So, who are you, where are you from, and how old are you?
I am S. Anton Salviander, but just Sam will do. I was born in 1971 in a small city in central Finland, but I was raised in the southwestern coastal city of Turku.
Can you tell us a bit about your family and growing up in Finland?
My father was a building foreman and my mother was a stage and film actress. They were both about to finish up their studies in their respective fields when I came along. Yes, I was a happy accident per my parents’ statements.
<chuckles>
My father cut short his dream of becoming an architect like his grandfather, Anton Salviander, who was a well-known Finnish Jugend-style architect and a general contractor. Anton designed and built around 40% of my home city, Turku. He was among the richest men in the city in the late 1800s. Trust me when I say that I never saw a penny of his wealth, as he had 10+ kids to split it amongst after his death. But I did get named after him.
It was awesome to have been raised in a city that was founded in the 13th century (although people had lived in that delta area for thousands of years), and it is complete with a castle and a cathedral from the dark ages. Is there really a better place for a young boy to roam than a dark castle and human-bone-covered catacombs under a cathedral? Answer is no, by the way.
How did you get into gaming?
That's actually quite funny, but I got into the whole thing because of my father, who didn't know the first thing about games. He got us kids an Atari game console and Pong game back in the late ’70s. Yes, the original nerve-wracking square ball and two paddles game ...
<laughs>
I played the crap out of that Atari and then wanted a better system to play games with. At the time Vic 20 and Commodore 64 had come on the market, and both offered much more stimulating games than Pong. I worked multiple little odd jobs since I was 12 years old to support my computer addiction, and owned everything from Vic to C64 to MSX to Amiga 500, and finally to Amstrad PC with a whopping 8088 CPU. Hey, my machine was 1.5 times faster than a genuine IBM PC at the time!
But to be totally honest, I was always a gamer type. Born to be a gamer, is a better way to put it. Games of all kinds appeal to me in all formats and mediums. I think it has to do with besting the other player or the game mechanics... to beat the challenge... to win... Period.
What were your favorite games on PC?
Is this a trap? I ask that counter-question in all sincerity, because back in the day we didn't have very many games, but they were somewhere around 95% really good ones. Therefore I would have to list them all, but if we cut to the chase, I'd say Star Flight I & II.
What other things did you enjoy as a kid growing up in Finland, or was it just games all the time?
I played hockey in the school teams and our city team, TPS, juniors. Surprising, huh? I also played baseball and competed in long-distance running, cross-country skiing, and such. I was also hanging out with my Comp Sci and Math friends outside the rink a lot. We used to challenge each other to code different kinds of games on a PC using Turbo Pascal and BASIC. They were pretty primitive games, but some of them were pretty good from an idea perspective.
Then I joined my first band, which was a metal band called ECT (Electro-Convulsive Treatment). We played something of a mixture of Slayer, ST, Napalm Death, and Metallica. To get myself an amp and a guitar, I had taken a job at a local game store. They sold computer games and conventional games like D&D, Games Workshop products, and so on.
So that got you into game-design?
Yes and no. It certainly helped to steer me in the direction of the inevitable. I had gotten the good ol' red box D&D Basic Set from one of my friends who'd visited New York with his parents. It was the latest fad at the time in the U.S. and before all the devil worship accusations, suicides, and what-have-you came about. So I had read the rules and immediately got it, as my mother was an actress after all.
One night we had a total blackout in our neighborhood in the middle of the coldest winter, and so a bunch of friends and I went to a boiler room to stay warm. It was frickin' boring to sit there in candlelight, so I whipped out the Basic Set. We played the whole evening and through the night. We were all hooked, and those guys would be my players for years to come, too.
Okay, so then what happened?
I think I honestly suffered from a stone-cold addiction after that candlelit night in the boiler room. I started taking my salary in game products, and soon I had played, and damn-near owned, every game on the market at the time: D&D, AD&D, Gamma World, GURPS, RuneQuest, Acirema, Cyberpunk 2020, Traveler, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, WH40K, MERP, and the list go on and on. Seriously, I could have either bought or built a house with all the money I spent on the games I owned when everything was said and done.
But this was also the opportunity for me to get my Universal Mass Combat System out in the wild. I designed it originally for a RuneQuest campaign involving a very large-scale armed dispute, but quickly realized that it can be converted to any existing fantasy RPG with minor modifications. I made the changes and it was published in late ‘80s in the officially licensed Finnish version of the TSR’s Dragon magazine called Sininen Lohikäärme (Blue Dragon in English), which gave the magazine rights to translate and publish old TSR D&D adventure module in the mag or as separate modules.
