Chris Crawford on Game Design

Conclusions

Siboot was published in 1987 by Mindscape under the title Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot. It was not a commercial success; I believe that only 5,000 copies were sold, and Mindscape never ported the game from the Mac to the PC or any other platform. Nevertheless, I consider Siboot to be my best game design. No other game has ever leapt so far out into unknown regions of game design and actually worked. No other game boasted as many significant innovations as Siboot: intransitive combat relationships, an inverse parser, a working language of interaction, dream combat, an information economy, general-purpose deal making, and functional, dynamic emotional relationships among characters. Indeed, in the fifteen years that have passed ...