Chris Crawford on Game Design

Chapter 24. Guns & Butter

Over the course of the 1980s, a public-domain game by the name of Empire gained a loyal following. I am told it was created back in the 1970s, before there were microcomputers. After bouncing around university computer centers for years, people starting porting it to microcomputers.

Over the years, various programmers had steadily improved the game with each design iteration. By the late 80s, there were several commercial versions of Empire for the Mac and PC. Dan White had produced a version for the PC, and somebody else had done one for the Mac. But these designs had clung closely to the core concept of Empire.

During the years 1988 through 1990, the three best game designers in the world each set out to build a conquer-the-world ...