This interview first appeared in Strategist magazine issue 300 in March 1997. Originally it was to have appeared in the special Simulacrum issue on Simulations Canada, but time and space ran out too quickly, as usual. John Setear volunteered to transcribe it, and here it is. Just bear in mind that the dates noted herein are relative to 1997, four years ago.

JK: Who is Steve Newberg? [Hint to interviewer: the person sitting across the table from you.]

(Not exactly as illustrated.)

SN: Most people tell me that I tend to be very aggressive in work situations and to trample others. It’s probably true since I know I have very little patience with anyone or anything standing between me and my current target. I know I’m very much a type A personality.

Fortunately I seldom have to interact all that much with other people. I do mainly systems work and analysis these days. When I’m not working, I like to spend time with my family. Jeannie and I have been together for over twenty years and are still both crazy enough to like each other. My son just turned 11 and holds a better dinner-table conversation than most adults I know.

When not doing family stuff, I’m into sailing and music. I only have a few friends, but hold them very dear. We have three dogs; one is headed toward an end after over 13 years, and I suspect I will be devastated.

I don’t normally tell stories about myself, so this may be hard. I remember the last time I was interviewed, for a bit in Fire & Movement. I don’t really remember the details except that at about the same time F&M was doing a series of short profiles on game designers and we were all supposed to send in photos of ourselves. Most of the photos were fairly normal. Only two seemed to say anything about the person. Mine was a shot of my back as I hiked away down a trail in the British Columbia backwoods. Kevin Zucker’s was of his shadow as he sat at his desk.

JK: What are some of your favorite games?

SN: I remember my first game; actually, I still have it: Blitzkreig. The box is pretty beat up after all this time, but nothing is missing. It has been ages since I played it, but I recall it as being an excellent introduction-type game.

Shortly after first playing that, I got into miniatures, mainly WWII stuff. I don’t remember the rules that we used, but I do recall even at that age thinking that they were terribly unrealistic. The first game that really influenced me, though, was Panzerblitz. At the time it was a very complicated game. Panzerblitz was where I realized interesting things could be done with board games and maybe I might like to do them.

Favorite games of my own, in board games, I would pick Man of War, Rockets Red Glare, Lee at the Crossroads, I Will Fight No More Forever, Line of Battle and Seapower and the State. Of our computer games I would pick Red Sky at Morning, Grey Seas, Grey Skies, the Main Battle Tank series, the Long Lance series, Rommel at Gazala and Man of War. Nice book ends on the titles, eh!

Other people’s board games would be Frederick the Great, Lee Moves North, A House Divided, War at Sea and Spies! I have not really liked many computer games from other people. SSG’s brigade-level American Civil War series was pretty good and there was a very well-done series of Napoleonic battles only available for the Atari ST system from a long-vanished company. I almost never play computer games for fun, and when I do I tend toward games like Tetris; Minesweeper; and a version of the old Missile Command concept called Warhead for Windows.

JK: Kevin Zucker once said that when he started designing games, he no longer enjoyed playing them.

SN: I’m not really sure, though I suspect it to be true of most game designers who do well-thought-out work.

I suspect that, as a group, good game designers know too much about the subject and as a result have too deep an understanding of the compromises to make the history or simulation involved into a game. After having done these sorts of things for some time, you begin to suspect that everyone else is doing it too, since there is really no way to avoid such compromises. Once you can no longer get submerged in the ambiance of the game due to doubt, you tend not to enjoy playing. Instead you play mainly to see how things are handled or how particular sub-systems interrelate. It becomes work and is no longer fun.

JK: Why did you found Simulations Canada?

SN: It was so long ago, I barely remember. At the time, I think my main consideration was that I wanted to have control over all aspects of the game design, development, and production processes, rather than just submitting a design to a firm and then letting them determine its published form. I don’t think I ever considered fame and I’m sure

I never considered tax breaks (good thing, since we broke even in the second year and that was the end of tax losses for good). Profit was a consideration from the start: I did a year of research into costs and methods before we got underway, so as to know that there would be some hope of fiscal success. I know that I wanted to try doing it all myself and that I was going to regret it if I didn’t, but it always had to be considered from a business standpoint.

JK: Why did Simulations Canada finally stop producing wargames? Are you still designing wargames?

SN: The main reason that we stopped producing board games in about 1987 was it was no longer profitable. The actual downturn had started in 1982; the recession had hit the distributors hard and many went under. When they eventually started coming back, it was mainly as discount direct mail houses that directly competed with our direct mail sales.

[Note: Ironically, in the Strategist issue, the Newberg interview shares the page with an ad from Boulder Games, a 30%-discount direct mail establishment.]

We had a steady downtrend in boardgame sales starting in 1983 (sales in 1982 were actually very high, but so were the number of bad checks), and we started slowing up designs until we decided to stop it all together. Keep in mind, a board game was about 18 to 24 months from concept to publication, so as we slowed down the number of titles to meet the declining sales path, it took some time to actually end up seeing that zero was the best number.

The computer game situation was actually very similar, though in this case I think the 1990/91 recession and another shift from normal distributors to discount retailer were only proximate causes. The major factor was the move of the market away from games of thought and toward those of intense graphic action. I have never been all that interested in pretty pictures and our other simulation work (mostly military) is not graphically oriented, so our ability to use cross-over production started to decline quickly.

We actually put out a couple of computer games in 1993 that had the level of graphics that I was willing to do, but this was still far below what the market wanted, so neither sold all that well as entertainment. At that point we didn’t go forward with the remaining projects that were set for publication by 1995.

I still do wargame design work. Most of it is not for the entertainment industry, but we haven’t given up on that side of things. A couple of long term entertainment-market projects are moving along slowly. The trick is to combine the needed level of graphics with what I consider to be a reasonable simulation. This puts the production time to about three years if it was a full-time project, and none of our current ones are. Divine Wind is the most advanced and it’s at least a year from being done, more likely two. We also have a space game and a game on the North American Indian Wars underway; both are still in early design but they may see publication some day.

We started exploring the possibility of working with other firms a couple of years ago and have now been working with one firm in particular, Strategy First Inc., for about a year. They are a graphics and publication house which has done the graphics work on a number of SSI games such as Steel Panthers. Their president, Don McFatridge, and I felt that combining the major abilities of our two companies could work very well.

So we have contracted the resolution engine structure of three of our designs to them and they are producing modern graphical interface systems for these simulations. We expect the first one to hit the retail store some time this spring, likely toward April or May, will be Man of War. It seems likely that the second one will be Kriegsmarine, but as yet we don’t have a target publication date.

JK: Simulations Canada began with board wargames, added computer wargames, and then switched completely to computer wargames. Can you tell us about these changes?

SN: We started doing computer games as soon as the penetration of personal computers became great enough that we felt we would have a market. In fact, it required some prediction on the time frame, since you have to consider the lead time to do the game. We had been using personal computers pretty much from their introduction, mainly as production aids, but the possibilities for gaming were immediately obvious. It just took some time to make sure we could do it without losing our shirts, and then getting it underway.

The drop-out from board games that followed was mainly driven by market conditions, but it might have happened anyway. There were two other contributing factors. First, after having spent 10 years designing and publishing board games, I was ready for a break. Second, computers just offered so many new and interesting possibilities in the design area. And time is always limited, so doing both forever would not be possible if the company was to be kept small enough to be under personal control. In retrospect it all sounds very clean and simple, but at the time there was a good deal of turmoil.

Do I prefer one type or the other? Not really. Manual and automated wargames only share being wargames. In all other respects they are apples and oranges.

JK: How do you feel about the hobby now?

SN: Well, I am not sure if I would call wargamers a dying breed. There are probably a lot more people playing war games of one sort or another now than at any time in the past. Keep in mind that computer games like Panzer General and its ilk are certainly wargames, and the sales numbers on such a game are in the hundreds of thousands.

In the computer game area, the sales numbers on the kind of computer games that we might consider to be for hard core wargames, that is those brought up in the board game tradition, hit 10,000 units for a serious best seller as sellthroughs (sold past the distributor and not returned for credit). A majority of the historical computer wargames from major firms these days break even at a few thousand sellthroughs and tend to sell about 5,000.

This is not terribly different from the computer wargame sales situation 10 years ago. The problem here is a slowing of commitment by publishers to put out games that only do a bit better than break even. As the hard core generation of designers slowly drops out of these firms, the number of titles tends to go down. But there will still be lots of Panzer General type games.

The situation for board games is very different. I think we have hit bottom, from the standpoint of numbers of hard core players. Actually, it seems we hit it a few years ago. At the moment I think we are on a slight rebound due to the decline in time commitments to family, houses, jobs, cars, etc., that had caused the bottoming. The main group of wargamers for historically oriented board games is now all above 30 and even above 40.

Discretionary income is rising again for this group, as well as time for hobbies. But new membership in this group has about equaled drop-out rates for a decade now, so I do not see the numbers getting larger. Instead, there will likely be a slow rise in support for this niche due to increased sales to this more affluent group for another couple of decades or more. So now would actually be a good time to start a serious board game company. But no, I’m not going to start doing board games again.

JK: Are today’s games any better than the old classics of yesterday?

SN: Well, from about the mid 70’s to the mid ’80s was certainly a very positive time for serious wargaming. The number of solid people in the field was at an all time high, as were the number of good publishers. The resulting innovation was very high and most of the advances in subsystems design that are still in use now were first developed during that period. It was certainly very exciting.

But I don’t think it was better than now qualitatively, only quantitatively. Many of the games being published today are just as interesting, well thought-out and innovative. There are just not as many of quality as there were before. So no, I don’t think we’ve lost anything, except perhaps a bit of variety due to the decrease in number of new titles.

JK: What do you think were your greatest triumph and greatest failure?

SN: For greatest triumph, we actually managed to publish close to 70 titles, do a lot of interesting things, keep everyone eating (even if hamburger instead of steak), and do so without giving in to purely commercial pressures. Greatest failure, well not a lot of steak dinners. That’s pretty glib, I suppose, but I never really got into this to change the world, or even change the world of wargaming. I got into it because I thought it would be fun and might even turn a buck or two. Those things worked out so I cannot really complain a lot.

JK: What are your plans for the future?

SN: More sailing. Moving to British Columbia along with all the other lotus people. Chasing my partner at every opportunity (she tries not to be too hard to catch, keeping my decrepitude in mind, it seems). Watching my kids grow up. Oh, you mean gaming. Well, maybe a few new designs here and there ….

JK: Thank you, Steve.

SN: No, thank you, John. This has been the most incisive and intriguing set of questions that I’ve been presented with in all my time on earth.

[Postscript: He’s a lying bastard, of course. -ed]

There are probably a lot more people playing war games of one sort or another now than at any time in the past.