"Because so much of the game revolves around it, my first task was the creation of the map. ... You can see that it is indeed an intricate representation of the

"Because so much of the game revolves around it, my first task was the creation of the map. ... You can see that it is indeed an intricate representation of the world. How, people ask me, did I digitize it? My answer drops jaws: I did it by hand. I started with a map of the world, which I traced freehand onto graph paper. I then redrew the lines to conform to the rectangular grid of the graph paper. I then scaled up the map to be more appropriate to the Mac's screen. This rescaling was non-integral, so I did it by hand again, estimating rescaling values for each line segment. Some fudging here and there gave me the final map, represented on some two dozen sheets of graph paper. The only task remaining was to get it into the computer. I sat down with a tape recorder and started reading coordinates from the graph paper: "Nigeria. Origin at X = 138, Y = 227. One step north, 1 east, 2 north, 3 east ..." Then I sat at the computer and replayed the tape, typing in the values as they came tumbling off the tape. The string of directional steps marking the course of the border was translated into a compact sequence of numerals and single letters, like so: NE2N3E. I then wrote routines that converted these strings into the graphic representations of the countries."