Chris Crawford on Game Design

Results

Patton Strikes Back was a market failure. A minor reason for this arose from the publisher's laggard publishing of the game. Our mutual understanding was that, so long as I delivered the golden master on their deadline, they'd get it out for Christmas. We met our deadline, but they failed to make theirs. That hurt.

The primary reason for the failure lay in the game itself. Patton Strikes Back was unquestionably an excellent “wargame for the rest of us”; the problem was that there was no “rest of us.” By the time we published, the hard core wargamers had taken over the marketplace. As you might imagine, they derisively dismissed Patton Strikes Back as a beginner's game lacking the kind of challenging complexity they expected. Their badmouthing ...