An Interview with Developer Charles Griffith

 

The victory that led to this entry.

           

Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to exchange some emails with Charles Griffith, who contacted me after seeing my entries on The Red Crystal (1993), an intriguing but buggy game that Griffith wrote himself after he left Paragon Software. At Paragon, he had worked on MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991) as well as three non-RPGs created under Paragon's Marvel license: The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Doctor Doom's Revenge! (1990), The Punisher (1990), and X-Men II: The Fall of the Mutants (1990).

     

Readers who were around for my coverage of the Paragon titles may remember my constant frustration. The company managed to score licenses from both Marvel and The Game Designers' Workshop; under the latter, they developed not only the two MegaTraveller games but also Space 1889 (1990) and Twilight: 2000 (1991). If that seems like a lot of games for a couple of years . . . well, yeah. Paragon's games are characterized by rushed production, incomplete mechanics, and a complete lack of understanding of what an "RPG" really is. Most of them have nebulous character development at best. In offering traditional experience and leveling, Griffith's The Red Crystal is the most RPG of the bunch.

      

Wandering a dungeon in The Red Crystal. The  level attached to the character was more than Paragon ever did in the way of character development.

         

Paragon's CEO and co-founder during this period, F. J. Lennon, would be the first to admit that the company fumbled the ball. He wrote Every Mistake in the Book: A Business How-NOT-To in 2001, in which he frankly confesses to a host of business blunders. I interviewed him in 2020, and he admitted that the company never really took time to study the mechanics of other CRPGs. There were times that the developers made up for this deficiency in its stories and quests, as we saw in MegaTraveller 2 as well as Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nghardia (1992) and BloodNet (1993), two titles released after the company was acquired by MicroProse.

   

In his interview with me, Lennon confessed to a certain bravado that led him to over-reach and over-promise. It was this swagger that led him to approach Marvel about licensing their characters even though, at the time (about 1987), the company had only developed one game and published another. Charles Griffith's story with the company begins soon after. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in computer science in 1987. The economy was shaky and jobs were thin. Griffith interviewed at Paragon and didn't get an offer. However, in a follow-up call several weeks later, he mentioned to Paragon president Mark Seremet that he had purchased an Amiga 500. Paragon needed an Amiga developer for its marvel license, and pretty soon Griffith was porting Spider-Man to the platform.

   

I'll start by saying [that] despite my best efforts, the game sucked. The PC version was horrible and I ignored most of it. It wasn't a code port, but some of the art was used. Fortunately, a newly-hired artist cleaned it up. [Griffith later interpolated that this new artist was Steve Suhy, perhaps the last of the original Paragon staff still working on games.] Sadly, while the Amiga was a revolutionary machine, it was not an easy machine to code on. Literally every program in Commodore's 300-page developer handbook resulted in a fatal error (called a "Guru meditation" with a numeric code). I muddled through getting 50% complete on developing the game before the company's sole Amiga hard drive irrevocably crashed - and no backups.  Again, as noted, deadlines never moved. You delivered by August (in time to master and produce the product for Christmas) or you went bankrupt. Long story short, we got a version out but it wasn't great.  However, I did feel some pride having been able to deliver despite the various challenges. 

      

Griffith probably regrets his name on the title screen.

         

Paragon decided at some point that the Amiga was never going to be a big player in the United States, "so Paragon graciously moved me to the PC." Griffith's next project was supporting programmer Thomas Holmes on MegaTraveller 1. Griffith remembers Holmes fondly: "He was an exceptional engineer. He literally was Paragon's early heart." Despite the many challenges he faced, including the fact that, in Griffith's opinion, "PCs were not meant for games," Holmes managed to deliver while keeping everyone's spirits up. "[He] was a great and calming agent for other engineers." On the CRPG Addict, we're about to see some more of Holmes's work on the two Ravenloft titles.

           

After his experience on MegaTraveller, Griffith lobbied to lead the development of a game, and he got X-Men 2: Fall of the Mutants. As perhaps the only true Marvel fan on staff, he saw the project as an opportunity to make up for X-Men (1989), which had demonstrated no affection for the comics. ("I mean, they introduced a gorilla as a villain!")

      

My goal was to take a major segment of X-Men history and turn it into a game that was true to the comic. I won't say we necessarily achieved that. However, I will say that it was an interesting attempt. We basically took all the potential X-Men we had in the license, created an underlying roleplaying system, and then put together a series of dynamic levels a player could explore with their team.  
     

I spent five straight days in the Paragon offices without sleep finishing this game. I had a pyramid of 200 Pepsi cans from the company machine with a continual parade of ants visiting it. Despite pleas for me to leave (or at least shower), I stayed until I finally figured it was done. I lived three hours from Paragon, and have no memory of driving home. One of the other set of team members that commuted told me they found me in my car that morning in a bowling alley passed out . . . but didn't wake me. In any event, when I did get home, Paragon called three hours into my sleep telling me I needed to come back in as they had "found a bug." I declined but we managed to make the deadline.

             

You know the situation is dire when there's snow in Dallas.

      

Griffith's next big project was as a co-programmer on MegaTraveller 2. The lead programmer, who Griffith did not want to name (and could be one of three people according to the game credits) "was an UBER-MegaTraveller fan." Griffith said that the developer had the "rare opportunity" to spend four months designing and prototyping the game, but that he didn't accomplish much during that time. "He was the classic game engineer: completely introverted, an exceptional coder, and difficult to engage. My role on the project was to help 'get something delivered.' I credit this as one of my early learnings on how to manage highly technical people." Once again, the company "put in incredible hours" to finish before the holiday deadline.

   

Griffith acknowledges the many comments I made about the lack of authentic role-playing and character development in the Paragon titles. He explains that Paragon operated in an awkward space between an independent developer, who can take as much time as he wants, and a large company, which has enough resources to fully develop their ideas. Paragon titles, in contrast, had "one or two engineers, one or two artists, a sound engineer, maybe a designer . . . [and the games were] likely tested by the same team!"

     

There was seldom downtime between games. Your lifespan was a direct result of earnings. Since it's been decades, I feel comfortable sharing some real numbers: For my roughly three years at Paragon, I started at $24,000 a year and left at around $30,000 if memory serves. The revenue I generated (and it was a small company, so numbers came in on faxes and everyone saw them), was well over $1 million. So you can imagine a small game company like Paragon  putting out about three titles a year in that era, was probably pulling in about $3 million a year. They had to cover salaries, licensing, rent, equipment, travel, [and so forth] out of that income so, it wasn't the industry it is today.  

       

The company was also having what in retrospect was its heyday during an awkward time. Changes in the computer industry were never more rapid, making it difficult to re-use last year's assets. All kinds of new technology was available, but it wasn't yet standardized even on a single platform. PCs weren't dominating the market yet, so every game had to be ported to multiple machines. You couldn't trust that most players would have hard drives, but you couldn't ship on too many disks. The industry as a whole had not developed a solid playtesting model. If the game turned out to have a catastrophic bug, there was no Internet yet to distribute patches. 

