Chris Crawford on Game Design

Conclusions

Gossip had the bad luck to be published in 1983, just as Atari was beginning its death spiral. With all the chaos of the layoffs, jobs like publishing games proceeded at a snail's pace and without much in the way of verve and élan. There is some question as to whether it ever appeared in the sales catalog; I myself don't know. I don't even know its sales figures; it seemed that, every time I called someone to ask, that person had been laid off. I'm sure it sold poorly; few people recall the game.

But Gossip deserves a place in history: it was the first computer game about people instead of things. It opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities for further development. Games in which the gossip mechanics are extended to cover ...