Soapbox: About the Industry

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

by Sandy Antunes
Aug 01,2002

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Welcome to my latest hard-hitting pragmatic business advice column. As usual, I ditch the pretentious to bring you the real numbers, the real way to best get your game to market and sell, sell, sell. Our topic today is 'creativity', taken from my perspective.

I have a game design which I expect to release 'soon' (on a geological scale, at least), and it is with a hearty sense of honesty that I attack the issue of whether it is the idea, or the execution, that makes for a best-selling game.

The answer? All ideas are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Therefore, success in the marketplace is less involved with 'the great new idea' and more concerned with how aligned your change is with the general mis-en-scene of the cultural milieu that enfolds the RPG intelligensia. Only by tapping into this subliminal superconsciousness in a meaningful way, and through ISO 9000 follow-though bringing your corporate culture into proper branding, can you expect success.

So forget that bit about ideas, sweat equity, and marketing. It's all about the zeitgeist, baby.

Let's look at the father(s) of the hobby. D&D by Arneson and Gygax, for example, built upon the basic strategic miniatures game they played, and added a multiracial and 'class' system in order to allow for interaction beyond the battlefield-- and thus was born roleplaying, in the form of 'combat underground instead of above ground'.

Clearly a mere evolution, and even today you can see that miniatures games and RPGs are really identical, except that one involves figures and stats, and the other involves diceless drama-based live action-- a minor tweak at best.

The excellent Steve Jackson release, "Nightmare Chess", infused basic chess with a randomized strategic component based on drawing cards. But few realize that Mr. Jackson didn't invent this concept. Rather, it was derived from a French game, "Le Nightmares du Croises", which loosely translates into "Crucified Nightmare". This clever French creation took the deterministic strategic game of "Tic-Tac-Toe" and added a tactical component by allowing card draws to modify board behavior. A simple 'twist' by Mr. Jackson to apply this to chess, and voila! A bestselling American game.

WizKids has made a recent fortune by reinventing miniatures. Their concept is simple: make it easy by printing the stats on the base of the figures, plus having a handy 3-fold 'lookup chart' of the special rules and conditions, plus requiring a basic understanding of the overall ground rules. This simple modification, then, of the basic system of "Monopoly" (wherein each card self-describes itself, just as each mini in the WizKids games self-describes itself), combined with a poorly written set of main rules, really makes the two games cousins in three ways. They're both self-explanatory, they both have a rulebook, and they both made lots of money. Not as much originality as you thought, eh? Told you so.

And, of course, there's M:TG (Magic: The Gathering). Originally proposed as "Robo Rally" by Richard Garfield, WotC's president (Peter Adkison) asked him to rewrite the game. By quickly making the minor change to switch it from a multiplayer tactical movement-based board game to a boardless dual-player card-based strategic randomized system of card combat, he created the megahit M:TG upon his own shoulders, as it were.

Heck, even this column isn't original. Instead, it's an 'evolution' wherein I took basic facts and 'evolved' them into more entertaining (albiet less factual) forms! So you see, there really isn't anything new under the sun.

Except my new game idea, of course.