      

I liked MegaTraveller 2's story; I never warmed to its mechanics or combat.

          

Exhausted after his experience on MegaTraveller 2, Griffith quit the company, moved to Ohio, and briefly consulted on enterprise solutions for rubber companies before landing a position with another game company, the Leland Corporation (formerly Cinematronics). During the day, he worked on an SNES racing game called Super Off Road: The Baja (1993), but he couldn't shake the idea that he could develop an RPG closer to the ones he had enjoyed in the early 1980s, including the Wizardry series and Gauntlet. He began programming what became Red Crystal during his off-hours. He envisioned it more like Gauntlet than Wizardry: an arcade-like dungeon crawler with the ability to support two players simultaneously. However, he also wanted it to contain plenty of side-quests, something he felt was missing from both the Paragon titles and the industry as a whole. (He is correct in this; by the early 1990s, the only major series that clearly understood the concept of "side quests" was Might and Magic.)

    

By the summer of 1992, he had enough programmed to take it to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago and start looking for a publisher. He caught the interest of Bruce Zaccagnino from New Jersey-based Quantum Quality Productions (QQP). QQP wanted to add more role-playing mechanics, and Zaccagnino and QQP employee Steve Cohen worked with Griffith to make the necessary changes. (Griffith particularly credits Cohen with most of the game's side quests. It was Zaccagnino who came up with the Seven Secrets of Life.) QQP had fewer resources than even Paragon, however, and the game was released in 1993 with minimal playtesting. Although acknowledging the game's many bugs, Griffith was particularly proud of a last-minute compression solution that he developed to fit the game onto two floppy disks, which was considered necessary at the time.

      

For all its flaws, the game had solid art and production values.

          

"Of course, the game was not the success QQP nor I hoped for," Griffith said. "Worse, [it] was available on WAREZ boards within hours  of release." On the other hand: "It was a PhD in learning."

   

Griffith had some final thoughts on the era:

      

It was still a moment in time when individuals could publish unique products with limited guidance or direction. However, these games had to be completed within ridiculous time frames with almost no support (engineering libraries, tools, high-end art packages, or multi-disciplined teams). Occasionally, this [reality] delivered compelling games that launched franchises; more often, players got inconsistent, flawed games which tried their best but never hit the mark. Sadly, most of mine fell into the latter category but, like babies, they were still mine and I love them for what they aspired to be. 

       

I think that Griffith's sentiments help explain why it's sometimes more fun for me to write, and for you to read, about flawed games than it is to write and read about the genre's masterpieces. 

    

Griffith continued for a while in the game industry, jumping to Acclaim Entertainment from 1992 to 1994. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked for Stargate Films, a special effects shop involved in major films like Star Trek, Highlander, and (more recently) The Walking Dead.

      

Griffith at home with his dogs.

        

Since then, his multiple jobs in the technology industry have included special effects engineering for television and films, computer-aided design and product rendering, e-commerce platforms, transportation logistics and supply chain management (he launched Amazon's worldwide delivery system), and business analytics. He has lived in the Seattle area for the last two decades and is eyeing retirement. He wrote his own closing line: "Like Bilbo Baggins, he looks back on these early adventures with fondness and a small bit of regret. However, he knows it pushed him to become more than he thought he was capable of."

MegaTraveller 2: Summary and Rating

       

MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients

United States

Paragon (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, 1992 for Amiga, possibly Atari ST

Date Started:  29 July 2017
Date Ended: 16 August 2017

Total Hours: 42

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: 41

Ranking at Time of Posting: 214/260 (82%)

Unfortunately the "evil path" I mentioned last time didn't amount to anything. Grazer gives you $50,000 for killing Trow Backett and then asks you to kill another Ancients expert going by the name "Cocoa" for another $50,000. I wasn't able to do the second part because I'd already spoken to Cocoa as part of the main quest, and the game had decided he was no longer a "green" NPC and thus wouldn't let me into his building. But I read online that you just get the money and that's the end of the thread. You still have to save Rhylanor if you want to "complete" the game.

      

It's a poor trade-off, since Backett buys things from you for well over $50,000.

      

It occurs to me, though, that this is one of the few games so far in the chronology that you could play 99% evil. You can make your fortune through piracy, taking the "evil" quest options (e.g., helping vile dictators suppress rebellions), and killing other NPCs for their stuff. You still have to save Rhylanor at the end, but you could argue that you're just doing that for the money.

I messed around a little more before wrapping up. It is possible to kill the Duke--he dies in just a couple of blows, in fact--but it has no effect on the game and he still shows up at the end to give his speech.

      

The Duke lies dead on the floor. But that doesn't mean we lose!

      

In the first entry, I noted that the predictions the slime would take "7 years" meant that you probably have 2,555 days to win. In fact, the slime finally hits Rhylanor Startown at 2,710 days. It swallows Rhylanor's other cities along the way. After about day 1,200, you can no longer travel to other cities.

     

The goo closes in on the planet's capital.

     

Once it covers Rhylanor Startown, you get a special "game over" screen.

     

I could technically still zap the planet with the terraforming device.

      

I know my last couple of entries have been fairly positive, so I feel that I have to clarify: MegaTraveller 2 is not a good RPG. It fails in every aspect of RPG mechanics, including character development, combat, and equipment. The story isn't even really that good. Its world-building is minimal. Although you encounter about a dozen races in the game, there's no real characterization attached to them. And yet this bad sequel to a bad game manages to offer something that no other RPG has offered in the chronology: a truly open world with nonlinear gameplay and dozens of side quests. I would really like to know who on the team insisted on that. He should have been working for a better company.

What's particularly disappointing about both games in the MegaTraveller series is the skill system. It's certainly an original approach to an RPG: Have most of the character development occur during the character creation stage. Instead of starting with a young Level 1 peasant who slowly becomes a hero, start with the hero, and role-play whatever selection of skills and experiences brought him to that stage in life. 

I suspect, however, that tabletop Traveller gives its characters many more occasions to use their skills. The computer RPG didn't even try. The manual for the game lists about 125 "skills that can be used to complete the game." A lot are weapons skills, but they also include "Bribery," "Disguise," "Admin," "Forgery," "Carousing," "History," and "Forensics." If these came into play anywhere in the game, it was so subtle that it might as well not have been included at all. 

     

Why couldn't I use "Admin" or "Bribery" or "Forgery" at a time like this?

     

The hintbook lists a more realistic 19 skills that are "used most frequently." Even this list seems too long. "Broker" and "Trader" are useful to get the best prices, but the economy is such that a character with no skill in these areas can still make plenty of money. The weapons skills are nice, of course, but success in combat seems to depend more on the quality of the equipment than the skill of the user. "Recruiting" is only useful if you accept your characters' deaths. "ATV" and "Grav Vehicle" are both on the list, and both can be used by anyone regardless of skill.

As far as I can tell, the only absolutely essential skill to get through the game was "Medic." "Interrogation" helped with the main plot, but its utility is duplicated with the truth serum. Maybe I would have made more of "Engineering" and "Turret Weapons" if I'd insisted on piracy early in the game.

In general, we have an RPG that both minimizes any skill development during the game (I've commented enough about how rare and erratic that is) and barely uses the skills that make up your characters' backstories. I can't believe no one realized how bad this was during the development of the game. With so many planets, so many side quests (the hint book lists at least triple the number that I explored), there were a thousand opportunities to employ each skill set, to use skills as alternatives to combat, to use skills as an alternative to having certain items in the inventory, but they missed every one. Did none of them play Wasteland?

I expect some extremes in the GIMLET. Let's see.

1. Game World. You can feel them really trying in this category, going so far as to commission the creator of the RPG to write the story. They designed all of these races and created 117 planets with double that number of cities, each with a unique profile in terms of technology, law, and government. It almost makes this effort relevant during gameplay but doesn't quite. The story itself is only "adequate." Frankly, I found the history of "Grandfather" and his offspring to be goofy, and the whole "Ancients" thing is getting old by now. "A" for effort; "B-" for execution. Score: 5.

       

The developers programmed new tiles indicating a "lusher" Rhylanor after you win.

      

2. Character Creation and Development. The creation engine is so good that it was designed to support tabletop RPG creation. There are so many potential careers, so many things that can happen during those careers, and so many skills, that the possibilities for the final character are essentially infinite. It's just too bad that, as above, the game does essentially nothing with the characters after that. Score: 3.

3. NPC Interaction. The actual mechanics of chasing down green dots wasn't fun, but NPCs are a vital part of the game. Just as in the Ultima series, you wouldn't be able to complete the quest without their clues. They impart lore, quests, and hints. There are no dialogue options, but there are a handful of role-playing choices. Score: 6.

      

NPCs are crucial to understanding the world and making your way through it.

      

4. Encounters and Foes. Your only enemy in the game is other people, and in combat they differ only by equipment. There are a variety of non-combat encounters that blend with the quest system, but these do not offer meaningful role-playing choices. Score: 2.

5. Magic and Combat. Horrible. Target and attack. That's it. No tactics, no strategies, no input, even, for 4/5 of your party. You get no feedback on the health or even names of your opponents, and the tiny interface keeps you too far from the action to really see what's happening.

I don't expect magic in a science fiction RPG, but I do expect something that substitutes for magic. Stims, chems, tasers, psionics, special futuristic technology devices that paralyze and stuff, active use of skills--any of these would have sufficed. Score: 1.

    

Space combat is so equally boring that it doesn't even qualify the game for an extra point.

      

6. Equipment. There are a lot of weapon types in the game, but even at the end, I don't know how to figure out which is likely to do the most damage, including the role that skill level plays in the formula. Laser rifles for everyone seemed to work fine. There are a couple of suits of armor, but most everything else is quest items. I'm annoyed that there wasn't a single place in the game to use my forensics kit or hand-held computer.

The one saving grace: MegaTraveller 2 is one of the few games of the era to offer detailed item descriptions. Click "Examine" on any item and you get a well-written paragraph or two. Score: 4.

       

This doesn't really tell you anything about the suit, but I like the text for the text alone.

     

7. Economy. The economy is really the driving force of the game--the only reason to engage in the many side quests. I admire its complexity: lots of ways to earn money, and lots of ways to spend it. It just needed better balance. Rewards should have been more commensurate with their effort, and costs more commensurate with their utility. By the game's midpoint, you have so much money that it would be silly to waste time making more. Score: 5.

     

Money is used almost entirely for travel in this universe.

      

8. Quests. A strength of the game. In addition to a couple of intertwined main quests, there are hundreds of side quests--more than a single player is likely to experience--and some of them even offer some basic role-playing choices. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I don't have any particular praise for the main interface graphics, but the cut scenes occasionally offer a nice image. The dits and boops and occasional explosions that make up the sound effects are fine, nothing special.

Worst was the interface. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you have less than 26 commands, there is no excuse for not just mapping them each to a key. Sure, offer the mouse interface too, but not exclusively. Running after NPCs and trying to click on the "Converse" button and then "Hail" when I should have just been able to hit "H" was infuriating. Even the mouse interface had problems: with the menu selections often small and close together, it was too easy to click on the wrong one. Score: 3.

       

The description and graphics of the Ancients sites are particularly well done. It's too bad there isn't more to do in them.

       

10. Gameplay. The nonlinearity is of course a huge asset. I also have to give it points for replayability, given the numerous ways characters can make money to pursue the main quest, plus the sheer number of side quests. (Alas, it would be even more replayable if the skills mattered more.) On the negative side, it falls on the "too easy" side except for a few unnecessary combats. While 40 hours is a respectfully modest time, the game often feels unnecessarily large and empty, particularly when you're running through empty corridors and streets looking for one small item or NPC. Score: 6.

That gives us a final score of 41. That feels right. 35 is usually my threshold for whether I'd recommend the game at all, and above 50 I'd say definitely play it. Between those two scores is an area that says "the game has strengths you'll enjoy, but it sabotages those strengths with as many weaknesses." It also compares well to the first MegaTraveller, which I gave a 34.

I find my opinion echoed by Scorpia's November 1991 Computer Gaming World review, which bemoans the wasted skill system and "worthless" training halls, and the disappointingly purposeless Ancients sites. Like me, she liked the nonlinearity. However, she liked the combat system, considering it improved from MegaTraveller, with which I 100% disagree. The first game's combat system was hard to figure out, true, but it actually offered tactical considerations. And you had grenades. Scorpia also complained about "too many side threads that have nothing to do with the main plot," which of course is the whole point of side quests, but I forgive her because side quests weren't really a "thing" in RPGs in 1991. It probably took a few games to build up a taste for them. Overall, I can't disagree with her conclusions: "An improvement over the previous game, [but] it hasn't improved quite enough. Skills have to be more fully integrated into the game."

Of course, I had to find out whether Dragon praised the game with 5/5 stars or slammed it with 4/5 stars, but it doesn't appear that they reviewed it--which is odd given its tabletop lineage. I would have thought they'd prioritize this one. I was also curious if our old Amiga Computing friend, Stuart Campbell, had written a review. His assessment of the first game remains my all-time favorite hyperbolic review quote: "If you took the Pacific Ocean, stacked another Pacific Ocean on top of it, and then attached two more Pacific Oceans to either end, it wouldn't be quite as deep as MegaTraveller 1." Alas, despite his praise, he seems to have missed the sequel. In general, Amiga magazines rated it poorly. I'd like to make fun of them like I usually do and say their primary complaint was the graphics, but only a few mention graphics. Most of them just thought it was boring.

Although both this game and its predecessor were products of Paragon Software, the specific teams don't share many of the same names. In particular, Paragon co-founder F. J. Lennon, credited with the manual in MegaTraveller 1, moves up to "writer" and "co-designer" here. In my MegaTraveller 1 review, I remarked that the manual was the best thing about the game, and you can see the quality of Lennon's writing in both the documentation for MegaTraveller 2 and the solid in-game text. Lennon isn't credited on Twilight 2000 (coming up soon), and I suspect the game will suffer accordingly. We'll see his work again on Challenge of the Five Realms (1992).

      

     

Paragon wouldn't last another year. Although it released 13 titles between 1989 and 1991, most under either its GDW or Marvel licenses, none of them got good reviews. MicroProse bought the company in 1992 and either didn't acquire their GDW and Marvel contracts or didn't care to develop more games based on them. GDW, its attempts to translate its properties to the computer having been bungled thrice by Paragon, itself went out of business in 1996. Traveller, despite all its acclaim as a tabletop game, never saw another computer edition. Or hasn't seen one yet, perhaps I should say.

[Edit: Long after originally posting this entry, I found the ad below for both Twilight: 2001 and MegaTraveller 3: The Unknown Worlds. The games are promised by Microplay, a division of MicroProse, suggesting that MicroProse got the rights to the GDW licenses. But despite this full-page ad in the August 1992 Computer Gaming World, nothing was ever heard of these games again.]
               

Two games that never were.

            

Let's remember this one for its strengths. Paragon Software, a company whose previous RPG offerings gave it no reason to be ambitious, suddenly got ambitious in a way that no previous developer had. MegaTraveller 2 is such a minor title that it's hard to believe it influenced later open-world, multi-quest RPGs, but it sure did anticipate them. If only they'd taken a page from SSI or Origin or literally any other RPG developer on character development and combat, we might remember this one as one of the greats.

****

Further reading: MegaTraveller wasn't the first implementation of the Traveller rules; that was the copyright violator called Space (1978). You may also want to check out my coverage of MegaTraveller 1 (1990), plus Paragon's other GDW titles, including Space: 1889 (1990).

Game 171: MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990)

The main main screen lacks the "1" after the title, but the pre-main screen, the box, and the manual all have it.

       

MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST
Date Started: 22 December 2014

      

More than 3,500 years in the future, mankind has colonized space. Multiple planets and systems, each governed in a neo-feudalistic style, are united into the Third Imperium--a "classic aristocracy" of haves, have-nots, and political machinations. Around 500 years ago (in the year 5018 on the "old Earth calendar"), humanity came into contact with the Zhodani, a race of human-looking mind-readers whose psionic powers--and the accompanying loss of any sense of privacy and secrecy--have created an authoritarian, unemotional, highly-regimented existence. The Imperium and the Zhodani clashed in a series of five Frontier Wars, each ending in either a loss or a Pyrrhic Victory for the Imperium (rendered worse after the first three Frontier Wars were followed by bloody coups in the Imperium).

MegaTraveller 1 starts amidst the beginning of the Fifth Frontier War. The titular Zhodani Conspiracy is to smuggle military weapons and armor to "dissident guerrilla units" on a selection of Imperium worlds. When the Imperium forces are distracted by these uprisings, the Zhodani plan to seize imperial worlds in the Spinward Marches, an area of space that marks the boundary between the two empires. The arms shipments will be conducted through a secret alliance with Konrad Keifer, an executive in the Sharurshid Megacorporation.

The characters get the main quest amid the opening screens.

But Lenara Raclor, a special agent from Sharurshid's internal intelligence agency, Transom, has learned of Keifer's treason. Clutching stolen data tapes and on the run from Zhondani forces, she bursts into a tavern frequented by ex-military types. Desperately, she approaches a table at which five veterans are reminiscing about their service. She hands them a data storage device, a decoding key, half of an imperial seal, and $30,000, begging them to take the items to Supernova, a bar on the planet Boughene, and find a man named Arik Toryan. As she finishes her plea, the door bursts open and commandos storm the tavern. Shouting a command to the party to "run!," Lenara pulls out an automatic pistol and begins firing.

No villain speech should ever begin with "Surprise...Surprise!"

The backstory and prologue for the game are as intriguing as anything I can remember. You could almost imagine them as a title crawl at the beginning of a Star Wars film, setting up an immediate action sequence. The five veterans are, of course, the player's party, created through an hour-long process and dead within five minutes unless the player has helpful commenters who warn him to run away from the opening battle. (To be fair, Lenara does say "run!," not "fight!")

More on the opening moments in a bit, but let's talk about the five veterans in the bar. MegaTraveller has an unusual and complex character creation system. We saw it earlier in Space (1978), which of course was plagiarized from the Traveller RPG. It starts with a random assignment of scores to strength, dexterity, endurance, intelligence, education, and social standing on a scale of 1-15. I don't think the rolls are truly random, because I almost never saw 1s or 15s and in general everything seemed weighted towards the middle of the scale.

Character creation begins.

Once you get a character you like, you choose whether to enlist in a service or submit to a random draft. Assuming you enlist, you have a choice between Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, and Merchants, each with different requirement for starting attributes. If you choose a branch whose minimum requirements you don't meet, you automatically go to the draft.

No matter how you end up in service, once you enlist, you watch the years pass, aging the character from 18 to whenever, depending on how many terms you serve. During each term, you can get promoted or assigned to special duty, which affects the number of skill points that you earn for the term. These points are spent acquiring new skills or bolstering existing ones. You can also get injured or even die during service, forcing you to start over. Aging takes a toll on the starting attributes after a while. It's unnerving to see a character get worse after generation.

Man, this game makes me feel old.

The choice of skills practically drove me to paralysis. With 82 skills, MegaTraveller has more than any other game I've ever played. With some franchises and companies, you can rest easy that whatever selection of skills you prioritize, the game will offer you appropriate alternatives to most puzzles. I don't know what the next Fallout game is going to look like, but I know that nothing crucial to a quest is going to be behind a locked door--or, if it is, the game will offer a computer terminal that also unlocks the door and, failing that, a keycard hidden somewhere in the same base. I know that I'll find plenty of weapons of all types, so I don't need to obsess about whether to favor energy weapons or guns. I know that bribes or running errands will compensate for failed speech checks. If Origin made MegaTraveller, I'd have the same level of trust. Paragon, whose only previous RPGs are the bizarre Alien Fires: 2199 AD and the silly Wizard Wars, has not yet earned that faith.

(The manual helpfully tells you that 25 of the skills--including cool-sounding ones like "interrogation" and "robotics"--aren't used in the first game, suggesting that you might want to develop them anyway "for future MegaTraveller computer adventures." The company certainly hasn't earned that kind of faith.)

Despite the complexity, you don't really get to "select" your skills during training. Instead, you choose a "skill table" that you want to focus on, and the game randomly picks a skill from the table--perhaps mimicking how military personnel don't have full control over their assignments. Thus, the character's starting position, in terms of skills, is somewhat arbitrary, although I'm promised that there are ways to acquire skills throughout the game through use and training. If a character turns out to be entirely useless, you can always dump him and create a new one at any starport.

I can choose "Advanced Education," but the game will choose randomly from among the items below it. On the other hand, if the game chooses any of the bolded options, it will open a sub-menu where I can choose the specific skill. It's all very complicated.

You get to choose how many terms characters serve, and basically the choice you're making (in addition to gambling on injury and death) is whether you want a young, inexperienced character with high attributes or an old, character with lots of skills (and retirement pay) but diminished attributes. Naturally, the manual advises, a mix is sensible.

Once the character leaves service--either by choice or force--he gets a certain number of "benefits" related to the number of terms he served and how many times he got promoted. Such benefits include cold, hard cash, increased intelligence and education, weapons, armor, and an "imperial release"--basically a pardon for crimes. As with skills, you don't get to actually choose the benefits--you just choose from two categories, "cash" and other "benefits," and the game randomly makes a selection among them.

Selecting from retirement benefits.

My party took most of this playing session to create. These were the five successful characters.

Keller seemed from her stats (high intelligence and education, low social standing) like an engineer type. I enlisted her in the Army. By focusing on "special skills" and "education" and keeping her in service for five terms, I ensured that she developed "ATV," "electronics," "grav vehicle," "jack of all trades," "mechanical," and "watercraft" skills along with "combat rifleman" and "submachine gun." (Ironically, general "engineering" wasn't available in this branch.) Despite my intentions to keep her in until the age of 40, the Army released her at 30 at the rank of captain. She received $20,000, cloth armor, and an imperial release upon retirement.

Castle was pretty high in social standing and dexterity but moderate in everything else. I thought I'd make him a "Face" character, skilled in things like bribery, communication, gambling, trading, and "streetwise." With the random selection, I was able to partly realize my goals, with skills in "carousing," "liaison," "streetwise," and "communications," along with the non-desired skills of "vacuum suit," "electronics," "jack of all trades" and "computer," before mustering out at the age of 34 and the rank of 3rd officer.  He retired with $11,000 in cash, an auto pistol, and an imperial release.

Maddox got above-average (but not extreme) scores everywhere, so I decided to make him my pilot. I was hoping he'd get out with the "pilot" skill, but instead he got "medical," "engineering," "forward observer," and "navigation" before the Navy mustered him out at age 30, having never been promoted. Ouch. He got $20,000, an autopistol, and +1 intelligence upon leaving.

Naming the character is technically the last step of the process.

By this time, I needed a couple of ground soldiers. I decided to try to make one young and hale, one old and grizzled. I rerolled forever until I went with Espinosa, moderately high in everything but education, and enlisted her in the Marines. I had intended to keep her in until 40 or 50, but the marines released her, having never been promoted, at age 30. Nonetheless, the training had done its job and I got out with 3 levels in "laser weapons," one in "heavy weapons," and the ancillary skills of stealth and bribery. In choosing benefits, her intelligence went up by 4 (from an already-high 11), but she only got $5,000 cash.

My last character, Casey, had 9s in most of his attributes. I enlisted in the Scouts. His enlistment was blessed with "special duty" and lots of skill selections. I intended to train him in weapons, but he ended up becoming more of a pilot than Maddox, with skills in "pilot," "navigation," and "engineering," but I also got him "handgun," "heavy weapons," and "battle dress" while improving a lot of his initial statistics. I wanted to keep him going, but I got discouraged at the losses of 1 point of strength, dexterity, and endurance for every term after the age of 30, so I mustered him out at 34. He got the most money of anyone--$90,000--plus a 2-point bump to his already-high intelligence.

At this point, Casey and Maddox were a bit redundant with each other, but I had been rolling, re-rolling, creating, and discarding characters for over two hours, watching some die in combat, others on the operating table after combat, and so forth, so I decided to just go with it and see how it worked out.

Too much of this gets depressing.

This game's approach to character creation isn't nearly as cruel as the one used in Space, where 9 out of 10 characters were simply unplayable and 9 out of 10 who were playable died during military service. I wonder which is closer to the original Traveller rules. I do like the general approach. Most RPGs assume that the player is a young, rank amateur, and it's fun to see one approach it from a different angle: these people are coming from long careers that have made them who they are. I wonder why those careers all have to involve military service, but that's a minor quibble. It's a nice inversion of the standard D&D-based system. On the other hand, for such a detailed process otherwise, I found it odd that you can't choose the character's sex.

After the long character creation process, MegaTraveller starts in the bar described above, where Lenara has demanded that the party "run!" from the Zhondani allies. The party starts outside the bar in the middle of combat, taking constant damage from enemy weapons while trying to figure out the interface and controls. This is only the second game I can remember that starts the party in such a cruel position--the first is Ultima VI. But where the battle in Lord British's throne room was fairly easy to win--including NPCs in the party who acted independently--the battle here is reportedly impossible even for a player who knows what he's doing.

Shot by Zhodani agents the moment I leave the bar.

I didn't know what I was doing, so I had my party hightail it out of there, to the far corner of the map. The interface shows that I'm on the planet Efate in the Efate system.

Hiding in a corner from Zhodani agents.

MegaTraveller has a bizarre interface. The top of the screen shows five icons in a row that represent the various party members, annotated with symbols representing the branch of service they came from, but I don't know what the pictorials below them mean and the manual isn't much help there: despite taking up 143 pages, it has about 4 total screenshots. The upper-right shows the active formation. I'm not sure what the symbols in the mid-right are about, but the bottom right has most of the commands, fortunately accessible with redundant keyboard shortcuts.
                 

Combat begins by "breaking" the party into multiple icons and controlling them separately. But it takes place in real time, and party members don't act on their own, so I haven't quite figured out how to effectively give commands to five characters at once. More on that next time, I guess.

I wandered around speaking to the various NPCs, but none had anything to say but "Greetings, Traveller!" I found a shop that rents ATVs, "grav vehicles," and boats; a clinic; a general store; an imperial base; a Museum of Natural History; and a "traveler's aid society" that won't let me in because I'm not a member. If I wandered too far, I kept running into Zhodani agents, so I ducked into the Museum and wandered around looking at items for a bit. (Just the icons; the game doesn't have a "look" icon that I can see, or any other way to interact with things.)

"Greetings. Please get out of my way."

One curator indicated that he'd be interested in purchasing "starrghrite" if I found any; another was interested in diamonds.

The extent of NPC dialogue, at least so far.

The Zhodani agents didn't go away, and they're blocking my access to the rest of the city, so I'm not sure if I'm supposed to hide longer or take them out individually now that they're dispersed. I'll work on that for the next time.

The RPG on which the game is based.

For now, let's focus on the game's origins a bit. It is, of course, a computer edition of the Traveller tabletop role-playing game, first published in 1977 by the Game Designers' Workshop. It seems to be the most successful science-fiction tabletop RPG, particularly given that it's still active, with the latest edition funded partly by Kickstarter and released in 2013. An impassioned e-mail from frequent commenter Gaguum, calling himself "without a doubt, the biggest Traveller fan among your regular commenters," led me to learn more about the setting, and I confess I really like it. Much like Firefly (which Gaguum speculates was heavily inspired by Traveller), it offers a future in which, despite faster-than-light travel and ray guns, people are pretty much the same as they are now. Although aliens exist in the universe, the focus is on humans. It eschews the utopian dreams of Star Trek for a gritty future in which people steal, trade, scam, scrimp, and hustle to make ends meet. Gaguum's description of the universe is so good that I'll just repeat it verbatim:

In the typical Traveller campaign (as in MT1), your PCs operate a "tramp steamer" starship, paying your bills and debts by taking various gigs--mainly speculative interstellar trade, but also odd jobs like bounty hunting, mercenary work, private investigation, delivering messages/parcels, etc. At the same time, you have to avoid myriad disasters and threats. Nearly everybody will try to kill you if you get in their way (e.g. space pirates, corporate goons, mobsters, corrupt officials, aliens, spies, critters, etc.). And there are always guys out there who are richer, more powerful, better connected, more heavily armed, and meaner than you, all of which makes diplomacy and discretion as important as fighting.

For its tenth anniversary, GDW published a new edition called MegaTraveller. My understanding is that the original Traveller was just a set of rules with no backstory. Later, GDW fused it with its Imperium boardgame to create the game's official universe, but even then it was up to the players to make up much of the story. MegaTraveller created a more rigid universe from that point forward. The weird thing, mentioned by Gaguum and confirmed by other online sources, is that while the tabletop version of MegaTraveller is set during an era of rebellion against the Imperium, the CRPG version mentions nothing of the rebellion at all. Despite taking the name from the updated universe, it's set during a period of the original Traveller universe.

This isn't Gaguum's only problem with the computer version. He complains that the plot strips the subtlety and complexity of a traditional Traveller campaign; that the mechanic removes the rules system by which players have to choose to do things "cautiously," "normally," or "hastily"; that the skills are under-used; that the computer game significantly limits character development; that the real-time combat system destroys the tactical nature of the game; and that, overall, it's too hard.

I have to agree with his last point.

I haven't gotten far enough in this game to assess any of these things for myself, but his comments don't fill me with hope for the game in general. By the end of the next post, I should know whether I like it yet.

One major theme of 1990, which I'll explore in more detail in the end-of-year post, is the number of other tabletop roleplaying franchises that, presumably seeing the success of the D&D Gold Box games, decided it was time to get themselves on the nearest computer. MegaTraveller is one of four tabletop-to-computer conversion that we saw in 1990, the others being Buck Rogers, Tunnels & Trolls, and the upcoming Space: 1889 (the latter also by GDW and Paragon). All of them flopped. None of them had great reviews, and only MegaTraveller and Buck Rogers survived to sequels--only to die after that. So as discussion questions: 1) other than Dungeons & Dragons, what RPG system has been most successful in its computer translation; and 2) what is so special about D&D that it was able to inspire 6 billion computer games where everyone else seems to die in the single digits?

MegaTraveller: Won! (with Final Rating)

 

MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST
Date Started: 22 December 2014

Date Ended: 21 January 2015

Total Hours: 28

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 34
Ranking at Time of Posting: 109/169 (64%)
Ranking at Game #458: 320/458 (70%)

Well, what a weird little game. After spending about 20 hours on gambling, bounty-hunting, and trading to amass my "Jump 2" drive bank, I only had about 3 more game hours before winning. The plot and quests were staggeringly lame, consisting of 3 fetch quests and a final battle. Specifically, I had to:

• Finish exploring the base on Neaera to find Arik. Showing him Lenara's half of the Imperial Seal got me his half and a quest to get his "decoding key" from a friend on Yres.

His reaction if you approach him without the seal in the hands of the first character.

• Travel to Yres and show the full Imperial Seal to a hotel clerk to get the decoding key.

• Travel to Akarates to give the decoding key to Lenara (glad she made it out of the game-opening bar okay) and get the final quest to kill Konrad Kiefer, along with a passkey to the warehouse where he's hiding on Efate.

• Return to Efate, the opening planet, and storm the warehouse.

Getting the final mission.

None of these quests involved anything more interesting than landing on a planet and hunting around for the right nearby building. The backstory, which I described in the first post as "as intriguing as anything I can remember" turned into absolute nonsense--essentially just an easily-replaceable framing story for a game that's mostly about logistics and mechanics. Kiefer was hiding in a warehouse 10 steps from the opening screen, and the only thing stopping me from getting to him was a key? And why don't these agents just travel to each other? If Lenara knows where Kiefer is, why doesn't she just instruct Imperial forces to bomb it off the map? What does this group really need us for? Not to mention that the titular Zhodani don't show up in the game at all.

The final battle was difficult, and I suppose I could have done a better job preparing for it with side-quests to increase my funds, training, and armaments. There were about 8 thugs wandering around a large room, protecting the doorway to Kiefer. I took them out one-by-one, but with quite a bit of reloading and retreating for healing.

Carnage and destruction lie behind me as I blow apart the door with a demolition charge.

Kiefer himself wasn't very hard.

Tough talk from a guy facing 5-on-1 odds.

I beat him?! He is destroyed.

Once he was dead, the game immediately cut to an awards ceremony in which Strephon, the Emperor of the Third Imperium, gave the party an "Imperial Certificate of Achievement." Three screens of text awkwardly recapped the game's plot . . .

Do we really have to hear about the decoding keys again? I just did that 20 minutes ago!

. . . and the game mysteriously gave me a code to write down for no reason that I could discern.

For god's sake, someone tell me what this means.

If nothing else, the endgame gave me the pleasure of imagining my five characters leaving the awards ceremony clutching paper certificates printed on some template from OfficeDepot rather than the riches and titles they expected.

What's particularly staggering about MegaTraveller is how much of the game is simply unused. The main quest only takes you to 3 of the 8 systems. Some of the planets have caves--essentially the game's "dungeons"--none of which are necessary. This includes a long maze on the planet Sino, a planet I never visited in a system I never visited, which contains very deadly creatures guarding a bunch of treasures whose combined value is worth about 4 trade missions.

Wandering around an optional "dungeon."

Even in the systems that are used, most of the planets aren't, and even on the planets that are, most of the territory isn't. My visits to Yres and Akarates involved simply walking from the starport to a nearby building when there were screens and screens of the planet to explore. Some planets had areas only visitable by gravity vehicles or watercraft--just no incentive to actually visit those areas.

Space combat is also entirely unnecessary. It never comes up as a plot point. You only engage in it if you want to earn your money through pirating. I played around with it, but it seemed extraordinarily basic--switch between the two gun turret views, "target," and "fire."

Attacking an innocent ship.

