That actually started back in 1966, when I was a high school sophomore, and a friend of mine named David Zeuch introduced me to the Avalon Hill board wargames. We played those, and I thought they were a lot of fun. I played them into college, though I didn’t have a lot of free time during my college years. When I was in graduate school, I ran into a fellow who worked at the computer center, and he was trying to get Blitzkrieg, an Avalon Hill game, running on the computer. I told him he was crazy. I said, “That can’t be done, forget it.” But that conversation planted a seed. I thought about it, and about a year later I decided I was going to attempt it. So I went to work and it turned out to be nowhere near as difficult as I had feared. So I ended up putting together a little program on an IBM 1130 in FORTRAN. It actually ran a computer game, a little tactical armored simulation. The debut of that game came early in 1976 when I showed it off at a little wargame convention that we held. Everybody played it and thought it was a great deal of fun. So then I bought myself a KIM-1 and redid the whole thing around that system. That design was unmatched for many years, because you had genuine hidden movement. I had built little tiny terminals, as I called them, and each player had his own little map and little pieces, and a screen to divide the two players. Two guys played this wargame, each one unaware of the position of the other. It was a lot of fun, and that was 1977 or ’78.
z wywiadu za Game Design: Theory & Practice Richard Rouse III
