Hacker News Reader

For me it would be Steve Barcia [0], the creator of Master of Magic (MoM) and Master of Orion II (MoO 2). (MoO 1 wasn't as great as the 2).

I surely played thousands of hours just with these two games, over 20+ years.

A while ago I tried to get in touch with him (among other things I started a tech podcast and I wanted him as a guest), but I couldn't find any way to contact him. I messaged him on Linkedin, but never responded.

What a pity. I would have loved to ask him how was his life when he developed these two games.

Fun fact: MoM has an incredible mod, called Caster of Magic, built by this lonely Japanese developer. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Barcia

[1]: http://seravy.x10.mx/Wordpress/?p=2027

Master Of Magic was and is such a masterpiece (and MoO 2 as well). Some of the older games, while often heavily unbalanced with clunky user interfaces, have so much better atmosphere and setting than many of the newer games. Maybe it's that it used to be much more about craftsmanship and telling a story, than just trying to make as much as money as possible.

My all time favourite game is Alpha Centauri and I would have loved to be around to see how they designed the tech tree among other things. It still feels like an excellent sci-fi novel wrapped as a game. Wish newer games could attempt something like that. Although I have to say many times an RPG game attempts something like that, the quality of their story leaves a lot to hope for.

Darkest Dungeon is one of the newer games that has successfully created great atmosphere, similar to those older games. Yet sadly I at least got very quickly tired playing it, with dull grinding of the characters who would keep dying by random crits.

I guess also because multiplayer has become so prevalent that it's not even necessary to create great storylines anymore. People will be satisfied by the interactions they have playing other humans and its never-ending challenge by the changing metagame and such.

The attention span of players today is much smaller than it used to be and there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, so I believe that these facts changed what mainstream games are supposed to be. But we have the indies :)

You might like this podcast episode where Brian Reynolds talks about the creation of Alpha Centauri:

https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/the-alpha-centauri-s...

I still play moo2 when I want to make four hours disappear. I probably need to branch out a bit, it's been two decades already.

I suggest Endless Space 2 or Stellaris.

If you want to find more about the MoO and MoM development, I would talk with Ken Burd. He was a large part of that development and design effort and a great guy to boot.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-burd-626ab45a

You may also want to check out Magic: the Gathering. On a high level, Master of Magic is a quite derivative game, being a clone of Civilization and ripping off MtG's spell system, especially the color wheel. But it stumbled into accidental brilliance. Tech tree in games like Civilization is notoriously bland and padded with insignificant techs. Because the whole research in MoM was made out of discrete spells, every single research step gives you something tangible! It's amazing. Another bit of accidental brilliance came from low RAM of contemporary computers. It caused the world to be split into magic planes - Arcanus and Myrror. They just couldn't manage to fit the whole world into RAM at the time!

Another single player game which can give you a lot of fun is Shandalar. It takes place in MtG setting and is an RPG game.

> They just couldn't manage to fit the whole world into RAM at the time!

I had no idea they did it for this reason. But now that you mention it, of course it make sense.

From a contstraint... One of the best features of Master of Magic. The two worlds (connected with a few towers) added a lot of strategic depth.

Same in the Atari ST world. Got my hands on a Pascal compiler, but had no bindings to the OS. Then picked up a Modula-2 compiler, but I had no OS documentation. Books were hard to come by, and everything cost a lot (when accounting for inflation) compared to right now.

It was a very hard world to crack into unless you had a community around you, and I did not have such a thing in rural Alberta.

When I got a 486 + really early Linux (0.97 I believe) and an Internet connection in 1992 a whole other world opened up. The machine itself was far less interesting, but the world of development became successively more and more open and easier to get into.

When I was 15 I actually spoke to Peter Molyneux on the phone a couple of times.

In year 11 we had to organise our own work experience, and I decided I wanted to try to do mine at Bullfrog - this would have been 1991. My friend Chris and I had started fiddling around with building games using STOS and AMOS on the Atari ST and Amiga, and so I asked him if he wanted to try to get in as well.

We talked to our form tutor about it. He was very supportive, got the deputy head involved, and they let us make some phone calls (a big deal for schoolkids at the time) to try to get in touch with Bullfrog. We didn't get anywhere with Electronic Arts, their publisher at the time, who flatly refused to give us Bullfrog's contact details, but then I decided to phone up Amiga Format, explained what we were trying to do, and we ended up speaking to one of their staff writers or editors who gave us Bullfrog's number straight away.

A totally surreal experience then occurred as I rang the number for Bullfrog, asked to speak to Peter Molyneux, somebody gave him the phone and we ended up talking. After explaning to him that Chris and I were looking for work experience, I handed the phone to my form tutor who verified the whole story and, long and the short of it, Peter Molyneux was totally up for us coming on board for a couple of weeks.

