Wingman screenshot.
© 1983 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM
With two more games in the catalog, and a foot in the door on a second platform, Bill decided it was time for him to leave General Instrument and work full-time at MicroProse. There was no realistic way for him to increase his efforts at the company otherwise, but I was more cautious about giving up my steady paycheck, and still not convinced that this dream was going to last. Our philosophy had always been to avoid loans and venture capital, and it would only take a couple months of slow sales to drag us under. I decided it would be more prudent for me to go half-time, spending two days a week at the new MicroProse office space and three at General Instrument.
Fortunately, my managers at GI were happy to keep me around in whatever capacity I was willing, especially since my gaming experiments served as a form of ongoing education that directly benefited them. As just one example, my recent proposal for a new operating system for GI had been based largely on the Atari 800 architecture I had become so familiar with. I doubt anyone at Atari could have predicted that their ideas would end up in cash registers throughout the Northeast, but the design worked well for our purposes and was approved. Most of my coworkers understood I’d be jumping ship eventually, and many of them were hoping for jobs at MicroProse themselves, so there was no animosity when I started splitting my time. Bill and I were the technological version of hometown heroes, and they were rooting for our success as much as we were.
Now fully dedicated to sales and promotion, Bill began touting his piloting experience even more heavily than before, and calling himself “Wild Bill” in press releases—a nickname from his Air Force days that might have been his call sign, or might have just been something he made up himself. At one point he managed to get the attention of a local TV station, and on the day the reporter was scheduled to arrive, he came to work in a full flight suit, marching around the office as if this were the way he always dressed. After the news crew left, he suggested in an “I’m kidding but not really” kind of way that from now on, we should salute him whenever the press was around.
Later, we found out that he’d had flight suits made for us as well, each bearing a custom shoulder patch with our company’s new slogan, “The action is simulated, the excitement is real!” At first, I thought it was only a costume, but Bill proved its legitimacy by taking me to Martin State Airport for a personal flying experience. It was a clever way to write off his hobby as a business expense, along with the suits themselves, but his motives were not entirely self-serving. Now that Wingman was out the door, Bill’s next big plan was to go head-to-head against Microsoft’s wildly popular Flight Simulator, and he wanted me to have the most accurate inspiration possible.
Even with a pilot’s license, Bill had to pass an initial skills test before they would let us rent one of their small two-seater Cessnas. I waited in the control tower, which at the municipal level was just a building facing the runway, while a pilot on staff took Bill up in the air to do a series of “touch and goes.” They would take off, circle around gently, land again, and then accelerate directly into another takeoff. After several demonstrations of these two most important parts of flying, the staff member would turn over his seat to me, and Bill and I could go wherever we wanted.
I’m not sure if flying a Cessna is dramatically different from a fighter jet, or if Bill was just showing off and pushing the plane to its limits, but something in the way he was flying caused the employee next to me to mutter cheerfully, “Oh, that guy has no idea what he’s doing.”
I hadn’t been nervous before, but I was definitely reconsidering now. In ten minutes I’m going to be on that plane, I reminded myself. If I ran, did I stand a chance? Probably not. Bill would find a way to get me back here.
Obviously, I survived. It wasn’t even particularly terrifying, though I declined to take over the controls once we were safely in the air. Bill had taught many young pilots at the National Guard base in Pennsylvania, and a standard part of their training involved recovering from problems he had deliberately caused, such as aiming the plane toward the ground or stalling one engine. So on an intellectual level, I knew that I couldn’t do anything too catastrophic for him to save us from. I guess I chickened out. I do wish I had put my hands on the controls at least once, just so I could say I’d done it.
Though Cessnas were an acceptable substitute, what Bill really wanted was a game featuring the F-15 fighter jet. The main reason we stuck to old-fashioned aircraft was they had old-fashioned technology. If the plane had simple instrumentation and topped out at 117 miles per hour, then we didn’t have to worry about how fast we could draw the landscape, or how much flight data we could store. Never mind the compression algorithms; there simply wasn’t enough physical space in the lower half of the screen to draw an F-15’s panel full of gauges, at least not at current resolutions. Promises of better graphics and higher processing speeds may have been just over the accurately tilting horizon, but for now, Bill’s dream would have to wait.
Solo Flight box art.
© 1983 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM
Our official debut in the flying sim genre—as opposed to the arcade genre, which offered unrealistic maneuverability and unlimited fuel—was going to be called Solo Flight. I introduced the idea of a movable camera that could cover the plane from different perspectives, so the player could switch back and forth between views within the cockpit and behind the plane mid-flight. We also came up with the subtle but effective detail of showing your plane’s shadow on the ground to help you estimate altitude, the first flight sim to do this as far as I know. Finally, I turned my focus to three-dimensional graphics, a beast I would continue to slay in small increments for years to come.
3D gets taken for granted now, but there is a ton of trigonometry involved, and I can’t express enough how relatively powerless these computers were. If you have children, you probably have a pile of toys in your house with more processing speed than what we were working with. In any case, I manipulated something called a linedraw algorithm to make the mountains and runways project outward in a more 3D fashion than ever before, and you’ll have to trust me when I say that it was really cool, and your mind would have been blown if you had been there at the time.
But all of these code improvements were outshined by one critical design choice: we didn’t eliminate the concept of play. Even though “games” like the Ace titles and “simulators” like this one were considered isolated markets, we saw no reason why the plane nerds shouldn’t have fun like the gaming nerds did. As long as we were careful not to cross the sacred line of realism, Bill and I could be the royal marriage that brought peace between our two nations. So we included a simple mail delivery challenge, suggesting deadlines and destinations that our pilots could attempt if they wanted to, no pressure.
The feature was a hit, and successfully distinguished us from Microsoft’s Flight Simulator—even stealing the crown, in many reviewers’ opinions. The circulation of these reviews was small, though, and there was no middle ground in the retail market. At the bottom were the mom-and-pop stores, and directly above them were national outlets like Sears, which in those days was even more profitable than Walmart. Upward mobility came all at once, or not at all.
The secret, Bill told me, was that the national chains didn’t decide for themselves what products to carry. Instead, they leased out their shelf space to professional distributors, who would sign their own contracts with individual game companies, like recording agents looking for the next big act. A distributor stumbling upon our game at a local shop was about as likely as a major record producer scouting out karaoke night at the dive bar. To get the attention we needed, Bill said, we had to get ourselves to CES in Chicago.
In 1984, the Consumer Electronics Show was about half the size it is today, meaning it hosted a mere 90,000 attendees split between three massive floors of one of the largest convention halls in downtown Chicago. The plan was for us to go together, so that I could demons
trate the game and answer technical questions, while Bill would be free to grab everyone who walked by and convince them what a financial boon we could provide for their company. We also brought along George Geary, an all-around useful guy at the office who could hold down the fort if Bill and I were stretched too thin.
Room reservations at the McCormick conference center were beyond our budget, so we settled on a place a few blocks away. It had been over $11,000 just to secure a basic 10' × 10' booth, which was still a bargain considering that today’s vendors spend closer to $150,000. I didn’t know at the time how much it was costing us, but I would have gone along with it regardless. I always left the money decisions up to Bill, and he was sure that if we could just get Solo Flight in front of the right people, we would be picked up by a distributor before the end of the conference.
Even in its half-constructed state, the vendors’ hall was exhilarating. I had never imagined the gaming industry could take up this much square footage, or be this diverse. Each booth represented a unique building block of our trade, and the surrounding disarray of cardboard boxes and black fabric did nothing to hide their potential. Here one person was selling a new and improved joystick, while across the aisle another had designed a hard drive that was faster than the others. Neither had to meddle with or even understand each other’s specialties in order to collaborate. They just had to agree that games were worth it. I only hoped our own offering could live up to the rest.
Our booth itself, sadly, did not, and CES was an instructive experience in that regard. It wasn’t until we saw the other companies unpacking that it dawned on us how little we’d brought. Where they had electric flashing signs, we had one vinyl banner. Lucasfilm and Electronic Arts had rows of demo stations, while we had a single Atari hooked up to a monitor swiped from someone’s desk, probably my own.
Bill became oddly anxious to get what equipment we did have up and running. Better to act like this was our plan all along than to appear both unprepared and slow, I guess. But the tables we’d reserved were not in our booth when we arrived, and no one could promise when they would be delivered. Muttering about the evils of unionized operations, Bill strode off to take care of the problem, and returned a short while later with our three tables—or someone’s three tables, at any rate. They were mismatched in both color and size, and did not exactly enhance the professionalism of our booth. But I knew better than to ask where he’d found them. “Do we, or do we not, have tables?” he would have replied. So we set them up.
A little while later, some workers came by with our nice, matching tables, but when they saw that we already had some, they shrugged and left again. Bill watched them go with triumphantly crossed arms. He was in his element, he had the energy of five people, and he was going to rule this corner of the convention hall like no warrior salesman ever had before.
And he did. By the end of the conference, we had multiple offers on our game.
Most were standard distributorship deals, and Bill was prepared to spend months aggressively negotiating those terms, should we decide to go in that direction. But one unusual offer had come from HesWare, a competing software developer that had taken the kind of venture capital money we had steadfastly turned down. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to be a company with more money than games—a similar description could apply to the distributors we were hoping to partner up with at this convention, after all—but partnership was not the same as ownership, and Bill and I had always been clear about staying on our side of the equation. Rather than a stake in the company or ongoing royalties, however, HesWare wanted to pay us a flat $250,000 to buy the game in its entirety and sell it as their own. The decision was big enough that Bill thought I should at least weigh in.
On the one hand, long-term sales of Solo Flight might surpass HesWare’s offer, especially now that we had distributor deals on the table. On the other, we were still running on a very tight budget, with me not even able to work full-time yet. A large injection of cash would help us significantly, and keep us afloat if the game turned out to be a bust.
