Redmond Simonsen Passes Away

I never met the man, but he is probably one of the single greatest influences on my life.
Greg Costikyan worked with him for several years, and it's worth reading his blog entries on the subject. There's also a NY Times obituary.

One afternoon in 1979

Autumn 1979. I'm in high school in Armidale, a small town in Northern NSW. A friend has suggested I might like to stay after school and check out the wargames ... club. (There's no formal club, just a bunch of people who meet to play games after school, supervised by a teacher who shares the interest.)

My friend is no veteran of the group, he's heard about it somewhere. (Our school is only 500 or so students, so the fact that this group has escaped our attention for so long is actually pretty amazing.) We go there and are given a rather strange game to play, it's called "Napoleon at Waterloo" and it has a small board, which simply and clearly shows the layout of a famous battlefield subdivided into hexagons, on which we place pieces which, somewhat less intuitively, represent formations of cavalry, infantry, and artillery.

An hour later the game is over, and I'm hooked for life.

Unfortunately, for SPI the end was already near. Board wargaming had peaked, and already role-playing games and computer games were eating their market. Within a few years, SPI would be gone. Within 10 years the best "refugee" companies formed from SPI's designers would be gone.

(Now, I wasn't entirely new to this kind of game. I'd seen some people playing similar -- much less well-designed -- games when I was younger. I hadn't had time to learn the rules, so I had gone home and tried to design a similar game, inferring what the rules must be like from the game layout. The most ambitious game I worked on was an all-encompassing game of interstellar war and colonisation -- and in trying to complete it I encountered every problem which SPI turned out to have solved: e.g. what constitutes a complete, usable set of rules?)

The game was from SPI, and Redmond Simonsen was credited with the graphic design of every one of the 400+ games SPI produced in about a decade. SPI didn't invent board wargaming any more than Apple invented the home computer. SPI invented the process for designing and developing board wargames in a manner that made them consistent (where consistency made sense). SPI credited game designers (Costikyan credits Simonsen with coining the term "game designer"), put play testers and blind testers in its credits, developed standards by which game rules were organized and printed, and developed a process for taking a game through from idea through design to testing and publication.

SPI created the games industry. And Redmond Simonsen -- along with James F. Dunnigan -- created SPI.

Farewell Redmond. RIP.