Absolutely unbelievable and therefore, in my eyes, regardless of what has happened since, the guy is and will always remain a legend.

Here's where the story gets a little sad though, at least for me.

I hadn't mentioned this scheme to my parents because I thought they'd poo-poo the idea before I'd even started, and I just didn't want to deal with the argument and the discouragement. I thought it would be better to see if we could get anywhere with it, and then talk to them about it if it worked out.

So I did talk to them and, long story short, they wouldn't let me go and stay up in Guildford (I grew up in Dorset). But Chris's parents did let him go, so my final conversation with Peter Molyneux was to thank him very much for the opportunity, apologise that I couldn't come after all, but let him know that Chris was still going to come.

So at least one of us had a great time at Bullfrog, and I think it was probably the coolest piece of work experience anyone in our year group did. For my placement I was instead a teaching assistant in a local middle school, which was still pretty fun, but not as much as working at Bullfrog!

---

EDIT: I've added the below in response to a reply on this comment, but I thought worth including it here as well to round out the story because I don't want to give an unbalanced view of the situation.

This whole idea of work experience at Bullfrog was always a long shot. I grew up poor. So I was disappointed that my folks said no, but there is no way they could have afforded to pay for a couple of weeks' accommodation for me in Guildford (and I obviously didn't have the money). In my heart of hearts, I knew that all along. Really I think I just wanted to see if it could possibly work[0].

It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.

[0] Of course, if I'd really had some hustle about me I'd have taken a more bullish approach to the setback and gone on some sort of fundraising drive.

Ouch, that’s a tough ending to the story indeed. Pretty cool still that you made it halfway.

You know, it was always a long shot. I grew up poor. So I was disappointed but there is no way my parents could afford to pay for a couple of weeks' accommodation for me in Guildford (and I obviously didn't have the money). In my heart of hearts, I knew that all along. Really I think I just wanted to see if it could possibly work. As you say: pretty cool to have made it halfway.

It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.

Great story nonetheless, as a parent this is the kind of imagination that it's hard to come up with as a parent.

I do understand that your parents acted the way they did. As someone who grew up with games, I would have gone the extra mile to support the venture.

But am happy to hear that things worked out after all.

Thanks and you're right, particularly in 1991: games were still fairly niche back then, certainly in the UK, and absolutely not on the radar as a career choice for the vast majority of people.

What happened with chris

So we finished our GCSEs in 1992 and, as is often the case at that age, we just kind of lost touch. I didn't see Chris again until the Christmas holiday period in 2018.

I was hunting for retro games in a charity shop in our old hometown. I didn't notice him come in but we recognised eachother pretty much straight away and had a good chat outside.

He didn't go to work for Bullfrog. In fact neither of us went into the games industry at all. But he did find his way into programming, and had spent a few years before we bumped into eachother doing a lot of fairly close to the metal work in C.

I love it.

I did something similar and contacted Future Publishing in 1997 for my secondary school work experience. Ended up commuting by train to Bath for a week and working with the editorial team of PC Review. By working they put me in a corner and had me play Little Big Adventure 2. I then also got play and review (with heavy editing) Atomic Bomberman. I still have a print copy of the issue with my name on the review. Twenty three years later and I’ve been making games professionally for fifteen years.

My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.

That's a great story, and I'm glad it worked out so well. I still harbour a small pang of regret at never having worked in games, but think I'd struggle to break into it now, and I definitely don't have the stomach for the hours these days!

> My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.

This is a little uncanny. In the 6th form I did work experience in flight operations at a firm called FR Aviation, based out of Bournemouth International Airport (may still have been known as Hurn Airport back then). They did a lot of exercises with the Navy so I too got a flight. Mine was in a Falcon, although not the F-16 kind: it was more of a Learjet type thing - just a very small passenger jet with twin engines. Still, my first time in any kind of jet and pretty cool as I got to sit in the jumpseat between the two pilots.

These days a lot of games is more sedate albeit not that much better compensated and not always amazingly well run. Lots more cross-over with regular tech as games aim for a longer tail of sales as well. Personally though I’d make them for fun if you want another hobby.

I am however eternally jealous of getting a flight in a small jet.

Plane was probably one of these?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassault_Falcon

Yes, I think that's the series.

Future publishing was the shit back then. I lived in the Canary Islands where thanks to the influx of British tourists and migrants we had a steady flow of one-month-late, overpriced British press. Everything from future publishing was miles ahead of the Spanish videogame press, Super Play and Edge were my favourites, i still have a good collection in my mother's basement... It's how I learned English, and the joys of British humour, but also how I learned to think critically about games at a different level. Peter Moulineux was an ever present figure in them, of course.

