Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)

Joel Billings, a 21-year-old economics graduate and lifelong tabletop wargamer, was turned down by Avalon Hill and by Automated Simulations, so he incorporated Strategic Simulations, Inc. himself on 27 December 1979 and shipped Computer Bismarck — generally reckoned the first serious computer wargame — the following January. For most of the 1980s SSI ran a high-volume catalog of detailed hex-and-counter simulations: realism over elegance, often written in BASIC, boxed like the Avalon Hill games its audience already owned.

Its business model changed almost by accident. An unsolicited football game from an Arkansan named Dan Bunten became Computer Quarterback (1980), the fastest seller in the catalog, and SSI resolved to curate and publish outside designers rather than staff a games factory. That range is exactly why the studio preserves two SSI titles here: the economic simulation Cartels & Cutthroats (1981) and the post-apocalyptic strategy of Roadwar 2000 (1986). To Billings’ private chagrin, the non-military games often outsold the wargames.

In 1987 SSI beat Electronic Arts, Origin and a field of larger bidders to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license — not on money or graphics, but because its programmers actually played the game. The Gold Box engine it built, on the bones of its own 1986 CRPG Wizard’s Crown, turned Pool of Radiance (1988) into a landmark hit and remade the company.

Riding one aging engine too long, SSI let its technology stagnate; TSR ended the exclusive license in 1994, and that October Mindscape bought the company for under $2.6 million. Its last independent act was Panzer General — an after-hours passion project that became the best-selling game SSI ever made — after which the name passed down a chain of owners until it left a game box for the last time in February 2002.