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Norm Koger
TalonSoft

Sure, war might be grim, brutal, and rife with action, but behind every good battle is a better strategic plan. Norm Koger, the 42-year-old former USAF GI knows first hand about the perils of conflict, and with wargames such as TalonSoft's The Operational Art of War, he has brought a unique strategic element to gaming that foregoes glitz in favor of depth. Working by himself out of a home office, Koger had quietly and consistently built games that have a devout following.

1. If there were one moment from gaming you'd put in a time capsule to represent the 20th century of interactive entertainment, what moment would it be and why?

Norm: Computer games are in their infancy and will be for a while longer.

An exclusive look at the expansion pack for The Operational Art of War.

I don't remember the make or model of the first computer I played with. It was a bare circuit board, screwed to supports on a sheet of clear plastic. The keyboard, secured to the same piece of plastic, was surplus from an electric typewriter. A friend had picked all this stuff up at an electronics show. I was not impressed when I first saw the thing. Then, we entered the source code for Hammurabi - an early "strategy" game. (We didn't have any kind of mass storage, so we had to enter the source code for whatever we were working on from scratch whenever we turned the computer on.) We made mistakes of course and had to tinker with the code to get it to work. I can't honestly say it was much worse than installing a game under Win 98 though. When Hammurabi finally ran without crashing, we were amazed. It was fun. I realized that these microcomputer things had potential.

It's been 20 years since then, and very few people remember Hammurabi. I suspect the same will be true of all today's games by 2020.

2. Do you think the gaming industry is underestimating one aspect of interactive entertainment that will take us all by surprise in the early 21st century?

Norm: Today, game design requires the coordinated effort of a group of programmers and artists familiar with the eccentricities of the medium. It's as much an engineering project as an artistic endeavor. Every game must be aimed at a target platform, and heaven help the developer who misjudges the installed technology base at the time of a game's release. If a game requires computing power that won't be generally available for another six months, players will howl that it is slow and unplayable. Underestimate, and you're in just as much trouble, as everyone will complain about how dated the design is. No matter what you do, one year after release, a game is considered so archaic that it is unlikely to be found on store shelves.

Next: Norm Koger (cont.)