Almost all my favorite games as a kid were from Bullfrog. They had so many great titles back in those days. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Syndicate. Many hours spent!

I remember it the same as a kid. I read an interview with Peter Molyneux in Amiga Format or Amiga User where he talked about using C to code populous and I figured - ‘I need to learn C!. So I managed to save up 15 pounds or so, which was a fair bit of money then, to order a shareware C compiler from the magazine classifieds. I remember it came on several floppy disks. Then I found out I stll needed the commodore standard libraries (which cost hundreds) if I wanted to actual make anything and I was stumped! Ah the joys.

Molyneux really soured his reputation with Godus, though the potential for over-hyping and not delivering was always there.

Godus could have been a great game, looked fantastic but ended up with a complete lack of purpose except fleece people via micro-transactions or sit through ad views to actually progress.

I always associate Bullfrog with Syndicate which is still up there as one of my favourite games.

Molyneux burned himself long ago with Fable, making extraordinary claims about the upcoming Xbox game and failing to deliver on something like 99% of them. At the end of the day it was a fairly simple game with evil/good branching.

This is complete fluff, but I saw this webcomic years and years ago and still can't stop laughing at it:

https://i.imgur.com/wEo36.gif

> Bullfrog had a huge amount of prestige amongst Amiga gamers. It might not look like it now, but everything they did appeared original and innovative at the time.

To me, Bullfrog equaled Syndicate Wars, and even just that is reason enough to praise them. I never played the other games, and I'm sure they were great too.

I remember following those same tutorials and not really learning much (but I was probably 11 at the time). I also remember that the OS includes were around £300 and there was no way I could ever afford that. I convinced my parents to buy me Blitz Basic 2 after following another Amiga Format tutorial later on, and that is what finally set me on my path. Programming in the 90's was generally a really expensive thing to get in to... And it was even worse on PC.

On the PC, you got QBasic out of the box. That actually lets you push things already a bit. The main things really missing were soundcard sound and mouse input.

But if you got to that stage, you had enough of a clue to go shopping about for other compilers / assemblers.

I fondly remember the assembly programming tutorial which Bullfrog did in ST Format magazine back in 1991, which was the first time I had been exposed to "real" games programming techniques in assembler (the ST lacked the custom graphics hardware the Amiga had and doing something as simple as drawing sprites efficiently onto the screen was pretty tough).

Bullfrog made some great games. My favourites were Powermonger and Dungeon Keeper. The author of article seems pretty critical of the fact that their games were procedurally generated and became rote too quickly but I personally preferred those sorts of games. Too many games nowadays are highly scripted with a story that goes exactly the way that the designer wants it to. I'm more of a fan of a game world with a few simple rules, where the gameplay is an emergent property of those rules.

Yes, that's one thing I missed when I played "From Dust" [0] which could have been a great successor to Populous if it had contained procedurally generated levels. I like the open-endedness, the potential for a bit of chaos or absurdity in how a level turns out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dust

Magic Carpet is still one of my all time favourite Sega Saturn games.

It's available for current hardware, and may still be enjoyable depending on how hard the nostalgia hits you: https://www.gog.com/game/magic_carpet

I still play the Saturn version :)

But thanks for the heads up.

Why everyone keeps glossing over the sequel, Magic Carpet 2? It's not the most innovative game ever, but it's very solid, and adds a lot of content in the form of monsters, spells, and spell upgrades via experience.

The single player "campaign" has a couple of very tedious cavern and maze levels though.

I also found it expensive for a poor kid to learn along with the Amiga. So expensive - plus in the UK expansion hardware was ridiculous. In fact, in later life, through a coincidence, I met the marketing person who decided a 1MB RAM upgrade should cost £800. Thank God times have changed. That whole Amiga sales channel was very sketchy though - and now that I'm older and more experienced, it is obvious.

In 1989(?) I had a local computer store sell me a 512k pack for the A500 - it was $150 out the door. To this day, I think they were grey market - no one had anything that cheap . He claimed it was legit.

Populous was awesome! I remember 1989, when Populous and SimCity were the two "big" Amiga games. I had just added a full megabyte to my Amiga 500... fun times!

I hit the scene a decade before you, in the 8-bit world, when all there was, was empty RAM. You had to fill it yourself, or there was simply nothing.

Especially for the lesser platforms of the time that were competing for attention, this was a lesson in frustration. At least you had magazine tutorials. All I could have done, and did, back then, was learn how to disassemble ROM routines, by FIRST writing a disassembler - in BASIC.

So yeah, they were very motivating days.

That was exactly the same process including devpac (On a cover disk) that I went thru. Flashbacks...