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Articles
Last week, Johnny Wilson covered his early years at Computer Gaming World, his relationship with the secretive Scorpia and CGW’s editorial policy of playing a game to completion before publishing a review.
In this second and concluding part, he talks about the CGW Top 100, reporting on industry rumors and the games that went on behind the scenes when the staff was busy playing games for a living.
Part 2:
THE
WAY IT USED TO BE!
By Johnny Wilson
(All pictures and text accompanying pictures are courtesy Russell Sipe and are part of Mr. Sipe’s personal archive. My sincere thanks to Mr. Sipe & Mr. Wilson for allowing JA the honor of publishing their reminiscences of the glory days of computer gaming and life at CGW)
Speaking of fair, another
tenet of Russell’s and my editorial philosophy was that it was
okay to be brutal in reviews, as long as we were fair. Fair meant
that we sometimes went out of our way to indicate what designers were
trying to do in a game, even if we felt it was a bad decision
or ended up with horrible execution. We tried to be fair whether we
were writing news, printing rumors or tabulating the Top 100 Games.
For many years, our Top 100 (divided into Action/Adventure and Strategy/Wargames)
was considered as important as the New York Times Bestseller List.
| It was so important that more than one software publisher attempted to stuff the ballot box. On one occasion, an Accolade employee literally Xeroxed the ballot cards and sent them in. We caught that right away and threw them out. On another occasion, I started noticing a lot of postcards from zip codes around Baltimore, MD. The MicroProse guys were smarter than the Accolade employee because the cards were sent from each employee’s home address. What gave them away? I was tabulating the ballots by hand, posting each score into our Lotus 1,2,3 spreadsheet (this was after we had performed the same calculations using Visicalc on the Apple and before we upgraded to Microsoft Excel) and I noticed that many cards had rated MicroProse games with the highest possible score and MicroProse’s direct competitors with the lowest possible score. I sorted out the ballots and found that those cards were all in zip codes near MicroProse. When I accused some of my friends at MicroProse of trying to rig the Top 100, Arnold Hendrick pleaded the grand tradition of “bullet ballots” in Boston politics. I laughed, but I threw out their ballots, anyway. |  Johnny (R) mentioned that we played computer games in the office. Our biggest stress reducer, however, was our table top hockey game. Here Johnny and I take a break from arguing about something or the other. |
For years, part of the training for those people who had to do the menial data entry for the Top 100 was to look for weird patterns. It seemed like something would come up every year or two. But being fair meant more than spotting illegal ballots (and I think we did a better job than…oh, say…Florida). Being fair meant assigning the right reviewer to the right product. It didn’t make any sense to have a guy who hated “twitch and flex” games (like me) reviewing Choplifter! or Marble Madness or to have some person who lived for Joust and Frogger to review Mech Brigade or Ultima III. We always wanted to make sure that the person who lived for action games read reviews that made sense for action gamers and that the person who lived for war games read reviews that made sense for war gamers. With the former, we would allow writers to spend a lot of space talking about controls, responsiveness, patterns and special effects. With the latter, we would spend time on combat doctrine, artificial intelligence, historical accuracy and general design.
Being fair also meant treating
your sources properly. For years, people wondered how I remembered
all the things they had told me at industry cocktail parties. The
assumption is that when you are in a location and everyone is drinking
that no one is going to remember a few slips of the tongue like: 1)
the new designer that was just stolen from another company; 2) the
unannounced product that someone was working on; 3) the big merger
someone was trying to close with a public company (actually, an illegal
comment to make at any time); 4) the affair that an executive was
having with a given employee; 5) the illegal substances used at a
given company; 6) the company that was being sued by one of its developers;
or 7) the real reason a certain executive had to leave his post. All
of those stories were interesting to me and I drank them all in, but
I always asked one question before I went to press, “Does revealing
this knowledge benefit the readers?” Frankly, the sex and drug
stories wouldn’t have benefited my readers in any way. Only
once would it have made a difference and I didn’t get confirmation
until it was too late. The only time it was relevant was when a developer
snorted a game up his nose. By the time I could have confirmed it,
everyone had forgotten that product. The new designer wooed by a new
company? That was big news for my readers when it was Dan Bunten or
Chris Crawford because it affected the kind of products the readers
would see from the new companies.
