Simtex

~ the last words ~

Steve Barcia started Simtex in Austin in 1988 to make turn-based strategy games for the PC at a moment when the PC was mostly a business machine with a sound card bolted on. The studio stayed small for its entire life. It never had a hit in the sense that a shooter has a hit, and it produced two games that people are still arguing about in forums thirty years later.

Master of Orion arrived in 1993, published by MicroProse. In the September issue of Computer Gaming World that year, Alan Emrich previewed it and called it "rated XXXX," his shorthand for explore, expand, exploit and exterminate. Readers shortened that to 4X and the whole genre took the name from a joke in a preview. Emrich died in January 2025 and every obituary led with those four letters.

Master of Magic followed in 1994, doing for fantasy what Orion had done for space. 1830: Railroads and Robber Barons came in 1995, a faithful conversion of the Avalon Hill board game and the most obviously niche thing in the catalog. Then Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares in 1996, which sold well into the hundreds of thousands and is the one most people mean when they say they played Master of Orion.

~ the record ~

~ two masters ~

These games reached Turkey, which most of the companies on this site's gaming shelf did not. A PC game in 1996 traveled on a CD, and a CD went everywhere, through the same channels that moved everything else in the country at the time. Cartridge companies had no way to reach here at all and most of them are graves nobody in Turkey has a memory of. Master of Orion II is different. The studio name meant nothing here, because a small Austin developer's name meant nothing anywhere outside the credits screen, but the game was reachable in a way almost nothing else in this batch was.

What they had in common was patience as a design requirement. Both games took real hours and handed you a map you had to hold in your head. Neither told you that you would lose the first several times, which you did. Master of Orion II in particular has the odd distinction of having been remade and openly imitated for thirty years without anyone quite replacing it.

~ the cancelled one ~

Barcia sold Simtex to Spectrum HoloByte, the MicroProse parent, in 1995, fairly early in Master of Orion II's development, and took an executive role upstairs. The studio became MicroProse Austin and the Simtex name stopped appearing on products. Then came Guardians: Agents of Justice, a superhero squad tactics game in the X-COM mold, in development through 1996 and 1997.

It never worked. One executive complained the thing was slow as a pig, and it went through redesign after redesign without ever arriving somewhere that satisfied marketing and was still fun to play. In June 1998 MicroProse pulled the plug on the project and closed the entire Austin studio at the same time, laying off thirty-five people. The parent was in bad shape itself by then: a GT Interactive deal had fallen through, and Hasbro made a tender offer for MicroProse in August and closed it in September.

~ what replaced it ~

Wikipedia files the closure at 1997 and that date does not correspond to an event. The acquisition was 1995 and the shutdown was June 1998, with the Simtex name retired somewhere in between when the studio became MicroProse Austin. This grave is filed on the month the doors closed. The rights sat with Atari until a 2013 auction broke them up, sending Master of Orion to Wargaming and the publishing rights for Master of Magic to Slitherine. Barcia went into management and later ran Retro Studios. Nobody there designed another 4X game.

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