Victory

[Victory]

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.