 It was not unusual for companies to send out dog and pony shows to our office to hype their latest product. Here some company sent a singing telegram guy to hype some gawd-awful forgettable game called WaxWorks. Johnny (middle) is really getting into the shtick [Hey, I loved Waxworks! Guess my bad taste is why I never got a job at CGW - Randy] |
Sometimes, I reported on business news and sometimes, I didn’t. As for the merger? I leaked the Origin merger more than 24 hours before it happened. Two executives of Origin lied through their teeth to me and when I was able to confirm it from other sources, I angrily posted it online—even though it could have gotten some of the principals in trouble with the SEC. Having been on the other side of that phone call a few times, I still think the appropriate answer is the one a beautiful, intelligent PR woman named Rachel Famighetti gave to me. When I said that I had heard that EA was purchasing Origin, she responded, “We are? How very, very good for us!” She neither confirmed nor denied the rumor, nor did she burn any bridges with the press with that answer. I have used it under two different circumstances. First, when Ziff-Davis went public and second, when we formed Paizo Publishing, LLC—the company that now publishes Dragon, Dungeon/Polyhedron and Star Wars Insider magazines. |
In all of my years at CGW, I can’t recall any sources ever claiming that I compromised them. The closest thing to it was during the controversy over Wing Commander IV. I published a story on the budget overrun for Wing Commander IV and infuriated the folks at Origin. I had seen an actual copy of the budget for Wing Commander IV, but because of the circumstances in which I saw it, had to read it upside-down. The folks at Origin were sure that I had seen it on Lord British’ desk, but that wasn’t the case. I had seen it at corporate headquarters. Naturally, you may be wondering how it benefited my readers to know that Wing Commander IV exceeded its budget by so much. I reasoned that if Wing Commander IV didn’t succeed, it would restrict the number of other projects that Origin would be able to produce. Frankly, I was right. Origin experienced enough of a recession that it had to cut a ton of projects off its slate even after Wing Commander IV was a major success. There was only so much development money to go around.
Life in the office was very different in those days. We always had some kind of game going on. Either Empire, Galaxy, Colonial Conquest, Star Saga I, Incunabula or a two-player SSI war game like Warships or Kampfgruppe was almost always in play. We even played some President Elect in those days. We would work at our desks while Vince DeNardo, our art director, Russell or myself would be in the game library/demo room typing in a move. After all the moves had been input, the others would be called in to review the results. Then, we would start over again. During heavy deadline periods, the turns would end up pretty spread out, but if you ever wondered whether we actually played computer games, I can assure you that we did.
Whenever the boxes of magazines would arrive, we would all go out to the truck and unload the boxes. That’s a tradition that holds true at Paizo Publishing, LLC. Everyone pulls together and helps, even with the warehousing. At CGW we had a joke that we were a “Mickey Mouse” magazine. Our first real office was about three-fourths of a mile north of Disneyland on Harbor Blvd. Whenever we worked late at night during the summer season, we would suddenly realize how late it was because the Disneyland fireworks would go off. Russell became so familiar with the fireworks program that he would amaze friends and relatives by calling the shots (red, white and blue flares followed by a flower cluster, etc.). During baseball season, we would invite freelancers and friends to office for the Computer Gaming World Baseball League. We would draft teams as if it was an ordinary fantasy league, but then we would play entire seasons using SSI’s Computer Baseball and then, Earl Weaver Baseball on the Amiga. I got so angry during an Earl Weaver game one night that I kicked a box of back issues and broke my toe. Some guys never grow up.
Of course, with so many gamers around the office, it wasn’t safe to leave a game in progress. When SimCity first came out and we only had a Macintosh copy in the office, Chris Lombardi (an intern who later became editor of the magazine) left a copy of his aesthetically beautiful and functionally exceptional city running on the office Macintosh. He had saved his city on a floppy disk and we (since we were all jealous that an “amateur” had built a better city than ours) wanted to give him a scare. We saved his city to another disk and hid it. Then, we messed up his city with every disaster possible. Then, we saved it on his save disk. He was so downcast. He also didn’t kill us when we admitted that we had a saved copy of the perfectly functioning city. We certainly learned to back up our game saves.
Another thing we liked to do in those days is something I wouldn’t do today. One of my hobbies is doing funny voices. So, every week I would do an answering machine message with a funny voice on it. One week, Humphrey Bogart would welcome callers to Rick’s Café, Casablanca HQ for Computer Gaming World. Another week, Jimmy Stewart would explain how it was a wonderful issue. Another week, I would be Crocodile Dundee asserting that the staff was out poaching alligators and would have to return the call at a later date. The Crocodile Dundee message admitted that we poached alligators (actually, there weren’t any real alligators to poach once they had closed down the California Alligator Farm in Buena Park) and asked the callers to list their favorite vice. Imagine our surprise when a mild-mannered executive told us that his hobby was dressing up in Spiderman pajamas and beating the <bleep> out of prostitutes. We laughed till our sides hurt. By the way, I’m still friends with that executive and we have yet to dress in sleepwear and perpetrate violence on anyone. Of course, what he does when I’m not around might be another story.
