Synergistic Software

~ the eulogy ~

Bob Clardy took an electrical engineering degree out of Rice in 1974, went to work for Boeing at the Johnson Space Center, and moved to Seattle with his wife Ann in 1977. Two machines had reached the market that year, the TRS-80 and the Apple II. He bought an Apple II upgraded to sixteen kilobytes in 1978 and started rewriting Dragon Maze, a short Integer BASIC listing printed in the back of the Apple II reference manual, in which a randomly generated maze has a dragon in it chasing you.

What he built from that listing was Dungeon Campaign, and Synergistic Software was founded in 1978 to sell it. Ann's father named the company. The game gives you four randomly generated maze levels and a party of fifteen adventurers, and asks you to take as much gold out as you can while avoiding the traps and whatever is guarding each floor. It was published in the same year people were still arguing about whether a personal computer was a toy.

The sequel, Wilderness Campaign, added resource management on top of exploration and is credited with shaping the design of the Dark Tower electronic board game in 1981. Synergistic also sold business software. There was a word processor and a graphics utility called Higher Graphics in 1979, plus a database called The Modifiable Database that grew out of a contract job Clardy had taken to write something simpler. That mix was normal for the era. There was not yet enough money in games alone to be only a games company.

~ the dossier ~

~ the campaign games ~

The company kept working for more than twenty years, which almost nobody from the Apple II generation managed. In the late 1980s it built an engine it called World Builders and ran a series of licensed titles on it: War in Middle Earth in 1988, Spirit of Excalibur in 1990, Vengeance of Excalibur and Conan the Cimmerian in 1991, Warriors of Legend in 1993. The pattern was the same each time. Take a world somebody else already owned and give it a map and an army.

Alongside that ran a long list of ports and work-for-hire that reads like the whole history of the American software business in one column. The MS-DOS conversion of The Fool's Errand. Thexder. Silpheed on DOS and the Apple IIGS. An Atari 8-bit Pitstop II. Then LA Law, The Beverly Hillbillies, Super Battleship, Carrier Aces, two seasons of Front Page Sports Football Pro.

~ inside sierra ~

Sierra On-Line bought Synergistic in 1996 and let it keep operating as a distinct development group. Three years later the parent company went through a restructuring and the studio was closed on 22 February 1999, twenty-one years after the Clardys started it. Nothing about the date is unusual for 1999. Sierra spent the second half of that decade being bought and resold, and the studios that had been acquired were the first line items available whenever a quarter needed fixing.

~ the funny part ~

The best-known thing Synergistic Software ever made does not carry its name anywhere a player would look. Diablo: Hellfire, the 1997 expansion to Diablo, was developed by Synergistic for Sierra and released on 24 November 1997. Blizzard did not make it and has kept it at arm's length ever since, which left the expansion in an odd position: too official to ignore, too unofficial to count.

Diablo itself was everywhere in Turkish internet cafes a few years later, installed on rows of machines where half the catalog had arrived by means nobody discussed. So the one product of this twenty-one-year company that plausibly reached me was an add-on to another studio's game, running on a copy that had not been bought, three years after the people who wrote it had been laid off.

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