History of Wargames
Hey, Let's Start a Wargame Company in the Basement!
How I got into the wargame business is one of those odd, series-of-coincidental-events
things that often turn out to have far reaching consequences. The emergence of the wargame
company (SPI) I founded in the late 1960s in effect signals the next major chapter in the
history of wargaming.
I picked up on wargames in the early 1960s when I was in the Army. While I had always
been interested in history, I had never been all that curious about military history. But
while in the Army I came across some GIs who played the original Avalon Hill games and, as
I was in the military, it seemed a logical thing to get involved with wargames. When I got
out of the Army in 1964, I kept in touch with wargames in a casual way and became somewhat
obsessed with the idea of using the games to teach, and better understand, history.
Spending the next six years working my way through Columbia University gave me ample
opportunity to do some writing on military history the way I thought it should be done.
Note that at this stage I considered games a means of better understanding military
history so I could write a better account of it. My goal of writing books took a detour
when I got to know Tom Shaw down at Avalon Hill. We got along quite well, and in 1966 he
asked me if I would like to design a game. At that point I had no aspirations to design
games professionally, but accepted the challenge anyway. A year later, Avalon Hill
published my effort, a game called Jutland, on the naval battle of the same name during
World War I. A year later, in 1968, they published my second effort, 1914, which covered
the opening rounds of World War I.
After doing two games for Avalon Hill, and carefully observing how they did it, I
decided that there had to be a more effective way to publish games. It was at that point,
I decided to found SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc). This was done in a rather
impromptu fashion, much like the old 1930s movie in which a group of bright young kids
gather around and say, "Hey, gang, let's put on a Broadway musical in dad's
garage!"
I did pretty much the same thing in 1969. However, we were city rats and our first
venue was not dad's garage but a windowless basement in New York city's lower east side
district. Our neighbors in the basement were a puppeteer on one side and a pornographer on
the other. A typical lower east side mixture, then and now. The initial staff was
comprised of local gamers. I had come to know a number of other wargamers in New York city
since 1964, and recruited as many as I could to form SPIs first staff. We had no money; so
I borrowed a hundred dollars from Al Nofi, one of the original SPIers. I had to pay Al
back in a month, but it was enough to get started. What we lacked in financial resources
we made up in a lot of energy and a few ideas. When SPI began, we had the basic concepts
which have remained the cornerstone of what all historical wargame publishers are still
trying to achieve. First of all, we wanted games published by gamers. This meant hobbyists
controlling all of the game development, production and marketing decisions. The second
principle was one of publishing more games. At the time, Avalon Hill was only doing one or
two a year, and Avalon Hill was the only show in town. The third principle involved being
more directly responsive to gamer desires.
Initially, in early 1969, we were only thinking of designing and publishing games,
advertising them through a new magazine called Strategy and Tactics (S&T), which had
begun publishing regularly in 1967. S&T was the brainchild of Chris Wagner, who was at
the time an Air Force sergeant stationed in Japan. In the middle of 1969, Chris Wagner's
S&T went bust. He was not able to get much beyond a thousand subscribers, and that was
not enough to make it a viable operation. Nobody else seemed interested in taking it over,
and as we were planning on using it as our chief means of promoting our new line of games
(Avalon Hill allowed no other advertising in its magazine), I had no choice but to become
the new publisher of Strategy and Tactics. Thus, we found ourselves in the magazine
publishing business, in addition to our efforts to publish more games. Doing the magazine
also brought graphic design ace Redmond Simonsen into SPI. I knew that the magazine, and
the games, needed a professional look. Simonsen was a native New Yorker, and a wargamer in
addition to being a highly talented artist. So I made him an offer he couldn't refuse:
half the business (we later shared some of this with some of the original staff). And
together we proceeded to do the deed.
Those early days were pretty hairy. Anything was considered possible, and with that
attitude we made things happen. In that period many of the still current concepts of
designing and producing games were either invented or given some solid form. The process
by which a game goes from concept to finished product was worked out because the pace at
which we were working had to be highly organized or nothing would get done. When it was
realized that we would have to simultaneously get our first issue of S&T out and have
our first six games ready to go before S&Ts subscribers lost interest, we had to
innovate and hustle. For a few frantic weeks in the Summer of 1969 we called ourselves
"the game of week club" because I did, literally, design three games in three
weeks. At the same time I was teaching the other lads the fine points of debugging the
games and writing the rules up in a consistent and legible format. There were other
complications, as I had a full time job (plus a part time job) and was going into my last
year as an undergraduate at Columbia (on an honors program, no less, demanding that a
thesis be written). One of our key people, Al Nofi, decided to sail over to Spain and back
during that Summer. He was late getting back, as the sailing back he encountered a storm,
the sailboat was wrecked and he was literally lost at sea for several weeks. He showed up,
rather more sunburnt and lean than normal, for the furious last few weeks of preparations
for out debut of S&T with its new format (with a complete game in it). We had
everything ready on the Labor Day weekend of 1969, and rather than wait for the post
office to open on Tuesday, we stuffed every mailbox on Avenue C with the thousand issues
of S&T.
The response from the readers was quick, and overwhelming. Many ordered all six of our
new games, renewed their subscriptions, and provided us with enough cash to get the
operation off the ground. I also aced the honors thesis. While I didn't get to Woodstock
(I was tending bar, a second job, down the road from all the traffic jams that weekend),
1969 was an interesting year.
