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+--- Thread: Victory (/showthread.php?tid=83)
Victory - Victory - 03-16-2011
Hey,
I just stumbled across this site and thought it was interesting and brought back some old memories.
I programmed the game Victory! The Battle for Europe for Rolling Thunder Games back in the 1990s as well as being an owner there for almost ten years. I had a lot of fun memories of game designing, attending conventions, frantic deadlines, talking on the phone with players, writing newsletters, etc. It was a good time for quite a while.
I started off playing StarMaster back in 1981 and still have all those papers in a box somewhere. Ended up working at Rolling Thunder in 1987 and leaving there while the design sessions for SuperNova Rise of the The Empire were underway back in 1997.
It is hard to believe how much things have changed in the industry and how fast time goes by. I was sad to hear about Dave Webber passing and happy to see Carol is still running Flagship.
Thanks for hosting this site and archiving some of information about the classic games.
Terry
RE: Victory - GrimFinger - 03-16-2011
Welcome aboard the site, Terry! We're glad to have you here, and we would sure like to hear some of your PBM and PBM design tales, when and if you get the time to share a memory or two in depth with us. For that matter, we're glad to hear bits and pieces, too.
I would certainly like to hear more about StarMaster, and about your times with programming Victory! The Battle for Europe and at Rolling Thunder games.
RE: Victory - Ramblurr - 03-16-2011
Welcome Terry!
As Grim mentioned, I would love to hear about your experience programming Victory! What sort of language and hardware did you use? Do you still do much programming today?
RE: Victory - walter - 03-17-2011
Oh man!
I wish I could signup for a starmaster game!
Can you tell more about this game??
Walt
RE: Victory - Victory - 03-17-2011
(03-16-2011, 11:22 PM)Ramblurr Wrote: Welcome Terry!
As Grim mentioned, I would love to hear about your experience programming Victory! What sort of language and hardware did you use? Do you still do much programming today?
Victory was programmed in Pascal on a Macintosh Plus. At the time the two choices in languages for the Mac were C and Pascal and the Pascal compiler was much more friendly.
I still remember the day we were able to buy a 20 MB (mega, not giga) harddrive for "only" $1000.00 -- it made it so we could store four Victory games on one hard drive rather than using floppy disks.
I still do programming for a living today. Back in the Rolling Thunder days I probably only spent 10-20% of my time coding and the rest doing business related stuff. Once I was able to stop doing data entry and get some time for coding I was able to automate turn entry more so that freed up even more time to do more coding. The problem was just the boot strapping was so tough and the day to day grind made it tough to get any free time.
RE: Victory - Ramblurr - 03-17-2011
Wow, heh, that is pretty crazy. I've read about even older automated ("computer assisted") PBMs where the GMs rented time on a university mainframe. Imagine all the time spent coding in the punch cards! I'm not surprised so much time was eaten up by non-programming tasks.
RE: Victory - Victory - 03-17-2011
(03-17-2011, 07:19 AM)walter Wrote: Oh man!
I wish I could signup for a starmaster game!
Can you tell more about this game??
Walt
I played quite a few games back in the day. StarMaster, Company Commander, Epic, Legends, Monster Island, Middle Earth, etc. Lots of smaller games too just to get ideas for our own games as well as having fun.
I started playing StarMaster back in 1981 and that is where I met one of my future partners at Rolling Thunder. I remember battling with Robert Bunker and his alliance in StarMaster (a race of reptile creatures if I recall correctly). That game had so many special actions and unique gamemaster related things in it that made it fun and sparked the imagination. It has been so long ago that I can't even remember what the names of my empires were though.
When Rolling Thunder got started with SuperNova (the original one) I joined the company right after the first galaxy opened up. I was a GM for multiple galaxies from 1987-1989 and then finally got a chance to do some game design and coding when we were able to get Victory! going. Even after/during the Victory coding I was still spending much of my time doing turn processing for SuperNova.
SuperNova had a lot of StarMaster in it. It was a computer assisted game rather than computer moderated. We still had lots of sheets of paper describing what the player was up to in their special actions, etc. The problem just became getting (and paying) good GMs and keeping the continuity from turn to turn since a different person might deal with each turn that got sent in from a position. Once hundreds (or maybe a thousand?) of people were in the games it was impossible to keep the true flavor of 'special' actions going and thus Victory was destined to be a computer moderated game since we had seen the writing on the wall for scaling games for larger amounts of customers.
Computer moderation was great for reducing errors. When you have a game that is as heavily hand moderated as Supernova was with as many GMs as it requires there are bound to be mistakes. Turning things over to the computer reduced mistakes to 99%+ input errors rather than human errors. And once we got a basic user input program out there those errors could be placed onto the player's shoulders rather than the GMs. I wish I had the time to make a better input program, but it did the basics and performed some minimal error checking and the time to improve the program just never arrived.
My time at Rolling Thunder had a lot of fun in it. We created several games, we licensed games out to other companies around the world (and survived those headaches) and also licensed some games for us to run that we had not designed. It was a good way to join the working world just out of college, although it certainly did not help my coding skills and probably put a big delay in my software engineering career. Just too much time spent doing daily chores and not enough spent honing my coding skills. Looking back, I think both RTG and myself would have done better if I could have just been put on coding full time and I would have been able to fully automate games which in the long run would have easily paid for itself.
It was strange rummaging through your forums. I can recall so many of these games and so many of the designers/owners. We didn't attend a lot of conventions, but we did go to AndCon (I think that was the name) a few times when it was considered the USA PBM convention and drank a few beers with fellow PBM moderators. We also got along with some of the old school people (like Jim Landes from Midnight Games) and chatted with them occasionally. It is just amazing how much the landscape has changed.
It is good to see some of the companies still around (including my old one still running Victory). I do find it incredible that games like StarWeb (or even Victory) survive in this day and age given the old machines they were written on and the competition for gaming dollars now. I left when Everquest, etc were just starting up when I thought that those massive multiplayer games would replace PBM.
If you have any specific questions feel free to send me a note. Otherwise I will probably disappear again until nostalgia finds me looking around again.
It's great that you could archive this much information. I know there are a lot of people who have a lot of good memories of the fun that PBM brought them (including me). I hope the industry can somehow survive, but while I still play games and still code I doubt if I will return anytime soon to running a PBM (or PBeM) company.
RE: Victory - GrimFinger - 03-17-2011
(03-17-2011, 03:39 PM)Victory Wrote: If you have any specific questions feel free to send me a note. Otherwise I will probably disappear again until nostalgia finds me looking around again.
Well, Terry, I hope that you don't disappear, entirely. It's great, listening to you recall such bits and pieces of PBM's past. You're a walking treasure trove of PBM knowledge. I'm glad that the nostalgia bug bit you, and that you bothered to stop by - and to pause long enough to share such choice memories with us. Definitely, your postings are PBM gold.
But, I can't make anyone stay. If nothing else, feel free to just lurk, and only chime in occasionally. What little that you've posted, thus far, is actually some of the very best PBM-related material that I have come across online over the last several years. You're a PBM resource that is, quite plain and simply, irreplaceable.
RE: Victory - Victory - 03-17-2011
(03-17-2011, 04:11 PM)GrimFinger Wrote:(03-17-2011, 03:39 PM)Victory Wrote: If you have any specific questions feel free to send me a note. Otherwise I will probably disappear again until nostalgia finds me looking around again.
Well, Terry, I hope that you don't disappear, entirely. It's great, listening to you recall such bits and pieces of PBM's past. You're a walking treasure trove of PBM knowledge. I'm glad that the nostalgia bug bit you, and that you bothered to stop by - and to pause long enough to share such choice memories with us. Definitely, your postings are PBM gold.
But, I can't make anyone stay. If nothing else, feel free to just lurk, and only chime in occasionally. What little that you've posted, thus far, is actually some of the very best PBM-related material that I have come across online over the last several years. You're a PBM resource that is, quite plain and simply, irreplaceable.
Thanks for the kind words.
This web site was just a walk down memory lane for me. I can remember all the crazy times and then the boom years followed by the convention when I picked up a bunch of Magic (alpha) cards. That was a turning point for PBM when Adventures By Mail decided to get into the Magic card craze and their PBM games suffered a bit as they found the collectible card game bubble and discovered that the niche of PBM was so small compared to the CCG wave. I think quite a few other PBM companies saw that same light and had to look hard within themselves to decide if the love of the hobby was worth skipping out on financial rewards.
And after that slowed down a little the internet took off and the big companies with large art departments were able to get their subscription based games with huge advertising budgets and economies of scale that the little shops had difficulty competing with.
Your website has me wondering where my box in the basement is that contains all my StarMaster, etc materials. I wrote so many newsletters for SuperNova and I think I still have a bunch of the old Schubel and Son newsletters too somewhere down there. That was such a long time ago...
RE: Victory - GrimFinger - 03-17-2011
(03-17-2011, 04:26 PM)Victory Wrote: Thanks for the kind words.
This web site was just a walk down memory lane for me. I can remember all the crazy times and then the boom years followed by the convention when I picked up a bunch of Magic (alpha) cards. That was a turning point for PBM when Adventures By Mail decided to get into the Magic card craze and their PBM games suffered a bit as they found the collectible card game bubble and discovered that the niche of PBM was so small compared to the CCG wave. I think quite a few other PBM companies saw that same light and had to look hard within themselves to decide if the love of the hobby was worth skipping out on financial rewards.
And after that slowed down a little the internet took off and the big companies with large art departments were able to get their subscription based games with huge advertising budgets and economies of scale that the little shops had difficulty competing with.
Your website has me wondering where my box in the basement is that contains all my StarMaster, etc materials. I wrote so many newsletters for SuperNova and I think I still have a bunch of the old Schubel and Son newsletters too somewhere down there. That was such a long time ago...
Ironically enough, I've never played a game of Magic. It looks intriguing, as many CCG card games do, but I never took the bait.
I also never played a Schubel and Son PBM game. I still recall being aware of them, as a PBM company, back when play by mail was still a relatively new thing to me.