At any time were you concerned that the game was too different?
I did not expect it to become a hit, but I felt it was important to do. This was exactly the
same thing that happened withEastern Front. I didEastern Frontfor myself and then, lo
and behold, everybody loved it. Well, that’s very nice. I didBalance of Powerfor myself
and, gee, everybody loved it. But I also did other games for myself that were dismal fail-
ures, commercially speaking.
How did you go about balancing realism with the gameplay inBalance of Power?
People talk about realism versus playability as if it’s a dilemma. I see it more as a matter
of sharpening things. An artist, painting a portrait, will deliberately accentuate certain
components of the face that he feels bring out the character of the subject. They don’t
see that as realism versus playability, they see that as art. In the same way I felt that I
needed to sharpen up, editorially and artistically, those elements that I thought clearly
showed the issues at stake. So I certainly made the world a much more dangerous
place. I took out a lot of the boring complexities, simplified it down, and sharpened it up
to a game about pure, direct geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers. And
that’s all it was, clearly showing that conflict.
I’ve read thatTrust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Sibootis your favorite of your games.
Why is that?
Every game I have done has
been original, with the exception
of the secondBalance of Power,
which I did at the urgent request
of my publisher. With that one
exception everything I have
done has been a new design. But
withSibootI went much further
out than with any other game,
that is, in terms of just how far I
took the design beyond the con-
ventions of game design.Siboot
was easily the most advanced. I
explored ideas withSibootthat
people still have not even come close to. We were talking aboutGossipas in some ways
ahead of other games.Sibootwent way, way beyondGossip. The other thing about
Sibootwas it wasn’t just one good idea. There were at least three major ideas inSiboot,
each one of them worthy of a game all by itself.
And then there were lots of other little ideas. Here’s an example of a little idea.
There’s now a user interface concept called “tool tips.” If you put the cursor over some-
thing and leave it there for a few seconds, it pops up some descriptive text. I anticipated
that and came up with something vaguely similar, where you could click and hold on a
button to see its functionality. That was four years before tool tips were first noted as a
user interface item in the PC world. That wasn’t a major idea on my part; I considered it
to be just a minor little thing, but at the time, nobody had anything like that.
Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 267
Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot