Confessions of an RPG Developer @ Atomic PC

Australian mag Atomic PC has a fascinating piece titled Confessions of an RPG Developer.  While the author's conclusions on the genre are debatable the article is a good read - it's essentially a short history of the genre with input from Richard Garriott, Chris Avellone, Joel Billings and Todd Howard and here's a sample:

There are those, though, who were inspired by D&D in a different way. Where Garriott admits in his high school days that he found strict adherence to the die-rolling and statistics management side of D&D incredibly tiresome, Joel Billings, former CEO of SSI, thinks it was the tactical side of the game that made it so compelling. And when his company released the Gold Box D&D games to unprecedented commercial success, he was vindicated. A die-hard wargamer at heart (growing up in a family of veterans tends to do that to you), Billings was never too roused by Elves, Orcs, and magic arrows. It wasn’t until Paul Murray and Keith Brors – designer and programmer of SSI’s first Gold Box hit, Pool of Radiance, respectively – pointed out the tactics involved in D&D that he took interest. ‘Most of the games that were out while we were doing Pool of Radiance, like Ultima,’ Billings remembers, ‘were, you know, more that sort of, “One guy wanders around the world” adventure games. And what Paul had done a little differently with one of our RPGs before Pool, Wizard’s Crown, was tactical combat – more like a war game, you know? You had your party, and you’d go into battle, and you’d move the pieces around.’

Thanks, Incognito!