I gave Bill the only advice I had to offer: if you believe you have something special, then you should treat it that way. “I heard you shouldn’t sell the family jewels,” I said.
It turned out to be the right decision. Unbeknownst to us, Hes-Ware was going through significant financial problems, and they declared bankruptcy just a few months later. If we’d sold our game to them, we would have lost the rights and likely never been paid.
Instead, Solo Flight brought in steady sales from the moment it hit store shelves, and with our new status as a distributable company, we were able to update a few old games for national release as well. First, I honed my AI skills with a new version of Floyd of the Jungle that allowed the computer to play any character not in use by a real person. Taken to its logical conclusion, we now had a demo mode that could tantalize customers just like the arcades did. While I was at it, I tweaked the enemy AI in Chopper Rescue, and converted all of the code for both games into SidTran, a more efficient programming language that I had created myself. SidTran’s main advantage over other languages was the same one provided by Dr. Sherman’s teletype over the punch card system: instant gratification. You could see the results of your code changes faster, and make twice as many corrections in half the time.
Our distributor did require one major revision to Chopper Rescue, which was the title itself. There was another game with a somewhat similar premise called Choplifter, and we were now at a level where that sort of thing mattered, so the national re-release was named Air Rescue I instead. (Though I guess the distributor didn’t worry about being liable for our company name, because no one ever brought that up until the day the injunction arrived.)
A few months after signing the Solo Flight deal, Bill said the words I’d been waiting to hear ever since the ad consultant had walked into our users’ group four years earlier.
“Sid, we’re making enough money. You can quit your day job.”
I wasn’t the only one he said it to, either. Almost overnight, we became a real office, with conversations at the water cooler and conference tables that had never been in anyone’s kitchen. We were still more like a family than a corporation—most of our employees were old friends, Bill’s wife had been doing our administrative work from the very beginning, and it wouldn’t be long before I proposed to a young woman named Gigi, whom I’d predictably met at the office since that was where I spent all of my time. But what had started out as a labor of love now finally qualified as a legitimate labor that we all happened to love.
The expansion was a financially aggressive move with the potential to backfire, but to his great credit, Bill never lost sight of the fact that quality content was the driving force behind it all. Selling multiple games at once could not continue unless we also had the same number in development, so his next order of business was to advertise that we were hiring.
In order to lure the smartest and most creative talent in the industry, Bill told me, he wanted to promote the message that we treated our designers with the admiration and respect they deserved. He had already made himself an icon to the players and the press, marching around in uniform and loosely implying that the US Air Force had mobilized a game-testing division on our behalf, but that kind of grandstanding wouldn’t appeal to the programmer types. They would only accept a folk hero, he said, one of their own. Therefore, he had decided that the two stars of his new ad campaign were going to be me and a giant pile of money.
I’m not sure if the photo ever made it into a magazine, but I thought the concept was so bizarrely funny that I kept a copy for myself. In it, I am sitting at my desk with Solo Flight proudly displayed on the screen. Beside me are two drawstring bags straight out of a comic book—dollar signs painted on the side, and a bouquet of cash bursting from the top—while I hold a spread of bills in front of a well-coached expression of pleasant surprise. But Bill had decided that even this was too subtle, and just before the photo was
taken, he had climbed onto my desk to hang glittering golden dollar signs from the ceiling. He never told me what kind of caption he had in mind, but I’m confident it didn’t include the phrase “only recently quit his day job.”
“Moneybags” photo shoot.
© 1984 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM. PHOTO CREDIT: GEORGE GEARY.
Even if we had been rolling in cash, flaunting it was not my style, to say the least. Bill himself is fond of telling an anecdote about how I once forgot to deposit a paycheck until Accounting called to investigate. I’m sure it was the result of a busy schedule rather than carelessness, but it’s true that my checks were never earmarked for immediate spending on whatever the 1980s version of “bling” was. I’m usually a saver, and always a planner. But I was happy to go along with whatever Bill thought would help the company, up to and including outlandish photo ops. All that mattered to me was that I got to make games for a living.
The steady march of technology was bringing other industries to prominence in those days as well. In 1975, a French company named Sextant Avionique had developed the first “heads-up display,” or HUD, for the Dassault Mercure aircraft. The idea was to project information onto a clear screen directly in the pilot’s view, instead of forcing his eyes down to the instruments and back up again to the horizon. It was a big success, and aircraft manufacturers had quickly adapted the idea for both military and commercial applications, while science fiction writers fantasized about displays inside our own eyeballs (cue Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator).
Then, in February 1984, the US Air Force announced their new fleet of F-15E fighter jets, which included a larger and more detailed HUD than ever before. The pilot’s field of vision was to be filled from one edge to the other with glowing text, aiming guides, and highlights of the terrain for precision maneuvers. The runway was no longer a runway, but two digital lines. The enemy was overlaid with luminous crosshairs.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 4