Finally--and this is the most damning aspect of the game--skills seem unnecessary. Of the 82 skills, the manual explicitly says that 25 are unused in MegaTraveller 1, leaving 57 that are supposedly useful. As far as I can tell, I got use out of exactly two of them: "laser weapons" and "gambling." I grant that some of the other skills would have come in handy if I'd made different weapon and armor selections--skills like "assault rifle," "energy weapons," "brawling," and "sword"--and others would have come in handy if combat had been harder and I'd been less willing to reload (e.g., "battle dress," "tactics").

What mystifies me more is the host of skills that seem like they ought to have done something, but for which I couldn't detect anything. For instance, characters without the "pilot" or "navigation" skills are perfectly capable of flying the ship; characters with no "ATV" or "grav vehicle" skills don't seem to have any problem operating those vehicles; and characters with no "medical" or "communications" skills can still operate those stations on the ship. "Trader" doesn't seem to affect buying and selling prices, and none of the interpersonal skills seem to affect interaction with NPCs. If characters with those skills are somehow better at the tasks than the others (perhaps someone with "navigation" makes the ship use less fuel and "computer" makes the programs load faster?), it's extremely subtle and ultimately a non-issue in gameplay.

Skill seems to have no bearing on who can use a medkit or how much it heals.

Having said all of that, you can detect the foundations of a much better game beneath all of this rubble. That 5/8 of the systems are unused in the main quest isn't necessarily a bad thing; after all, most of the locations in Skyrim, Baldur's Gate, or Fallout 3 aren't really "necessary," either. If these planets had been more interesting, with more NPCs to talk to, more lore to discover, and side-quests that involved something more than finding an item in one place and selling it in another, the result would be a reasonably good sandbox game. If the main plot had required a different variety of skills and the combat had been harder and more interesting, and the rewards had been more balanced, the player would have had a reason to do all of the side-quests to pay for better equipment and skill-development. The developers spent a lot of time on mechanics but didn't integrate them into a sensible, cohesive, balanced game.

I expect it to perform in the low 30s in a GIMLET, but let's see:

1. Game World. The background of the universe, drawn from the pen-and-paper Traveller RPG, is complex and interesting. It just doesn't translate well to the CRPG itself. It acts primarily as a framing story for a set of mechanics that could have been transferred to just about any story. The titular Zhodani Conspiracy is pretty pathetic, and the Zhodani themselves never appear.

There are maddening hints at a better game if the developers had simply had more time and technology. Most of the lore in the game comes not from NPC discussions but rather nuggets of information that you buy for $2,000 each at special shops. For instance, one discussed a civil war in progress on Yres, which explained why I kept getting randomly shelled as I wandered around the city. This could have been more interesting if there was anything to do with it. Score: 4.

There is an explanation for these craters and bodies; it's just not very interesting or helpful.

2. Character Creation and Development. A great creation system--one of the best I've ever experienced--undermined by almost no character development after creation and a lack of use of the skills, making all the development a waste of time. The only way to increase skills after the character creation process is to pay around $40,000 per point. Again, it's an issue of balance. If skills were more useful, training cost a bit less, and rewards from miscellaneous side quests were a bit higher, there would be more incentive to spend time on skill development. As it is, you can pretty much win the game with the starting party.

Aside from skills, none of the other aspects of the character's background--in particular, branch of service and rank--seem to affect the game at all. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. For all the random NPCs wandering around, interaction is pretty pathetic. Most of them just say, "Greetings, Traveller!" Others tell you to bring them various items for a reward. Only a couple have anything to say relative to the plot or game world, and none of them offer dialogue options. I found maybe two opportunities to use the "bribe" skill and no place to use all the other interpersonal skills--"leadership," "carousing," "interview"--that the manual insists are important. Score: 3.

I forgot to mention this. On some planets, you get stopped for an "illegal weapons" search. What's "illegal" differs from place to place; sometimes my laser weapons were confiscated; sometimes they weren't. But I never saw any negative consequence to just saying "no" to the search. Imagine if the TSA worked that way.

4. Encounters & Foes. There are really no non-combat encounters, and the selection of enemies is limited and boring, mostly consisting of interchangeable thugs in gray combat suits. None of them seem to have particular strengths and weaknesses. Score: 2.

5. Magic and Combat. Ground combat is mostly boring. You simply order your characters to fire at an enemy and the two groups exchange shots until someone is dead. I guess it was even worse in an earlier version of the game (I'm playing 3.0) when there was no option to pause to issue orders, and essentially you could only control one of your characters at a time.

Ground combat does probably have more tactics than I actually used. For instance, I never did much with grenades, even though they would have been helpful on clusters of enemies. There are some considerations with terrain and character placement that could have made a difference. If the battles had been harder (or, in any event, less random), I might have been inspired to explore these options further.

Giving orders in the penultimate battle. Technically, I could be hiding my characters behind these objects, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

Because it wasn't necessary to the game, I simply didn't explore space combat much. It has some interesting ideas, with a variety of laser and missile weapons to buy and a variety of programs that you can purchase and run to increase ship maneuverability, defenses, and weapon effectiveness. In my few attempts at it, nothing really gripped me about the mechanic, though. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. Like many things in MegaTraveller, equipment is solid in concept, flawed in execution. There is a lot of stuff to buy and use, including weapons and armor, medkits, grenades, demolition charges, vacuum suits and helmets, spare oxygen tanks, electric torches and lanterns, and various quest items. There just isn't much reason to buy them.

Early in the game, I bought everyone the best level of vacuum suit, which also provides decent armor protection, at $9,800 each. The next level of armor, "combat armor," costs $122,500 each, so I never bothered to go there. Again--and I know I keep repeating myself--if combat had been harder, the armor less expensive, and the quest rewards more lucrative, there would have been a much greater incentive to continually upgrade equipment. Score: 4.

Some of the items I can sell.

            
7. Economy. This one category encapsulates the game's entire raison d'etre and almost everything wrong with it. The economy in MegaTraveller plays a huge role. It's key to the main plot--the first step is to acquire $2 million for the "Jump 2" drive--and it's the only real mechanism of character development, both in terms of equipment and purchasing new skills. You constantly need to resupply ammunition, fuel, and healing (if you don't want to waste a lot of time in the ship's sick bay). It's the driving force behind all of the side quests as well.

On the surface, the economy has everything I like in an RPG: lots of ways to make money, lots of ways to spend it, never a time when you can just ignore it. It's just that the balance is horribly off. When a single reload of "Laser 12" ammo costs almost $20,000, it's hard to get excited about a side quest that offers a $15,000 reward. When you can make almost $60,000 flying back and forth between Efate and Louzy in less than 10 minutes, why would you spend 20 minutes flying a "space race" between three planets for $10,000? When the difference between an adequate combat suit and a great one is $113,000, are you really going to spend a lot of time grinding for that extra cash?

