Thursday, June 15, 2006

And Still More on Chris Crawford

I thought I posted this yesterday, but clearly I forgot.

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I had the strangest thought after I put up that Chris Crawford post: if you're still in your twenties, you've probably never even played a game designed by him.

Boy, did you miss out.

Crawford put out a game in 1985 called Balance of Power. It might well be the best geopolitical simulator ever created. Its primary competition? Balance of Power: the 1990 Edition. Since then, someone puts out a geopolitical simulator every few years, it never quite gets finished, it's clunky, and it dies a horrible death. I don't think anyone's ever matched Balance of Power--and it's 131k. No, that's not a typo--the size of Balance of Power: the 1990 Edition was 131k.

The original Balance of Power was 310k. Man, that's bloatware in comparison.

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