the industry was that it bought market share. That is,Wing Commanderwas a hugely
expensive program to write. It’s funny; Chris Roberts has denied that it cost much, but
that’s because of some creative internal accounting. Back in those days, around 1990, a
typical budget for a game would be $100,000 to $200,000. There were some done
cheaper, but $300,000 was a very expensive game.Wing Commanderprobably cost
about $1,000,000. By the standards of the day that was considered absurd. And in fact,
I’ve been told by an Origin insider thatWing Commanderby itself never paid back its
investment, but that the follow-ups and add-ons did. But what they were really doing
was spending so much money that it would only work if it became the top hit. It did. The
problem then was, they’ve raised the bar for the whole industry, we all have to produce
$1,000,000 games, and unfortunately they can only work if each one is the number one
game. And you can only have one number one game. So that, in turn, forced the indus-
try to become much more conservative. We’ve got these huge expenses, we simply
can’t make money turning out a number twenty game. Anything less than being in the
top ten will lose money. So very quickly it became a hit-driven business. That was
already starting in the late ’80s, butWing Commandersealed it. So once it became a
hit-driven industry, the whole marketing strategy, economics, and everything changed,
in my opinion, much for the worse. The other thing was thatWing Commanderalso
seemed to reestablish or reconfirm the role of the action game as the wave of the
future. And basically that’s where the industry solidified, and the cement has now set.
It was right before the crash that you wroteThe Art of Computer Game Design,
wasn’t it?
Yes, actually I started that as soon as I joined Atari Research. It’s funny, one of my goals
at Atari Research was, “Let’s really sharpen up the whole field of game design.” So I, in
essence, tried to create a computer game developer’s conference within Atari. I tried to
set up a Friday afternoon seminar. And some politics got in the way. I sent out invita-
tions to all the designers throughout Atari, and some pig-headed guy who was running
the software group at coin-op was furious that I didn’t route it through him. I didn’t fol-
low the hierarchy properly, and he therefore sent out a memo forbidding any of his
employees to go. That’s one of the reasons why Atari collapsed; there was a lot of
pig-headed ego crap going on. So the seminars never really came off. I therefore
decided, “OK, I’ll write these ideas down.” I started working on the book. I finished it in
1982, but Ray Kassar, the CEO, was also pig-headed and insisted that he personally
approve the manuscript before we sent it out to a publisher. So I sent it to him, and he
sat on it for a year.
Do you still look back on the book positively?
I certainly have come a long ways. Had I known that fifteen years later people would
still be reading it and deriving some benefit from it, I would have been flabbergasted,
and I simply would not have believed it. I still get e-mails referring to it. There’s no
question it’s still providing people with some benefit. And that says some very bad
things about the whole games industry and the games community, how little thinking
there is going on. It’s shameful.
264 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford