Revisionist History: Simtex

Though the concept of the 4X game—exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating—is as old as Empire, the term itself didn’t appear until the post-Civilization turn-based strategy boom of the early 1990s. The problem was that every game invited comparison with Sid Meier’s distinct and ingenious design. So the best way to deflect comparison was to send gamers to strange new worlds. There were two options: put them in the future or send them to a mythical past. Simtex did both and created two titles that stand with Civilization as landmarks in turn-based strategy.
1993’s Master of Orion is indisputably a classic. Simtex founders Steve Barcia and Ken Burd started with a space conquest game called Star Lords. They passed it around, and it came to the attention of Alan Emrich, the strategy guide author and columnist who had coined the term 4X. A few tweaks to the underlying model led to the space conquest game that changed the industry. A highly regarded sequel would appear three years later. To their eternal credit, neither Barcia nor Burd had anything to do with the infamous Master of Orion 3, which has most likely killed the series forever.
The fantasy world game Master of Magic was published in 1995. It looked just like Civilization, right down to the city screens, but had races with specializations and unique armies, both natural and supernatural. It was much closer to the original Civilization model, but with elves. Since it didn’t attract the fans that MOO did (they’ve been affectionately dubbed MOO and MOM), there was only a muted and unheard clamor for a sequel.
Both games were clearly derivative of the Civilization formula. Both had “goody huts,” whether in the form of loot-filled dungeons or planets with artifacts. The main idea was to improve your planets or outposts until they became contributing members of your society and could crank out armies. Settlers or colonists expanded your empire, and AI-controlled powers would try to stop you. Throw in some diplomacy. You know the drill by now. But the Simtex games did make two major contributions that changed the way all future 4X would be viewed.
Before the MOO era, most games didn’t have asymmetric sides or races. You might get unique units at most. But Master of Orion turned biology into destiny. Some races were better at science. Others excelled at production. In Master of Magic, the divisions between the races were based on the types of magic they mastered, which were very much like mana colors in a Magic the Gathering deck. Now almost all 4X strategy differentiates factions with bonuses and penalties, but this wasn’t design dogma until Simtex did it.
The other big step forward was to put tactics into the strategy mix by letting you play with your armies in battle mode. This was something Sid Meier had always avoided because he didn’t like how it broke the game into two separate layers, strategic and tactical. But Simtex did it anyway. In MOO, you could design your own ships however the hell you wanted. Big ships, little ships, fat ships, cheap ships, whatever. In a historical setting, my archer and your archer aren’t all that different. But sci-fi is all about making the ultimate starship and seeing how it fares. It’s the Enterprise versus the Millennium Falcon for all the marbles. Similarly, MOM let you build custom armies out of different units, a feature you would later see in games like Disciples and Kohan.
You can’t overestimate the importance of these changes. Alpha Centauri’s factions are very similar to those you would find in MOO. RTSs quickly progressed from the cosmetic differences in Dune II and the early WarCraft games to the dramatic variation in StarCraft and the specialization in the Age of Empires games. Though other games had allowed tactical minigames, none had offered the customization and sense of ownership that Simtex gave you.
The good die young. Part of the glory of the Simtex era is that the developer vanished so quickly. It only made four games: the first two Master of Orion games, Master of Magic, and a boardgame conversion called 1830: Railroads and Robber Barons. Work on Guardians of Justice, a superhero tactical combat game much like an early Freedom Force, progressed too slowly for publisher MicroProse, which cancelled the game, a move that led to the demise of Simtex. But for all Simtex’s brevity, like the game that obviously inspired it, its contributions stand the test of time.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #181