These days Chris Crawford is probably better known as the founder of the Game Developers Conference, which (as the article notes) started in his living room, an

These days Chris Crawford is probably better known as the founder of the Game Developers Conference, which (as the article notes) started in his living room, and and for being a visionary game developer, but back at the peak of his fame he was known for one thing: Balance of Power. I remember playing Balance of Power, when it first came out, on my dad's Macintosh (the original black and white one, which these days you are more likely to run in to as a fish tank than a working computer, but back then in my kid-geek eyes it was the coolest and most sophisticated of any personal computer, at least until my true love, the Amiga, came along). It was obvious that Balance of Power was really different from all the other games out at the time. For one, it was not about slaying dragons in dungeons or other adventures but about Real Life, featuring real life politics, and it was Serious, very Serious. I could tell that. I had fun playing it in the few times I visited my dad at work (it was his work computer.. we definitely couldn't afford to have one at home), but it was it was difficult, and had the infamous ending which featured just this single paragraph, which I still remember: "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." Back then I didn't have the words for it, but Chris Crawford had almost single-handedly ushered in the dawn of simulation computer gaming. This was 1985, four years before SimCity and six years before Civilization. There were other early contenders, like M.U.L.E (from 1983), and Seven Cities of Gold (1984), but they were all either cute and whimsical and/or set in a mythical/distant/nonexistent time or place. This was the first game I remember which was set in today's world, with real-world politics in it, and which seriously tried to simulate this world as it is. Today it looks primitive, but back then it was really innovative and it was obvious to everyone that Chris Crawford was on a different wavelength than virtually everyone else in the industry, was seeing and aiming further than just about everyone, who were mostly focusing on much smaller and less ambitious aims. Unfortunately, it seems that he was a bit too ambitious for the technology of the day, and he kind of disappeared from the scene, working on his magnum opus which was never to see the light of day.