Annals of Rome The Designers Perspective
March 17th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · 5 Comments · Ancients, Feature:Anc, Interview, Retro
As I noted in an edit to my Annals of Rome entry, I was delighted to get an email from the designer of the game, George Jaroszkiewicz. The fact that he was not credited in the original packaging (When I created the game, it was inconvenient to publish my name, so I invented the name Rome Software as a convenient cover.) explains why it was so difficult to find any game genealogical footprint.
In any case, Mr. Jaroszkiewicz gave his consent for me to publish the contents of that email. I hope you find them interesting.
Quote:
In those days I wanted to see how accurately I could create a historical simulation and personally I thought of it as an intellectual, mathematical exercise in socio-economic modelling. However, at that time, such games were not thought of as anything more than entertainment and not something for grown men to dabble in, so I kept my name out of it. I pandered to that element by introducing a scoring system, but as various reviewers have pointed out, the only score worth anything in history is how long we can survive. [The often credited] Andrew Pan and A. D. Boyse & J. G. Langdale-Brown were simply people who were paid by PSS to convert the game from my original Amstrad 464 version onto various more popular platforms. They had nothing at all to do with any of it apart from that. I still hold the original documentation, flow diagrams, and copyright and can prove this.
It should be appreciated how little RAM I had available to me when I wrote AOR. Not much more than 48k. I had the smallest Amstrad, with a monochrome monitor, not colour. ...
(Continued)
http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2008/03/17/annals-of-rome-the-designers-perspective/ ... rspective/