It was published in Issue #2, as it missed, by accident, Issue #1’s deadline. It was geared to be the jewel for the first issue and a driver for the interest in the publication in general (Ed: still presented online http://rpggeek.com/image/569092/sininenlohikaarme-issue2). It so happened that Issue #2 was to be the most popular and sought after of any of the issues for that magazine, because it had my mass combat rules in it. Whether it was the fact that they were really liked by the gamers or the fact that there was really nothing in existence at the time that solved a problem over massive wars in the campaigns at all, I am not sure about. I like to think it is the former, but I am not objective in this matter. Anything you ever create becomes your baby, so you don’t want to see it to be thrown out with the bath water, right?
What I also find hilarious is that my name is not on the author’s / contributor’s list on RPG Geek forum and the description says merely “simple mass combat rules” (Ed: Sam quickly proved that NOT to be true), but the cover of the mag hails UMCS as “a whole new game” which it really was at the time of the publication. The rules were easy to learn, but not simple by any means. Anyway, guys, it was a long time ago, so who cares.
I also designed a game heavily based on Gamma World called Conflict in Vietnam, but like said it was heavily based on GW, and while it was played quite a bit, I would have not been able to publish it.
I can say, though, that at that time my addiction to games was so bad that I'd have been abusing games intravenously if that would have been an option.
<laughs heartily>
Was that when you started designing games in numbers?
No, since I had already sort of done that with my egghead buddies and most of us kind of sucked at it, my mass combat rules eventually got buried under the dust of amnesia over the ages, and CoV was a thoroughly plagiarized version of GW for private use only.
Well... I mean they were all okay or better than ok and free, but we still didn't really gain any fame except for being the guys called to fix any computer problems in school. That happened a lot, and we also ended up teaching Comp Sci to other kids, as we were light-years ahead of the teachers.
Then I also had to go do my compulsory military service right after high school, so there wasn't much time to work on games. Most of my time in high school went to band practice, hockey, and playing games.
What did you do in the military?
I went through my basic in a mechanized Jaeger Brigade in which I made it to the NCO school. During the NCO Phase 1 I was let in on a public secret that there was a possibility to qualify for the asymmetrical warfare unit. So I went after that option with gusto, to say the least.
Asymmetrical warfare unit is what people commonly call Special Forces, but we weren't to use that moniker... ever. Very long story short, after WWII, the Soviet Union banned Finland from having SF troops in the 1948 treaty, so we didn't have "Special Forces", but we had my unit which was the same thing without the label. We just did not call it like that or make any noise about it. There were others, too, like Combat Divers, Parajaegers, Border / Frontier Jaegers, and so on. All of us, except the divers, got pretty much the same training, but different emphasis on air, land, and / or sea operations.
Would you think I switched my games obsession to obsessing about getting accepted into this unit? Oh, you bet! I eventually qualified not only to be sent to the CO School but the Sr. Recon Officer training course, as well. I served in this function until my honorable discharge as a second lieutenant in the early ‘90s.
Hey, we know how it works in the U.S. How could you have been an officer with just a high school diploma?
In the Finnish army, everyone goes to basic and can then work their way up to General, if they so desire -- and if they can, that is. No shortcuts. The education level doesn't matter, as we were all tested extensively through various psychological, intelligence, and so on, tests. Repeatedly, actually, and the higher they thought you could go, the more tests you took, both physically and mentally.
But let's just say that 90+% of the guys who qualified for the asymmetrical warfare unit and CO school eventually got their college degrees in the civilian world. Yes, even the standard army guys. My unit buddies have all done extremely well for themselves in various areas in the past 20-some years.
Okay, that was cool, but we’re still wondering how you got into hardcore game-design.
It was a dark and stormy night... just kidding.
It's actually worth going back to my time in the unit for a little bit more. We had a communication center raid coming up and had to make miniature 3D maps of the target and all that cool crap you see in the movies. So, I saw an opening and a real function for a role-playing game right there. Not a miniature game, as you probably thought, because of the 3D map we made.
No, in my mind it had to be an RPG. We'd been collecting reconnaissance data around the target for a week, pretty much day and night, to learn the guard paths, rotations, infiltration routes, and such. Trust me when I say it is pretty extensive preparations for attacking a target on foot.
So I saw something useful from my gamer days. Why not experience the raid firsthand before, right? Over and over again, if need be? All the men had seen the target area during the recon phase of the prep, so I grabbed a copy of GURPS and had my fire team create themselves as characters.
Seriously?! You had a bunch of burly SF guys roll PCs for GURPS...?!
Well, yeah, seriously and by the way GURPS was a very conscious decision, too. It is the best RPG in terms of mixing simulation of reality with fluid flow of the game itself.
I played the raid with my fire team a few times with different results, and they were stoked about the concept. My DIs approached me about the whole ordeal, and after I explained the reasoning behind it, they were rather impressed and saw the application for it just as I did. It simply made sense to become a veteran of that engagement in your mind’s eye so to speak. We did everything and anything that made logical sense and would give us an edge over our enemy.
Needless to say, the raid went superbly well for my fire team, as we had done it a few times before we did it for real. It was a huge differentiator. I have to also give all the credit and high praise for GURPS for being the best pen and paper RPG out there, even today.
As a funny trivia bit, much later in life when I was living in the U.S., I would be a guest speaker for a Steve Jackson Games release online event, with Mr. Jackson himself, for theGURPS: Special Ops source book. This was in Austin, TX where SJG is also headquartered.
It was quite an honor for me to be in the online event with Mr. Jackson, whom I’ve respected to high heaven for so many years as an avid GURPS abuser, and a bunch of hardcore GURPS fans. Ranks with meeting Sandy Petersen in person in Helsinki RopeCon, and getting an autograph on my Call of Cthulhu rulebook.
Wow. Cool. But we still haven’t gotten to how you got into real game design.
Sure, ok. After I discharged from the service as a 2LT, I did some other things in life not related to gaming, so I’ll skip that and fast forward to the year 1994. I was recovering from a severe illness, and used that time to write my first collection of short stories that was published in 1995.
The creative writing streak got my inner engine revving, so I had to come up with something to soothe the beast, so to speak. That’s when the SteelBall idea came to my mind and I started working on it immediately. Just a couple of months later we were play-testing with a crude prototype with a bunch of my gamer friends. It was an addictive game straight through the gate.
It was all because of the progression that the players went through as more games were played. I don’t mean the human players, but the players in the imaginary SteelBall teams, who are all created like RPG characters with stats, backgrounds, equipment, and so on. They also gained experience and formed real-life like personalities as we went about playing more. It was, and is, as you know, a very cool and very addictive hybrid concept of an RPG and a board-game.
However, producing a board-game in 1994-Europe was insanely expensive, and I was just a Comp Sci lecturer at a technical school at the time. So we kept playing the prototype and having fun.
Then I got a job offer and scholarship from Microsoft Corporation in 1998, and moved to Redmond, WA to work and go to university. At that point SteelBall went to the drawer to be whipped out only when I played it with my new coworkers and other American game enthusiasts at the local game stores. But with busy schedules around MSFT and college courses, I wasn’t looking at it as a side project on top of the responsibilities we have in life once an adult.
However, a couple of years after moving from Finland to Redmond, I ended going to Eastern Oregon University to finish my CS degree, and had a bit more free time in the evenings. So, between schoolwork and jobs and other duties, I founded an RPG Club. Through that I met a lot of awesome people and went on to design Trencher WYSIWYG miniature war game for variety’s sake. Both SteelBall and Trencher were big hits among the gamers on campus.
Then something really bizarre happened, which is the reason we are having this interview in a first place, and I still can’t explain it all today.
I had a dream about playing a card game, but not the standard tapping style as Magic the Gathering and other copies of it are played, but more like a, hmm, kinetic card game, y’know? I had that description in my head when I woke up and it has stuck with the game since then. This was 2001 by the way, so it is really great to get it going full steam exactly 13 years later.
But that morning I remember I was like, kinetic card game? I was intrigued, and knowing how fast dreams fade from our minds, I skipped lectures for two days and simply wrote the first revision rules in that time. Basically, I translated the game mechanics I had seen in my dream into rules.
Now that I had a set of rules, I had no idea if they would actually work in practice. I went to the campus book store and bought a deck of note cards, which I cut in half and with a pencil marked the stats on them. After the third day since my dream, I had a prototype deck and rules ready to go.
Then I had my first-ever test game with Jon Hancock (the fantastic artist and human being behind a lot of the NetWar card art), which turned out to be a success. It was, and still is, bizarre how you can dream of a game and it is actually a functional, addictive game almost as-is. I will most likely never be able to explain that other than our brains are amazing machines that do things outside our consciousness quite a bit.
I am just happy mine was kind enough to let me know of the game...
<laughs heartily>
Damn, we had no idea that was the background of NetWar. Was it finished and ready for print right then and there?
Oh, by no means was it ready for prime time. We lacked all the art, there were special cases that needed presiding over, and so on. But that said, the basics of the game and the neat differentiators from other card games were there. It included the Invisible Game Board, the mathematical geometry being spot on (actually, the game can only work with those exact dimensions), and so on. It was a surprisingly ready product already after three stinking days, and one dream, of designing.
Well, ok, let me take back some of that as the original was fantasy themed and was called EPOCH: The Journey. That was the milieu Jon was drawing and painting his art for originally.
Ah, so when did EPOCH turn into NetWar? Seems like quite a change.
Ok, so when we started talking about the merging of Slipknot Games into Legion 13 Games in 2013, it made me go back to the EPOCH model and realize that it is more of a computer network, how the game works. It is far too linear to be an anything-goes fantasy milieu game.
That’s when it hit me that it really is a hacker game of malicious applications, devious features, and rivaling factions over the World Wide Computing Cloud who are in it to win it. In other words to annihilate the opposition. Perfect.
So I changed the rulebook and the art of the cards before we sat down over NetWar, as it is now called.
It also went hand-in-hand with my stint in the U.S. Department of Defense programs for a few years, where we developed, hardened, and tested both software and hardware used in Afghanistan and Iraq during the recent wars.
What were you doing for USDOD?
All I can say is that I carry a DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) challenge coin with me and spent long stints in Ft. Huachuca, AZ, but if I divulge anything else to you guys, I will have to... yes, you know the drill.
<laughs>
By the way, I came up with the NetWar name the night before our first meeting.
You dawg! We thought the game was 13 years old, and thoroughly tested when we contacted you!
<chuckles>
It really is a 13 year-old and tested game. Only the clothes have changed, so to speak.
Do you disagree?
Okay, you got us there, as we all truly enjoy the game. Not just because it is “our” game, but because it is a lot fun and a challenge to master. So, what’s happening in the future for you and L13G?
We are going to flourish and buy Hasbro, what else? Not the other way around. Rule #1 is to dream big and rule #2 is to never give up.
<laughs>
Nah. We are going to roll NetWar out and add two new factions as the pilot program finishes. Specifically White and Black decks in the same fashion as Red and Blue are coming out. Also new feature upgrade, application upgrade, and high power level cards will be published shortly, as light weight add-ons.
There’s a lot of ammo in the reserves for this game, as you well know. We’ll have the first 100 decks available as Collector’s Hacker Deluxe bundles, which will include — as far as I know — numbered basic sets and a hard-copy of 9254’s debut album ‘Black Helicopter’. That album is comprised of my compositions -- 13 songs, one of which was on the soundtrack for the Gamers movie about the semi-pro and pro Counter Strike gamers. So, it's a more than fitting swag item for NetWar. I call the album as tunes to hack the world by. There might be some other do-dads added, like fancy dice and so on, but that is up to the marketing guys.
And, yes, this is a totally shameless plug, man.
<laughs>
Seriously, though, we are going to roll hard with NetWar and then... you know what’s going to happen, right?
STEELBALL!!!
Affirmative. It is going to be my highlight of the 2000s, when SteelBall gets released. It is my third big game design, but very close to my heart because it combines violent sports and dystopian cyberpunk milieu. Well, ok, it is almost up there as number one, but I still have to reserve the first place for NetWar — it being my personal, real-life Lovecraftian Dreamlands design, that I’ll probably never be able to fully explain.
A final question. Is the well dry after these games are released?
No, and you know that, too. So, here comes another shameless plug. We are going to publish Trencher: The Eternal Conflict WYSIWYG miniature war game rules ... for free.
Since you are hellbent in dropping all the commercial ads into my interview, let’s also preemptively mention NetWar the Mobile Game that we’ll roll out at some point, too. It’ll be a freemium game with a couple of very nifty features that we think people are going to like. Mobile app is also in the talks for SteelBall, but it’ll be a bit different by default.
Thanks, Sam. That’s it, as you’ve given us plenty to go with, and we’re also out of snacks.
No, thank you.
I am S. Anton Salviander, but just Sam will do. I was born in 1971 in a small city in central Finland, but I was raised in the southwestern coastal city of Turku.
Can you tell us a bit about your family and growing up in Finland?
My father was a building foreman and my mother was a stage and film actress. They were both about to finish up their studies in their respective fields when I came along. Yes, I was a happy accident per my parents’ statements.
<chuckles>
My father cut short his dream of becoming an architect like his grandfather, Anton Salviander, who was a well-known Finnish Jugend-style architect and a general contractor. Anton designed and built around 40% of my home city, Turku. He was among the richest men in the city in the late 1800s. Trust me when I say that I never saw a penny of his wealth, as he had 10+ kids to split it amongst after his death. But I did get named after him.
It was awesome to have been raised in a city that was founded in the 13th century (although people had lived in that delta area for thousands of years), and it is complete with a castle and a cathedral from the dark ages. Is there really a better place for a young boy to roam than a dark castle and human-bone-covered catacombs under a cathedral? Answer is no, by the way.
How did you get into gaming?
That's actually quite funny, but I got into the whole thing because of my father, who didn't know the first thing about games. He got us kids an Atari game console and Pong game back in the late ’70s. Yes, the original nerve-wracking square ball and two paddles game ...
<laughs>
I played the crap out of that Atari and then wanted a better system to play games with. At the time Vic 20 and Commodore 64 had come on the market, and both offered much more stimulating games than Pong. I worked multiple little odd jobs since I was 12 years old to support my computer addiction, and owned everything from Vic to C64 to MSX to Amiga 500, and finally to Amstrad PC with a whopping 8088 CPU. Hey, my machine was 1.5 times faster than a genuine IBM PC at the time!
But to be totally honest, I was always a gamer type. Born to be a gamer, is a better way to put it. Games of all kinds appeal to me in all formats and mediums. I think it has to do with besting the other player or the game mechanics... to beat the challenge... to win... Period.
What were your favorite games on PC?
Is this a trap? I ask that counter-question in all sincerity, because back in the day we didn't have very many games, but they were somewhere around 95% really good ones. Therefore I would have to list them all, but if we cut to the chase, I'd say Star Flight I & II.
What other things did you enjoy as a kid growing up in Finland, or was it just games all the time?
I played hockey in the school teams and our city team, TPS, juniors. Surprising, huh? I also played baseball and competed in long-distance running, cross-country skiing, and such. I was also hanging out with my Comp Sci and Math friends outside the rink a lot. We used to challenge each other to code different kinds of games on a PC using Turbo Pascal and BASIC. They were pretty primitive games, but some of them were pretty good from an idea perspective.
Then I joined my first band, which was a metal band called ECT (Electro-Convulsive Treatment). We played something of a mixture of Slayer, ST, Napalm Death, and Metallica. To get myself an amp and a guitar, I had taken a job at a local game store. They sold computer games and conventional games like D&D, Games Workshop products, and so on.
So that got you into game-design?
Yes and no. It certainly helped to steer me in the direction of the inevitable. I had gotten the good ol' red box D&D Basic Set from one of my friends who'd visited New York with his parents. It was the latest fad at the time in the U.S. and before all the devil worship accusations, suicides, and what-have-you came about. So I had read the rules and immediately got it, as my mother was an actress after all.
One night we had a total blackout in our neighborhood in the middle of the coldest winter, and so a bunch of friends and I went to a boiler room to stay warm. It was frickin' boring to sit there in candlelight, so I whipped out the Basic Set. We played the whole evening and through the night. We were all hooked, and those guys would be my players for years to come, too.
Okay, so then what happened?
I think I honestly suffered from a stone-cold addiction after that candlelit night in the boiler room. I started taking my salary in game products, and soon I had played, and damn-near owned, every game on the market at the time: D&D, AD&D, Gamma World, GURPS, RuneQuest, Acirema, Cyberpunk 2020, Traveler, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, WH40K, MERP, and the list go on and on. Seriously, I could have either bought or built a house with all the money I spent on the games I owned when everything was said and done.
But this was also the opportunity for me to get my Universal Mass Combat System out in the wild. I designed it originally for a RuneQuest campaign involving a very large-scale armed dispute, but quickly realized that it can be converted to any existing fantasy RPG with minor modifications. I made the changes and it was published in late ‘80s in the officially licensed Finnish version of the TSR’s Dragon magazine called Sininen Lohikäärme (Blue Dragon in English), which gave the magazine rights to translate and publish old TSR D&D adventure module in the mag or as separate modules.
It was published in Issue #2, as it missed, by accident, Issue #1’s deadline. It was geared to be the jewel for the first issue and a driver for the interest in the publication in general (Ed: still presented online http://rpggeek.com/image/569092/sininenlohikaarme-issue2). It so happened that Issue #2 was to be the most popular and sought after of any of the issues for that magazine, because it had my mass combat rules in it. Whether it was the fact that they were really liked by the gamers or the fact that there was really nothing in existence at the time that solved a problem over massive wars in the campaigns at all, I am not sure about. I like to think it is the former, but I am not objective in this matter. Anything you ever create becomes your baby, so you don’t want to see it to be thrown out with the bath water, right?
What I also find hilarious is that my name is not on the author’s / contributor’s list on RPG Geek forum and the description says merely “simple mass combat rules” (Ed: Sam quickly proved that NOT to be true), but the cover of the mag hails UMCS as “a whole new game” which it really was at the time of the publication. The rules were easy to learn, but not simple by any means. Anyway, guys, it was a long time ago, so who cares.
I also designed a game heavily based on Gamma World called Conflict in Vietnam, but like said it was heavily based on GW, and while it was played quite a bit, I would have not been able to publish it.
I can say, though, that at that time my addiction to games was so bad that I'd have been abusing games intravenously if that would have been an option.
<laughs heartily>
Was that when you started designing games in numbers?
No, since I had already sort of done that with my egghead buddies and most of us kind of sucked at it, my mass combat rules eventually got buried under the dust of amnesia over the ages, and CoV was a thoroughly plagiarized version of GW for private use only.
Well... I mean they were all okay or better than ok and free, but we still didn't really gain any fame except for being the guys called to fix any computer problems in school. That happened a lot, and we also ended up teaching Comp Sci to other kids, as we were light-years ahead of the teachers.
Then I also had to go do my compulsory military service right after high school, so there wasn't much time to work on games. Most of my time in high school went to band practice, hockey, and playing games.
What did you do in the military?
I went through my basic in a mechanized Jaeger Brigade in which I made it to the NCO school. During the NCO Phase 1 I was let in on a public secret that there was a possibility to qualify for the asymmetrical warfare unit. So I went after that option with gusto, to say the least.
Asymmetrical warfare unit is what people commonly call Special Forces, but we weren't to use that moniker... ever. Very long story short, after WWII, the Soviet Union banned Finland from having SF troops in the 1948 treaty, so we didn't have "Special Forces", but we had my unit which was the same thing without the label. We just did not call it like that or make any noise about it. There were others, too, like Combat Divers, Parajaegers, Border / Frontier Jaegers, and so on. All of us, except the divers, got pretty much the same training, but different emphasis on air, land, and / or sea operations.
Would you think I switched my games obsession to obsessing about getting accepted into this unit? Oh, you bet! I eventually qualified not only to be sent to the CO School but the Sr. Recon Officer training course, as well. I served in this function until my honorable discharge as a second lieutenant in the early ‘90s.
Hey, we know how it works in the U.S. How could you have been an officer with just a high school diploma?
In the Finnish army, everyone goes to basic and can then work their way up to General, if they so desire -- and if they can, that is. No shortcuts. The education level doesn't matter, as we were all tested extensively through various psychological, intelligence, and so on, tests. Repeatedly, actually, and the higher they thought you could go, the more tests you took, both physically and mentally.
But let's just say that 90+% of the guys who qualified for the asymmetrical warfare unit and CO school eventually got their college degrees in the civilian world. Yes, even the standard army guys. My unit buddies have all done extremely well for themselves in various areas in the past 20-some years.
Okay, that was cool, but we’re still wondering how you got into hardcore game-design.
It was a dark and stormy night... just kidding.
It's actually worth going back to my time in the unit for a little bit more. We had a communication center raid coming up and had to make miniature 3D maps of the target and all that cool crap you see in the movies. So, I saw an opening and a real function for a role-playing game right there. Not a miniature game, as you probably thought, because of the 3D map we made.
No, in my mind it had to be an RPG. We'd been collecting reconnaissance data around the target for a week, pretty much day and night, to learn the guard paths, rotations, infiltration routes, and such. Trust me when I say it is pretty extensive preparations for attacking a target on foot.
So I saw something useful from my gamer days. Why not experience the raid firsthand before, right? Over and over again, if need be? All the men had seen the target area during the recon phase of the prep, so I grabbed a copy of GURPS and had my fire team create themselves as characters.
Seriously?! You had a bunch of burly SF guys roll PCs for GURPS...?!
Well, yeah, seriously and by the way GURPS was a very conscious decision, too. It is the best RPG in terms of mixing simulation of reality with fluid flow of the game itself.
I played the raid with my fire team a few times with different results, and they were stoked about the concept. My DIs approached me about the whole ordeal, and after I explained the reasoning behind it, they were rather impressed and saw the application for it just as I did. It simply made sense to become a veteran of that engagement in your mind’s eye so to speak. We did everything and anything that made logical sense and would give us an edge over our enemy.
Needless to say, the raid went superbly well for my fire team, as we had done it a few times before we did it for real. It was a huge differentiator. I have to also give all the credit and high praise for GURPS for being the best pen and paper RPG out there, even today.
As a funny trivia bit, much later in life when I was living in the U.S., I would be a guest speaker for a Steve Jackson Games release online event, with Mr. Jackson himself, for theGURPS: Special Ops source book. This was in Austin, TX where SJG is also headquartered.
It was quite an honor for me to be in the online event with Mr. Jackson, whom I’ve respected to high heaven for so many years as an avid GURPS abuser, and a bunch of hardcore GURPS fans. Ranks with meeting Sandy Petersen in person in Helsinki RopeCon, and getting an autograph on my Call of Cthulhu rulebook.
Wow. Cool. But we still haven’t gotten to how you got into real game design.
Sure, ok. After I discharged from the service as a 2LT, I did some other things in life not related to gaming, so I’ll skip that and fast forward to the year 1994. I was recovering from a severe illness, and used that time to write my first collection of short stories that was published in 1995.
The creative writing streak got my inner engine revving, so I had to come up with something to soothe the beast, so to speak. That’s when the SteelBall idea came to my mind and I started working on it immediately. Just a couple of months later we were play-testing with a crude prototype with a bunch of my gamer friends. It was an addictive game straight through the gate.
It was all because of the progression that the players went through as more games were played. I don’t mean the human players, but the players in the imaginary SteelBall teams, who are all created like RPG characters with stats, backgrounds, equipment, and so on. They also gained experience and formed real-life like personalities as we went about playing more. It was, and is, as you know, a very cool and very addictive hybrid concept of an RPG and a board-game.
However, producing a board-game in 1994-Europe was insanely expensive, and I was just a Comp Sci lecturer at a technical school at the time. So we kept playing the prototype and having fun.
Then I got a job offer and scholarship from Microsoft Corporation in 1998, and moved to Redmond, WA to work and go to university. At that point SteelBall went to the drawer to be whipped out only when I played it with my new coworkers and other American game enthusiasts at the local game stores. But with busy schedules around MSFT and college courses, I wasn’t looking at it as a side project on top of the responsibilities we have in life once an adult.
However, a couple of years after moving from Finland to Redmond, I ended going to Eastern Oregon University to finish my CS degree, and had a bit more free time in the evenings. So, between schoolwork and jobs and other duties, I founded an RPG Club. Through that I met a lot of awesome people and went on to design Trencher WYSIWYG miniature war game for variety’s sake. Both SteelBall and Trencher were big hits among the gamers on campus.
Then something really bizarre happened, which is the reason we are having this interview in a first place, and I still can’t explain it all today.
I had a dream about playing a card game, but not the standard tapping style as Magic the Gathering and other copies of it are played, but more like a, hmm, kinetic card game, y’know? I had that description in my head when I woke up and it has stuck with the game since then. This was 2001 by the way, so it is really great to get it going full steam exactly 13 years later.
But that morning I remember I was like, kinetic card game? I was intrigued, and knowing how fast dreams fade from our minds, I skipped lectures for two days and simply wrote the first revision rules in that time. Basically, I translated the game mechanics I had seen in my dream into rules.
Now that I had a set of rules, I had no idea if they would actually work in practice. I went to the campus book store and bought a deck of note cards, which I cut in half and with a pencil marked the stats on them. After the third day since my dream, I had a prototype deck and rules ready to go.
Then I had my first-ever test game with Jon Hancock (the fantastic artist and human being behind a lot of the NetWar card art), which turned out to be a success. It was, and still is, bizarre how you can dream of a game and it is actually a functional, addictive game almost as-is. I will most likely never be able to explain that other than our brains are amazing machines that do things outside our consciousness quite a bit.
I am just happy mine was kind enough to let me know of the game...
<laughs heartily>
Damn, we had no idea that was the background of NetWar. Was it finished and ready for print right then and there?
Oh, by no means was it ready for prime time. We lacked all the art, there were special cases that needed presiding over, and so on. But that said, the basics of the game and the neat differentiators from other card games were there. It included the Invisible Game Board, the mathematical geometry being spot on (actually, the game can only work with those exact dimensions), and so on. It was a surprisingly ready product already after three stinking days, and one dream, of designing.
Well, ok, let me take back some of that as the original was fantasy themed and was called EPOCH: The Journey. That was the milieu Jon was drawing and painting his art for originally.
Ah, so when did EPOCH turn into NetWar? Seems like quite a change.
Ok, so when we started talking about the merging of Slipknot Games into Legion 13 Games in 2013, it made me go back to the EPOCH model and realize that it is more of a computer network, how the game works. It is far too linear to be an anything-goes fantasy milieu game.
That’s when it hit me that it really is a hacker game of malicious applications, devious features, and rivaling factions over the World Wide Computing Cloud who are in it to win it. In other words to annihilate the opposition. Perfect.
So I changed the rulebook and the art of the cards before we sat down over NetWar, as it is now called.
It also went hand-in-hand with my stint in the U.S. Department of Defense programs for a few years, where we developed, hardened, and tested both software and hardware used in Afghanistan and Iraq during the recent wars.
What were you doing for USDOD?
All I can say is that I carry a DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) challenge coin with me and spent long stints in Ft. Huachuca, AZ, but if I divulge anything else to you guys, I will have to... yes, you know the drill.
<laughs>
By the way, I came up with the NetWar name the night before our first meeting.
You dawg! We thought the game was 13 years old, and thoroughly tested when we contacted you!
<chuckles>
It really is a 13 year-old and tested game. Only the clothes have changed, so to speak.
Do you disagree?
Okay, you got us there, as we all truly enjoy the game. Not just because it is “our” game, but because it is a lot fun and a challenge to master. So, what’s happening in the future for you and L13G?
We are going to flourish and buy Hasbro, what else? Not the other way around. Rule #1 is to dream big and rule #2 is to never give up.
<laughs>
Nah. We are going to roll NetWar out and add two new factions as the pilot program finishes. Specifically White and Black decks in the same fashion as Red and Blue are coming out. Also new feature upgrade, application upgrade, and high power level cards will be published shortly, as light weight add-ons.
There’s a lot of ammo in the reserves for this game, as you well know. We’ll have the first 100 decks available as Collector’s Hacker Deluxe bundles, which will include — as far as I know — numbered basic sets and a hard-copy of 9254’s debut album ‘Black Helicopter’. That album is comprised of my compositions -- 13 songs, one of which was on the soundtrack for the Gamers movie about the semi-pro and pro Counter Strike gamers. So, it's a more than fitting swag item for NetWar. I call the album as tunes to hack the world by. There might be some other do-dads added, like fancy dice and so on, but that is up to the marketing guys.
And, yes, this is a totally shameless plug, man.
<laughs>
Seriously, though, we are going to roll hard with NetWar and then... you know what’s going to happen, right?
STEELBALL!!!
Affirmative. It is going to be my highlight of the 2000s, when SteelBall gets released. It is my third big game design, but very close to my heart because it combines violent sports and dystopian cyberpunk milieu. Well, ok, it is almost up there as number one, but I still have to reserve the first place for NetWar — it being my personal, real-life Lovecraftian Dreamlands design, that I’ll probably never be able to fully explain.
A final question. Is the well dry after these games are released?
No, and you know that, too. So, here comes another shameless plug. We are going to publish Trencher: The Eternal Conflict WYSIWYG miniature war game rules ... for free.
Since you are hellbent in dropping all the commercial ads into my interview, let’s also preemptively mention NetWar the Mobile Game that we’ll roll out at some point, too. It’ll be a freemium game with a couple of very nifty features that we think people are going to like. Mobile app is also in the talks for SteelBall, but it’ll be a bit different by default.
Thanks, Sam. That’s it, as you’ve given us plenty to go with, and we’re also out of snacks.
No, thank you.
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