After struggling for two years just to get the thing off the ground, I developed a
marketing/advertising campaign in 1971 which really got us rolling. Within two years we
were reaching more than half of the active gamers in the country. While in 1969, fewer
than 100,000 wargames were sold, almost all by Avalon Hill, three years later, this number
had more than doubled, largely because of our efforts. Ten years later the number of
wargames being sold was more than two million. Unlike Avalon Hill, we actively promoted
other publishers' games. Thus our promotional efforts gave all of the new publishers a leg
up and expanded the reach of wargames even more.
To give you an idea of what this promotion campaign meant, consider the history of
wargame sales.
Manual Wargame Sales: 1960-1991
Since 1960, over twenty million paper, or manual historical wargames have been sold.
Unit sales of historical wargames (paper, or "manual" type
games) per year indicated.
Year |
Wargames Sold |
1964 |
62,000 |
1965 |
65,000 |
1970 |
129,000 |
1975 |
743,000 |
1980 |
2,200,000 |
1985 |
900,000 |
1990 |
450,000 |
1991 |
400,000 |
These are sales of historical wargames, excluding science fiction and fantasy titles.
Nearly fifteen ten percent of these were games published in Strategy & Tactic
magazine. As with most books, about half of all sales were concentrated in less than fifty
of the best selling wargames. Several paper wargames have achieved extraordinary sales
figures. PanzerBlitz has sold over 300,000 copies, but it has been in print since 1970.
Squad Leader has sold over 100,000 copies of the basic game, plus many more of the add on
modules. About 1200 game titles were published during this period, most selling at least a
few thousand copies. Avalon Hill, with the widest distribution, could usually rely on a
decent game selling at least 25,000 to 50,000 copies. This number has come down a bit
since the boom times of the 1970s. But even today, Avalon Hill can move at least 25,000
copies of a decent game over its two to five year publishing life. Smaller companies, with
more limited distribution, can usually move at least a few thousand copies. SPI stood
somewhere in the middle, being able to sell at least 5,000 of a title and moving over
30,000 copies of best sellers. The games in its magazine, Strategy and Tactics, sold as
many games as there were buyers of the magazine, plus a few thousand additional copies
when some magazine game was later published separately.
Computer wargames did not enter the market until 1980. In that year only about 100,000
units were sold. By 1985, computer wargame sales moved past manual wargame sales. By the
late 1980s, some individual computer wargame titles had sales exceeding 250,000 units
after several years on the market. Currently, several million computer wargames are sold
each year. Over 25 million computer games of all types are sold each year (not counting
the Nintendo types). Up to ten percent can be classified as wargames, and this excludes
all the fantasy titles that feature a lot of combat activity. Computer game sales more
than tripled between 1985 and 1992. There are only about thirty million PC's (of all
types) in homes. Nearly as many are in commercial locations, where there are more games
being played than management will generally admit. Surveys indicate that about two thirds
of the homes of actual or potential wargamers contain PC's. Currently, several computer
wargames each year exceed 100,000 units sold. However, the average computer wargame sells
more like 20,000-30,000 units.
During these first three years at SPI (1969-1972), Redmond Simonsen further refined the
standards for editing and designing game components. Simonsen also had a flair for editing
and this, combined with his artistic skills, created a system for presenting games that
has never been surpassed and is still widely imitated. While I was self taught in the
wargame business, Simonsen had graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in design. Cooper
Union is one of those uniquely New York institutions. It has a huge endowment, so charges
no tuition. However, entry is competitive. Other graduates have told me that getting in
was worse than any job interview they subsequently had to go through.
By providing a model, SPI spawned dozens of other game companies, each following the
SPI system to one degree or another. This system emphasized keeping the cost down, not
having a mounted (paper map glued to cardboard) mapboard. The mounted mapboard was a habit
Avalon Hill picked up from the mainline toy and game publishers and increased the cost of
the game considerably. Initially, SPI marketed games solely by direct mail rather than
trying to get them into stores. Some new companies, such as Simulations Design Corporation
(SDC) in California, even attempted to put out a magazine with a game in it. The head of
that firm, Dana Lombardy, came to us for advice in the early 1970s, which, as was our
custom, we freely gave. SDC eventually folded, as did many of the other young publishers,
but a large number survived. Although SPI published nearly 400 games between 1969 and
1982, the dozens of other smaller publishers published that many and more (depending upon
how you define "publishing") to date. Some of these smaller publishers developed
highly innovative ideas and have themselves contributed to profound changes in the hobby.
The most innovative and influential of these new game systems was the role-playing game
(Dungeons & Dragons) developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1973. The closest SPI
ever came to this was a game we published in 1973 called Sniper, which involved man-to-man
combat in an urban area. Players had a tendency to individualize their playing pieces in
Sniper. But I, as the designer, did not bother to take it as far as Dungeons and Dragons,
which was also the first, or at least the most widely successful, of the fantasy games.
SPIs first science fiction game, Star Force, was published in 1974 and went on to
become one of SPIs best sellers. After StarForce, SPI published many other fantasy and
science fiction games, almost all of which did very well and by the late 1970s, many of
the smaller publishers realized that the quickest way to survival and success was to
concentrate on fantasy and science fiction topics.
This shift towards fantasy and science fiction somewhat dismayed many of the older
gamers, the grognards ("grumblers" in French, a term originally applied to
Napoleon's old soldiers who knew what was going on, but were powerless to do little but
grumble about it). Most of the original wargamers were history buffs. But about 30 percent
were also into fantasy and science fiction, and their number greatly expanded when there
were actually fantasy and science fiction games to be had. The second big burst of growth
in the hobby took place in the late 1970s as a result of the widespread introduction of
fantasy and science fiction games.
The three other big forces to emerge in wargaming in the late 1970s were the gaming
conventions, the increasing flood of gaming periodicals and the publication of
"serial games."
Overview
The Conventions
Table of
Contents
Chapter
5 Contents