With a few tweaks in rewards and costs, the economy could have been much better-balanced, which would have changed the nature of the game entirely, making the side quests more of a necessity than an option. In particular, I would have removed the trading mechanic entirely (or made the prices more variable) and made the "Jump 2" drive cost a lot less. Score: 5.
                    
8. Quests. The game has a multi-stage main quest with no options or alternate outcomes and a pretty pathetic series of events. There are side quests--still oddly rare in the era--but almost all of them are fetch quests with such small rewards that they're hardly worth the time. The exception is bounty-hunting, which is both lucrative and somewhat fun. Score: 3. 
                
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Nothing here is going to win any awards. The graphics are VGA but look EGA and haven't really advanced beyond games like 2400 A.D. from several years prior. The NPC portraits look simply awful. The sound consists primarily of an annoying rat-tat with every footstep and a blasting noise during combat. I played with the sound off. The interface is generally okay. I like that it supports a mouse without (usually) requiring it. Some of the inventory-related activities, like dropping an item or transferring an item to another character, are clunky and non-intuitive, and it's actually quite easy to drop an item without realizing it (if it's the active object when you hit ESC to leave the inventory screen). Score: 2.

Even not considering the hair, this is the ugliest NPC portrait in history.

                  
10. Gameplay. As a quasi-sandbox game, gameplay is mostly non-linear, allowing the player to explore the systems in any order and do whatever he wants to achieve the first step of the main quest. But since there's so little of interest in the universe--basically just retrieving objects for rewards--it's hard to regard the non-linearity as a major advantage or to call the game "replayable" because of it. The difficulty is moderate, which ends up hurting the game, as it makes so many of the mechanics unnecessary. The pacing is way off, with the first 4/5 made up of boring grinding and the last fifth a quick flurry of fetch quests. Score: 3.

That gives us a final score of 34, right about where I expected it.

I'm tempted to give the game some bonus points for a few of its innovative ideas, like being able to refuel a ship from gas giants, or the mechanics of spaceflight, in which Newtonian physics prevent easy turning, gravity wells of planets can capture you and throw you off course, and an inattentive player can easily get sucked into a sun. But I'd just have to take them away again for its bugs (my fifth character never did fire his weapon) and dumb gameplay decisions, like starting the party in the middle of a hopeless combat. Thus, we'll leave things as they are.

                    
Wow, did this game get polarized reviews. The best seems to come from the always-charitable Dragon, which offered its modal score of 5/5 and praised how well it followed the rules of the tabletop Traveller (ahem, Gaguum?) and designated it "one of the best science-fiction role-playing games ever for the computer."
                 
Much as we're used to high praise from Dragon, we're equally accustomed to reviews from Amiga magazines in which the reviewer seems to have never played an RPG before. From the July 1991 Amiga Computing, we learn that MegaTraveller 1 is--I'm not making this up--"undoubtedly the best ever computer RPG" just before the reviewer goes on to describe an experience that sounds more frustrating than fun. In the June 1991 Amiga Power, our old friend Stuart Campbell, who gave Secret of the Silver Blades 8/100, opines that "if you took the Pacific Ocean, stacked another Pacific Ocean on top of it, and then attached two more Pacific Oceans to either end, it wouldn't be quite as deep as MegaTraveller 1" and concludes that "the attention to detail is almost breathtaking, and if there's been a game with more to do in it than this one, I haven't seen it." I'm tempted to suggest that Mr. Campbell therefore hasn't seen the last three Ultima titles, either of the two Starflights, or any of the Gold Box games, but we know he's seen at least one of those.

Sanity comes from the June 1991 ACE (combat "irritatingly difficult to control"; mechanics "serve to slow down the action rather than generate excitement"), pretty much all the German Amiga and Atari ST magazines (ratings in the 50s out of 100), and Computer Gaming World. Back in the 1980s, when CGW was pretty much the only show in town, I thought my own opinions were widely divergent from those of Scorpia and the other reviewers. Now that we're in the 1990s and puerile gaming magazines like Amiga Power are springing up everywhere, CGW's coverage always seems like a refreshing oasis of reason. In the November 1990 issue, L.S. Lichtman offers a fair and sober review of the mechanics, drawing from some previous experience with the tabletop Traveller. He indicates that fans of the RPG will be both pleased and disappointed with what did and didn't make it into the computer version. He praises the game for simplifying the character creation process (while still leaving it interesting) and extensive manual but criticizes the combat system and issues with the economy, ultimately labeling it an "unfinished product" and "seriously flawed" while still praising its "variety of activities and natural feel to the adventuring that it offers." In 1996, the magazine included the game on its list of "50 worst games" of all time.

Paragon never did have a decent track record with RPGs, and I'm curious how they managed to get the rights to Traveller and other RPGs in the first place. (By contrast, SSI and D&D were a natural pairing.) Their only previous offerings were the nonsensical Alien Fires: 2199 AD (1986) and Wizard Wars (1988), neither of which exemplified a good RPG. Now, suddenly in 1990 and 1991, they got this agreement with Games Designers' Workshop, and issued games based on MegaTraveller, Space: 1889, and Twilight: 2000.
     
The project lead for MegaTraveller was Jane Yeager, and this is the only game on which I can find her credited in such a role; all her other credits include art design and direction. We've seen her work before on DarkSpyre (which, artistically, bears a passing resemblance to MegaTraveller) and will again on Dusk of the Gods (1991), The Summoning (1992), Dungeon Hack (1993), Veil of Darkness (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and Anvil of Dawn (1995), before she leaves the field and turns to computer education and web site development.

Most of Yeager's later work was at DreamForge, which was co-founded by her co-designer on MegaTraveller, Christopher Straka. This is the first game on which he's credited for "design," but he went on to become the lead designer on almost all the titles above, plus Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (1999), his last credited game.
                   
Next year, we'll see MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients, which everyone seems to think is much better, likely because it involved the active participation of Marc Miller, co-founder of GDW and co-developer of the tabletop Traveller. Also, it looks like primary game design was taken over by F. J. Lennon, who wrote the manual for MegaTraveller 1--arguably the best part of the game.

The 143-page manual provides a solid intro to the Traveller tabletop RPG, not just this game's mechanics.

                       
I am sick to death of 1990 games that don't crack the 30s in the GIMLET. When I designed the scale, I really thought that the average game would be in the 50s or 60s by now. In my entire last year of blogging, there have been only a handful of really good games--Ultima VI, Quest for Glory II, Secret of the Silver Blades, maybe Lord of the Rings--and a bunch of mediocre offerings that feel like throwbacks to 1986. The future doesn't look any brighter, and soon we have to deal with Space: 1889, yet another science-fiction RPG from Paragon that's based on a tabletop game. Maker's breath, will I be happy to see 1990 in the rear-view mirror. 
               
Hard Nova, written by the same person who thought "Malcolm Trandle" and "The Key of Thor" were good ideas, is next. Yay.

*****

Further reading: My coverage of the sequel, MegaTraveller 2, begins here. Paragon's other GDW-based games includes Space 1889.