IN 1972

SPI was never a part of "corporate life." In those days men wore suits to work, but a suit was never seen at SPI. It was as unusual a place as wargaming was. The hobby has become somewhat normalized since then, but at the time SPI had the feeling of something that wasn't supposed to exist at all, like a weed that had grown through the cracks. The first two issues of S&T after Dunnigan took over were printed at night at the IBM plant where he worked as a night watchman. The S&T staff smuggled the magazines out the back door into a waiting taxi at dawn. Pretty much "counter-cultural."

by Kevin Zucker

When I arrived in New York, on the first of October, 1972, John Lindsay was in his sixth year as mayor. Madison Square Garden hosted John Lennon, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, and Elvis. David Bowie made his debut at Carnegie Hall, three days before I arrived.

The city was in decline, plagued with corruption, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, environmental ills and a mounting deficit. From the transit strike of 1966 to the Hard Hat Riots of 1970, unrest and tension blighted the cityscape. A decade of middle-class flight and a dwindling manufacturing sector had left the city reeling on the verge of collapse.

The flight of businesses left a vacuum for new companies to grow. A glut of office space meant cheaper rent for start-ups. One of these companies was Simulations Publications, Inc. Starting from 1,000 subscribers when they took over S&T Magazine in 1969, by 1972 the circulation was nearing 20,000 and SPI had already published three dozen games.^[1]

That October the Presidential campaign was in its final swing, with New York, like most of the nation, about to give Richard Nixon a second term (ending with his impeachment in 1974). Feminism was in the ascendant with the emergence of Ms. Magazine, produced on Lexington Ave. I was trying to get my bearings in the unfamiliar and somewhat overwhelming cityscape. Fortunately, my co-workers at SPI were helpful. They advised navigating by keeping an eye on the Empire State Building, generally visible, half a mile north of the Flatiron District. Broadway was another great landmark, because of its diagonal path through the regular grid of streets and avenues. The Flatiron building at 23rd Street got its triangular shape because of Broadway. SPI, then temporarily lodged at 34 East 23rd Street, was preparing to move to larger digs five doors east at No. 44.

I liked to go into the office early, and spend some time in the quiet there by myself working on my own projects and listening to the classical radio station. It was fun to notice the first arrivals, and the gradual increase in the energy and hum of activity.

I had already cut my game development teeth working with Dana Lombardy on Conflict Magazine. My idea was to mark up the existing rules and then retype, rinse and repeat. The act of typing forced you to slow down enough to notice the possible problems. I worked on Destruction of Army Group Center, a rather unbalanced simulation of 1944 on the East Front; Red Star/White Star, a modern tactical game, and several others.

As I arrived from California to take my new job at SPI, Jim Dunnigan and his girlfriend met me at La Guardia airport. They had booked me into the shabby-fabulous Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street, in Manhattan, close to work. A thunder-storm brought such a flood into my room that I had to get dressed, grab my suitcase and briefcase and get a different room. I found better shelter when I met John Young. He kindly let me crash on his couch. He was rarely home, so I had the place to myself mostly. I quickly became discouraged looking for an apartment I could afford on my $800/mo. salary. The uprooted, disoriented suburbanite was lucky to have a livable place to land.

John had the second floor apartment in his parent's house in Bay Ridge, an Italian-Irish neighborhood near the Verrazano Narrows, in Brooklyn. Everything about John was steadfastly Irish. The subway was a ten-block windy walk up Fort Hamilton Parkway, then a 30-minute ride on the EE to 23rd St. in Manhattan, where SPI was located. My low point came when John’s Russian Blue cat, named “Face,” landed squarely in the middle of my pizza with all four paws.

A fierce competitor in Scrabble, John could always be relied upon to attempt “alternative” spellings such as “ZO” for “ZOO.” “Schmirndock” was his all-purpose name for any of his playtesters [or maybe he meant “Schmendrick”—an apprentice Schlemiel.] John was very loveable, but his contagious cheerfulness and jovial laugh concealed his true self, which he shared with very few. He hid his cares behind the humor and jesting. One of John’s allies in this endeavor was a large squeaky toy with wheels named “Yellow Dog,” looking like the Disney character Goofy, which he unleashed on the unsuspecting to let off steam when things got too tense around the office. He also made ample use of squirt-guns and snowballs. John was employed as SPI's accountant and he designed games in his “spare time.” Since he couldn’t endure arguments of any kind, he may have tried to conceal the true state of SPI’s finances. The company was in a state of accelerated growth but was never solvent. In those early years John even posted the balance sheet in the magazine.

John was an important part of the “hothouse atmosphere” in the R&D Department. I worked with John Young on Austerlitz, Red Star/White Star and Rifle & Sabre. Actually, at SPI the designer took a back seat to the developer after the hand-off. John seemed to lose interest in the small details as he moved on to the challenges of the next design, so it was up to me to pick up the pieces.

One day, as I was arriving back in Bay Ridge, I stepped into the vestibule and stood face to face with John’s red-haired teenage sister. She was a beauty. We were both surprised and except for a mumbled apology nothing was said. However, there was energy between us as she told me many years later; she was rendered speechless. She didn’t register the slightest interest, though, and we were never introduced.

I watched a lot of Public TV—theater and arts programming unknown in 1970’s suburbia, or read John’s history books to while away the dark nights. I went to work early and found something like peace and clarity that allowed me to set my agenda for the day. I did my laundry at the local laundromat. A kindly attendant had to show me how to get a small box of “suds” from the dispensing machine.

My father had tried to interest me in the stock market, getting me to chart the daily action. That November, the Dow Jones broke 1,000 for the first time. I’m standing there in someone else’s apartment, hearing this useless information, knowing I will never buy one share of stock.

The modern wargame may be an Avalon Hill invention, but SPI invented the wargame factory. Lots of practices that came out of there are now considered norms, like the idea that a game has a designer and a developer, or the purpose-made game series with common rules. —Dave Demko

Shortly after I started work at SPI, the company moved its offices a few doors down 23rd Street from 34 East to 44 East. Several doors away at 14 East 23rd St. was our shabby lunchtime hangout, Shandon's Irish Pub, with its steam-table fare of sausage, sauerkraut, carrots and mashed potatoes which we washed down with a little glass of Heineken beer. Across the street was the Metropolitan Life Insurance building with its clock tower chiming every quarter hour, the "Westminster Quarters" melody, borrowed from Handel's Messiah and at the end of the block was the famous and much-photographed Flatiron Building, at 20 stories the world’s tallest building when it opened one hundred years ago. Here was a completely different world from my former place of employment, where I had worn cut-off jeans to work and lived only 300 sandy steps to the Pacific Ocean. 

I learned very little about game design from SPI's chief designer, Jim Dunnigan. He was strictly focused on churning out the product. There was little mentoring or apprenticeship. Rather, I was given assignments and learned by doing. I was assigned the task of "developing" the game Foxbat and Phantom. Fortunately, I had a few unpublished game designs under my belt before I came to SPI, and had at least enough sense to base the new game on SPI’s previous, although anachronistic, entry—Flying Circus.

I recall sitting in Jim's office (with the gerbils skittering through yellow tubes lining the walls) as he described the game idea, handing me a single 3"x5" card with a few notes jotted down. That was the design I was supposed to develop. He let me know where I stood by comparing me to a "4-4" infantry division (not, as I saw it, an "8-6" panzer). It was sink or swim.

In December I met Ina, two and a half years my senior, who was working at the same firm down a dark hall in a dusty office checking over computer printouts of subscribers. I often visited her office, sometimes just sitting quietly as she worked. 

I quit the job in January and headed to Germany, dropping in on my friend from high school, posted in Mainz, in Ashes too: an Army soldier, getting drunk with his wife in the kitchen. I quickly moved on to Munich and then Vienna.

I tried out my German on the ticket agent; he, unimpressed, replied in English: “You vant to go to Munich?”

Sitting in a dark café on Vienna’s Universitätsring in the late-afternoon, watching a light snowfall, reading the Financial Times on its wooden newspaper spit. I had no plan.

After a semester back in Sacramento, I returned to SPI in the summer of 1973, working at the front desk from 9 to 1. While answering the phones and signing for packages, I answered game questions by referencing a notebook of the collected rules of SPI games, organized by subject—for instance, there was a section for all the supply rules, all the movement rules, etc.—which Frank Davis had clipped out of the printed rules folders and taped onto separate pages. Before long they started bringing me rules manuscripts to edit. These were often a creative jumble of ideas, which I reorganized by making note of the topic of each paragraph in the margins. Eventually I went back on full-time (occasionally working until 9 at night) as the Managing Editor, under Art Director Redmond Simonsen.

My office, which I shared with the overworked typesetter, Linda Mosca, became the lynchpin between the R&D department and the Art department, and in fact it had two doors: one leading down each hallway. Both physically and conceptually, I was at the center of the work flow, where R&D interfaced with production. At production time there was often a line of R&D staffers waiting to talk to me about their projects, as I busily marked-up their copy before passing it on to Linda.

I learned a lot about production from Redmond. My job was to read the rules and magazine articles, discuss my questions with the developer or author, and then either assign a re-write or tackle the revisions myself. Generally I would re-type the entire manuscript from start to finish. In this way I really got to know the game and easily spotted inconsistencies. I tried to put myself in the place of the gamer, looking for gaps and hidden assumptions, realizing that players would have nothing more than the rules and charts to guide them. I tried to impart some rigor into the process. Even if I knew what the developer intended, that wasn't always what was written.

One method I employed to establish some standards was to habitually throw out the section on movement, as a prime example, and substitute my well-honed, standardized movement rules. When the "Quadrigame" concept started with Blue & Gray, I got the four designers together in a room and insisted that they would not leave until we had agreed on a single set of rules. This was mainly to streamline production, saving myself from the effort of producing four completely different rules folders, but it helped the players as well.

There were so many games in the schedule that everyone in the company was encouraged to produce one. I tried my hand as a designer in the quadrigame format, first with Bloody Ridge in the Island War Quad and then with Napoleon’s Last Battles.

The sketch maps we received from R&D were often so crude that I took it upon myself to correct features like coastlines. At least our game maps would bear some semblance to actual geography. One day I was looking at the West Point Atlas of Napoleonic Wars, and I saw how neatly the four battles of the Waterloo campaign would fit into a quad map format. After I roughed-out the map layout, I wrote up my discovery in a Feedback question and printed it in the next issue of S&T. Some weeks later, I was surprised by Dunnigan’s announcement that the response had been overwhelming, and company policy held that the author of the Feedback question should be the designer.

With NLB I got to learn what it was like to see your design taken away from you by the developer. It was decreed that once the game left the designer’s hands, the developer was in charge and made all subsequent decisions. “The designer proposes, the developer disposes,” was the rule. Then, when the game went to the Art Department, the developer had to stop developing and wasn't allowed to add any chrome, just to correct everything that had already been wrought. I was lucky to have a uniquely talented developer, Jay Nelson, who saved the game from all of my myriad ideas, and, in truth, made it the great game it is.

The R&D Department was the heart of SPI, and, like any system, it was more than the sum of the individuals who worked there. Working closely with the R&D staff kept me in the hothouse of ideas that pervaded the air we breathed. In my role as editor, developer and designer, I saw all sides of the creative process, learning to collaborate and to relinquish control in order to meet strict production schedules. The pace was hectic but the strides we made were exciting, even though the task before us, in the end, was impossible.

By the beginning of 1977, the size and complexity of the games had grown beyond the capacity of the production system. The monster Highway to the Reich was not ready on deadline. Terry Hardy and Jay Nelson knocked a window into the wall between their offices so that they could collaborate on the rules, with Jay taking the even numbered sections and Terry the odd ones. I was expected to feed these pages into typesetting piecemeal, without having a chance to review the entire manuscript. I knew what a train wreck this would be, and resigned.

In the course of editing over 100 games I came to know something no one else at SPI knew—where all the best ideas were. After I left SPI, I borrowed many of those great ideas—attrition, administrative points, and others—and blended them together in my own way to create the first OSG game, Napoleon at Bay.

 

Portions of this account appeared previously in Wargame Design Magazine.

Of related interest: The Zen of Game Design https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0443/6423/4910/files/NYinthe70s-5.pdf?