Game makers fear peace will be bad for business

Press, 19 December 1989, Page 8

Game makers fear peace will be bad for business

NZPA-KRD New York In the war simulation game business, they call it the “glasnost problem”. New personal computer games such as the “Third Courier” and new board games such as “Fifth Fleet” are based on what have long seemed safe assumptions: that the Soviet Union is the western world’s enemy, Eastern Europe is made up of rigid Soviet satellite States and the Cold War could last forever. But political reforms in Czechoslovakia, a crumbling Berlin Wall and the recent United StatesSoviet Union summit meeting in Malta are confounding those assumptions. Now war game makers worry that peace will be bad for business. They say future games may focus on other sorts of combat,

including Third World conflicts, World War II battles, even outer space invasions. But new games can take two years to create. Meanwhile, some developers are preparing for the Christmas sales equivalent of the siege of Stalingrad. “We have a lot of games devoted to war with the Soviets,” said Sandy Peterson, a software developer at Microprose, a Maryland firm that specialises in software combat simulations of tanks, submarines and fighter jets. “There has been a lot of joking about our company going out of business.” Microprose’s newest release, “Ml Tank Platoon,” lets the user take on the Russians tread-to-tread. “Our reputation has been made

on military simulations,” Mr Peterson said. “But the Soviets are no longer a viable enemy for a game. There are still bad guys in the world. All you have to do is pick on one of them.” Accolade, a California software firm, has just released the “Third Courier,” a game about “Berlin, the perfect place for a spy to die.” Ralph Giuffre, the marketing vicepresident, admits new world developments may have lessened the public’s appetite for the product.

“These changes affect us just as they would affect people’s appetite for novels and movies about the Cold War,” he said. He points out the release of one Rambo movie — about the Afghanistan war — coincided with a Soviet withdrawal.