and again to saddle up my buckskin and ride into the hills so that, upon my return, I might continue with a clear eye.”

  Tom Clancy and other authors had successfully portrayed the tension and psychological isolation of submarine warfare, but it was O’Kane’s sense of gallantry and valor that had really captured me the first time, and I felt it keenly missing from our early versions of Red Storm Rising. Modern submarines were more computer-controlled than ever, and with the book’s futuristic World War III setting, we couldn’t believably roll back any of those advances for the sake of gameplay. The artists could animate a detailed storyboard for the opening sequence, and an explosive demolition at the end of each mission, but for the most part, a ship’s radar was just your dot and the bad guy’s dot, and we couldn’t pretend otherwise. It felt cold and impersonal, and once again I began to worry about realism’s ability to hamstring us.

  Fortunately, reality came through for us in a different way. Larry explained that while technology had come far in its ability to detect something out there in the water, it was still very bad at telling you what that something was. That job fell, as it always had, to the sonar operator. A good “ping jockey,” as they were known by their shipmates, could determine the speed, location, and nationality of a ship just by listening to its propeller noise through millions of gallons of seawater. The enemy was more than a dot. He was a complex and ominous purring in the darkness, and you had to know his song to survive.