Strategic Simulations

» see ssionline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ssi finished its best work before i had a machine capable of running any of it. computer bismarck is a january 1980 apple ii release and pool of radiance is 1988, which puts the company's entire important period inside a decade i spent not owning a computer, in a country where none of this was distributed anyway. the name reached me later and secondhand, as three letters on the spine of strategy games that other companies were publishing by then.

the founding is a good story on its own. joel billings played board wargames and noticed in the summer of 1979 that home computers could handle the bookkeeping those games buried you in. he took the idea to avalon hill and to automated simulations. both passed. so he started the company himself and hired john lyons to write computer bismarck, which is generally credited as the first serious wargame published for a microcomputer. billings had planned to build it on a north star machine until trip hawkins, then at apple and later the founder of electronic arts, talked him onto the apple ii for the graphics.

it grew into a real business quietly. by 1985 antic wrote that serious computer wargamers considered ssi a company in a class by itself, and the company was running sixty employees and shipping twelve games a year, with developers like gary grigsby taking royalties as high as twenty thousand dollars per title. fiscal 1987 closed at five million dollars in sales against eighty-nine games released in eight years.

~ the record ~

~ the gold box ~

in 1987 ssi acquired the advanced dungeons and dragons license from tsr, which at that point was the most valuable name in the hobby and had never been done properly on a computer. pool of radiance landed in 1988 and thirty official titles followed. the engine underneath them got called the gold box after the color of the boxes, and its defining move was refusing to simplify: combat dropped you into a turn-based tactical grid running something close to the actual tabletop rules, initiative and armor class and all.

that decision is why the lineage is unbroken. every party-based rpg with a pause button and a positioning problem is downstream of those boxes, and the studios that later made the famous ones grew up on them. the games are hard to go back to now for reasons of interface rather than design, which is the usual fate of software that was right about the hard part and dated on the easy part.

~ the ownership chain ~

mindscape bought ssi in 1994, and by the letter of it that is when the company died, since it stopped existing as an independent entity that year. the brand kept shipping, so nobody outside noticed. what followed is one of the ugliest ownership chains in the industry. mindscape went to pearson and from there into the learning company. mattel then paid roughly three and a half billion dollars for tlc in 1999 and wrote most of it off almost immediately.

mattel unloaded the whole thing on gores technology group in 2000 for terms widely described as effectively nothing. gores then sold the entertainment division to ubisoft in march 2001, with the broderbund and mindscape catalogs bundled into the same transaction. ssi arrived at ubisoft as one line item in a portfolio of distressed assets, and the brand was allowed to lapse within a year or two.

~ what got buried with it ~

the last stretch is not the d&d work, it is panzer general in 1994, which took the same design instinct and made it approachable enough to sell to people who had never touched a hex map. it produced allied general and pacific general, plus a couple of non-historical spinoffs, all filed later under the five-star general banner. panzer general ii in 1997 sold well past a hundred thousand copies on its first release and is still being modded today, three decades on.

the 3d attempts in 1999 and 2000 went nowhere and the name went quiet after them. in december 2013 billings donated a set of the company's games to the international center for the history of electronic games, source code included, computer bismarck among them. the company had been legally dead for nineteen years by then and the founder was still the one making sure the files survived.

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