 Speaking of dog and pony shows, when Sierra told us they were bringing former controversial police chief Darryl Gates (R) along when pitching their new Police Quest game, Johnny, the office liberal, got all excited thinking up left wing liberal snarely questions to sling at the law-and-order celeb. The result was I got arrested and handcuffed! Geez. Publishers are always getting in trouble covering for their editors! |
One of my biggest frustrations as editor of CGW was that I didn’t have adequate room to do enough strategy articles. I loved strategy articles more than reviews, but reviews paid the piper. The readers seemed to respond to reviews more than strategy articles and the advertisers certainly preferred to advertise in vehicles that covered their new games. I always wanted to see a backlist of games in the stores and felt very evangelistic toward keeping the legs going for games that I liked. So, I conceived the idea for a quarterly publication that would be for subscribers only—no newsstand and no return risk. In this quarterly, Computer Gaming Forum, we had new scenarios and strategy articles, as well as rumors of upcoming games and a department called Boot Hill where readers could trade their used games. Well, first we had very little advertising and then, some of the large publishers threatened to pull their ads out of CGW because they were afraid that Boot Hill supported pirates. I was heartbroken that I would have to kill off my baby when Bing Gordon at EA encouraged Russell to take CGW from nine times per year to monthly. Suddenly, I had lots of pages to work with. So CG Forum was folded into the parent magazine. CGW became a monthly and suddenly I had lots of pages to work with. |
The good news about Computer
Gaming Forum was that I introduced “The Rumor Bag.” When
I was young, I had been an admirer of Herb Caen’s three dot
journalism in the San Francisco Chronicle (he put lots of interesting
tidbits together and separated them with three dots). I liked getting
lots of little pieces of information in one spot. Then, just before
we launched Computer Gaming Forum, I noticed a column by one Robert
X. Cringely in Info Week. This guy would leak all kinds of rumors
from all over Silicon Valley, but he would tie them together with
a fictitious story. When I started writing “The Rumor Bag,”
I decided that I would take real locations but use a fictitious byline
and a phony cover story to weave all of my rumors together.
“The Rumor Bag” was one of those columns that was either loved or hated. Some people erroneously thought that the fiction was keeping them from getting more rumors. It wasn’t. The fiction was just intended to be fun. And it was fun. One of the early rumor bags described a trip to The Magic Castle, a private club in Hollywood for stage magicians and aficionados. In the column, we overheard prospective investors in Three-Sixty Pacific talking about their upcoming plans. Now, Tom Frisina had told us those plans himself so that we could do a story on the new company, but he got into such a panic when he read “The Rumor Bag” that he called up all of his investors and asked which one of them had mouthed off at The Magic Castle. At that time, I knew that “The Rumor Bag” had potential. Another time, one of the attendees of the 3DO Developers Conference leaked some secrets to me about the new machine. I wrote it up as though I had attended the conference and, for several months, people were confused about who wrote “The Rumor Bag” because neither Russell nor I had attended the conference.
I still think the most amazing aspect of “The Rumor Bag” was the fact that at a time when a group of people online were bagging on CGW for how pretentious most of the editorial was and a fellow who worked at Sierra was ragging on me most of all, “The Rumor Bag” was cited as being extremely well-written. The Sierra employee had assumed that Russell had written all of “The Rumor Bag” columns because they were so much more readable than my style.
Finally, let me just say that a friend and colleague, Ken Brown, and I once sat in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. This was the site where all the greats from the New Yorker magazine used to gather for three martini lunches and then some. I asked Ken if he didn’t think it would have been absolutely remarkable to work on a magazine that was such an opinion leader that it shaped an entire generation. As I waxed nostalgic, I suddenly realized that I worked on just such a magazine. “Yes,” I admitted to Ken with the ghosts of S. J. Perelman, Franklin Pierce Adams, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Harpo Marx surrounding us. “Yes, it is.” Even now, I can honestly say, “Yes, yes it was.”
end
If you would like to read more about Johnny Wilson and the history of pc gaming, then be sure to visit the following links:
The Rise and Fall of Infocom by Johnny Wilson
On Location in the Great Underground Empire by Johnny Wilson
You may have noticed the flashing icon on our front page of Johnny Wilson with and without beard. Our question to you is - which Johnny Wilson do you like better. Bearded Johnny or Beardless Johnny? Your vote is important!