Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)

History

Strategic Simulations, Inc. was a Miniatures & Board Wargames company before it was anything else. Joel Billings, a board-wargame enthusiast, founded it in the summer of 1979 after realizing that home computers like the TRS-80 could handle the bookkeeping that made hex-and-counter games so slow. Trip Hawkins — then at Apple, and soon the founder of Electronic Arts — persuaded him to back the Apple II, and Computer Bismarck arrived in January 1980. By late 1980 SSI was advertising games "from Waterloo to the Super Bowl," and by 1985 it had some 60 employees and was publishing about a dozen titles a year from its base in Mountain View, California.

The company's turn toward fantasy began in 1984–85 with Questron, the Phantasie series and Wizard's Crown, tactical RPGs that owed as much to tabletop miniatures play as to Ultima or Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Then, in 1987, came the deal that defined it. TSR put the computer rights to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons up for bid, and SSI — smaller and less technically advanced than other bidders — unexpectedly won on the strength of its experience turning complex rules into software.

By 1992 SSI was no longer primarily a wargame house. In 1994 it launched Panzer General, the hit that spawned a "5-Star General" line including Fantasy General (1996), and in the same year it was acquired by Mindscape. Through Mindscape it passed to The Learning Company and Mattel, and in March 2001 to Ubisoft, which retired the SSI brand a few years later.

Notable work

The heart of SSI's legacy is the Gold Box, the engine and house style that began with Pool of Radiance in 1988. Set in the Forgotten Realms and built on real AD&D rules — THAC0, saving throws, memorized spells — it paired a first-person exploration view with turn-based tactical battles on a grid. Pool of Radiance sold 264,536 computer copies in North America and was followed by Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990) and Pools of Darkness (1991); a Dragonlance trilogy beginning with Champions of Krynn (1990); and the Savage Frontier games developed by Stormfront Studios. The line closed with Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures (1993), a construction kit that let players build their own Gold Box modules.

SSI also served as publisher for outside studios. Westwood Associates made Hillsfar (1989) and then Eye of the Beholder (1991), a real-time, Blobber-style First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers') in the vein of Dungeon Master that SSI sold more than 129,000 copies of. Stormfront built Neverwinter Nights (1991) on the Gold Box engine for America Online: the first graphical online RPG, and for years one of AOL's most popular features. In the 1990s SSI carried the license into TSR's newer worlds with Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993) for Dark Sun and Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994) for Ravenloft.

Legacy

SSI proved that the full weight of a tabletop rulebook could survive translation to a floppy disk, and it did so while Gary Gygax's AD&D was still the dominant tabletop RPG. The Gold Box set the template — licensed setting, party creation, rules fidelity, turn-based tactics — that BioWare's Baldur's Gate and eventually Baldur's Gate 3 would refine, and Neverwinter Nights on AOL was an early step toward the MMORPGs. Its games are still sold and played today through digital re-releases, and "Gold Box" remains shorthand among RPG fans for the most rules-faithful D&D computer games of their generation.