In 1984, Strategic Simulations (SSI) published Questron, a fantasy role-playing game built on Ultima's model — with Richard Garriott's blessing. The Director's name is in its rule book: he did the game's theory, the layer underneath the design, and the layer is anthropology — how to hold a human being inside a system for forty hours.
| Game Theory | Gerald M. Wieczorek |
|---|---|
| Game Design | Charles W. Dougherty |
| Programming | John C. Dougherty |
| Publisher | Strategic Simulations (SSI), 1984 |
The Character Disk boots in Drive 1. When the game asks for Game Disk I or II, click Drive 1’s Load Disk (folder) button, choose that disk, then click the screen and press ESC.
The Director's account of what he built, in his own terms: he deliberately created heavy FLOW — total absorption — through fear and commitment. Every player dies in the first hour and must restart. Later in the game, a suicide mechanic lets the player kill their own character to continue — the early, forced self-killing teaches the player to stake themselves, and that stake sustains concentration and fear across a game of roughly forty hours.
It worked at scale. The game drew substantial fan mail; the Director keeps the measure he was given at the time — one player called in sick for a week to play it.
Site Map — every page on the site, by area.