TURN-BASED STRATEGY GAMES RARELY GRAB THE HEADLINES IN THE HISTORY OF GAMING. BUT FOR JON VAN CANEGHEM AND MARK CALDWELL, A LOVE OF CHESS AND BOARD GAMES LED TO ONE OF THE GENRE’S BEST TITLES, THE ACCLAIMED HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC II

WORDS BY FAITH JOHNSON

IN THE KNOW

» PUBLISHER: 3DO

» DEVELOPER: NEW WORLD COMPUTING

» RELEASED: 1996

» PLATFORM: DOS, WINDOWS, MAC, GBC

» GENRE: STRATEGY

Heroes Of Might And Magic II stands proud as one of the key PC games of the Nineties strategy boom. It has its roots in a less well-known game, King’s Bounty, released six years earlier by New World Computing. “Heroes was born from King’s Bounty and King’s Bounty was born from wanting to make a Star Trek game,” Mark Caldwell explains, “at the time, Gulf And Western owned Star Trek and was already making Star Trek books, games and trinkets, so they wouldn’t give us a licence. But we knew Task Force Games had made a Star Fleet Battles board game based on Star Trek. We thought we could licence that, and while they were interested, it turned out to be cheaper to buy the entire company.”

After Mark and Jon Van Caneghem bought Task Force Games, both a board game and videogame of King’s Bounty was released. Jon remembers that, “King’s Bounty was my first attempt to make a strategy game and we got a lot of praise for it. When making games in those days, we had no idea if we’d make enough money to be able to make the next game. So after the success, it was obvious we were gonna make another one. And we took the fan feedback on everything they were asking for, which I think is very important in game development, especially making sequels.”

That sequel was titled Heroes Of Might And Magic and after winning numerous awards it was inevitable a follow-up would be made. “We weren’t making a sequel for the first time,” explains Mark. “So we did as we always did. Take ideas we couldn’t use, or didn’t have time to implement, in previous games and work them into the next one. Designing a computer game, at least at NWC, was always about iterating. Just start, get something working, then get feedback, and iterate.”

» Jon Van Caneghem cofounded NWC in 1984 to make games he wanted to play himself.

After the initial design process, Jon started work on Heroes II’s map editor. “I spent a lot of effort creating the editor so players could make their own scenarios. That was a must-have and what everyone was asking for. I had a very clunky tool during the development of the first Heroes, so I wanted to build Heroes II with the same editor that we were releasing to the fans. I worked on the editor first and actually used it for many of the maps and played the scenarios over and over to balance them. It was really a passion project with the amount of time I kept putting in adjusting all the maps and making new ones.”