Quantum Quality Productions

~ the eulogy ~

QQP sold turn-based wargames out of Flemington, New Jersey, and it was finished before I ever dialed a modem. I was seven years old and in Turkey when The Perfect General shipped in 1991, and eleven and still offline when American Laser Games closed the studio. Everything here comes through the written record, down to a closure notice archived off a games magazine's website that no longer exists either.

The record is clear enough about what the company was. Bruce Williams Zaccagnino ran it and Mark Baldwin was vice president of production and the designer of its best game. Their market was people who had grown up with cardboard hexes and wanted the bookkeeping done for them, and the catalog answers that description exactly, from The Lost Admiral through Conquered Kingdoms.

Computer Gaming World in 1994 described QQP as a satisfying wellspring of entertainment whose fine games came with below average documentation, which is a sentence doing two jobs at once. The games were good and the boxes were cheap. That trade was available to a small publisher in the early nineties and it held for four years, which is about as long as anyone got.

~ the dossier ~

~ the catalog ~

The Perfect General in 1991 is the one that stuck. Two players buy their units before the battle and then move them in turns across a map of hexes, and the design was clean enough that it came back later on the 3DO and on Windows and earned a sequel in 1995. Its scenario editor kept it alive among hobbyists well past the company's own end date.

Around it sat an unusually wide range for a house that small. Merchant Prince dropped you into Renaissance Venice to buy influence, and Solitaire's Journey was a card game collection with no war in it at all, sold to the same mailing list. A publisher with one genuine hit and a dozen respectable companions is the normal shape of this industry, and the companions are what pay the rent between hits.

~ the unraveling ~

By 1994 the rent was not getting paid. QQP accepted a buyout from American Laser Games, a company in Albuquerque whose own product was filmed cowboys on laserdisc shot at with a light gun. On paper there was a logic to it: ALG had cash from a very good arcade year and wanted a catalog that did not require a film crew.

The logic lasted about eighteen months. ALG's coin-op manufacturing ended in November 1995 as the arcade business fell away underneath it, and in December the parent closed its New Jersey studio. Computer Game Review used the word unceremoniously, which fits a closure that produced no announcement anybody kept. ALG was in trouble itself within the year, and by 1999 it had been swallowed by Her Interactive, a label it had set up on its own premises to sell games to girls.

~ the funny part ~

Zaccagnino had another project in Flemington. A model railroad had been growing in his basement in Three Bridges for years, and in 1991 he moved the whole thing into a warehouse in Flemington and carried on adding to it. It opened to the public as Northlandz in 1996, the year after the game company closed, and in 1997 it took the Guinness record for the longest small-scale model railway track, more than fifty thousand feet of it, held until Hamburg took the title in 2005.

So a man who had passed four years simulating artillery on a grid went on to lay real track by hand in a warehouse down the road from where the studio had been. Both jobs come down to making a very large system behave correctly at a scale one person can take in at once.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »