Why Set 'Red Steel' On Fire?
An Ode to Insanity
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2006

There was a time when I imagined that running a game company would be a dream job. And I suppose that in some ways, it is. But in others, it’s just like any other small business. Rent, payroll, printing bills, shipping bills — all these have to be satisfied. Employees need care and watering. You end up doing things you never would have imagined yourself even contemplating. And as with any small business, the pressure can be enormous. Sometimes you make some very bad decisions.

In the game industry, many of those spring from the fact that it’s, well, the game industry. Products get created because the creator’s in charge and, damn it to hell, he wants his game in print. Or worse, the product gets gold-plated to stroke said ego: This is how 64-page paperback roleplaying supplements become 256-page hardbound Tomes of Great Import. Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing something with your business because you just plain want to, as long as it’s your business. But being the game industry, we of course have to pretend otherwise — part of the ego gratification is the veneer of business success.

119694_avalanche Press is a moderately successful small business. We provide a living to 15 employees. It’s a good working environment, we get to work with interesting people and tackle many different challenges (at least that’s how it looks months later when the horrors have mutated into beer tales). It’s a cash-flow business, meaning there’s not a huge pile of investor capital in the background to bail us out of trouble. So you tend to dwell on the mistakes. A lot.

Thus we come to Red Steel: Clash of Armor at Kishinev.

Following Success

Released a decade ago, Red Steel made its debut at Origins 1996. The year before, we’d had a definite hit with Great War at Sea: Mediterranean. As a part-time company in those days, we released very few games a year. I wanted to break that cycle.

Most wargame publishers are part-time businesses. I won’t name names, mostly because I’m not completely sure where all publishers fall on that scale and some of them may exaggerate to play the “have pity on us, we have to work a day job!” card (as opposed to our “have pity on us, we got nothing else!”). Running a business after hours, one as complex as game publishing, is enormously difficult. People who do it with no intention of changing are either much tougher or far less sane than I, probably a little of both. I was determined to get off that treadmill, and that meant a more frequent release schedule.

The logical follow-up to Mediterranean was the North Sea version. That would be an enormous undertaking, possibly a year’s worth of effort in our part-time structure. The then-art director argued passionately for this course, even though it would take a year. I wanted to release games again in 1995, if we met our deadlines, and had great misgivings about making the next product one that we knew would at best make the next year’s convention season. If we failed to make our deadlines — and we had not to that point made a single one of those — we would miss the summer season and likely be out of business.

In the early days we presented 119694_avalanche Press to the public as a happy partnership of gamers “just like you,” but the reality is that I’ve been responsible for the company’s decision-making from the first day, and this one was up to me as well. I took what appeared to be the safer course — we’d revert to traditional wargames like our first four for the next releases rather than attempt an ambitious naval game with the huge art commitment that represented.

Our most successful traditional wargame to that point had been Blood on the Snow, and so I pressed Brian Knipple for one like it: a small number of playing pieces and low retail price. Thus was born Operation Cannibal, which would spin its own tale of disaster. He offered a sequel to our original game, Invasion of Italy, as the other: one based on the Canadian fight at Ortona or, alternatively, a larger one on Monte Cassino.

This was where insanity took hold.

Selling the Madness

I had always wanted to do a game focusing on Romanian rather than German forces, and here was opportunity. I slotted Red Steel in as the second game, as I’d completed the design a few months earlier and it was farther advanced than the Ortona or Cassino games. I was eager to publish a game that refuted the wargame-received wisdom that Romanians were all cowards; I’d personally witnessed the 1989 revolution and those images were still stark in my mind. These were not good reasons to publish a game. I did it anyway.

I contracted Mark Simonitch to do the map; he redrew the one I’d prepared using better topographic sources and it is quite nice. Since he had another job in the game industry at the time, the map is actually credited to my dog. In playtesting, the game turned out to be really good — excellent play balance, interesting weird units for both players, opportunities to turn around bad luck with reinforcements. I did impose on it the rather silly notion that the game system needed to be “easier” and so it has separate basic and advanced rules. Sometimes, you just have to accept that a game system is complex and market it as such.

The game had, for its time, good packaging and its game pieces were a noted improvement over Red Parachutes. Physically, it’s a very nice package that holds up 10 years later. Game play is excellent.

Problem is, it’s based on a battle about which most people outside Romania have heard nothing.

It released in the summer of 1996 and did moderately well. We had three new games that season: Red Steel, Operation Cannibal, and the card game of tenure politics, Survival of the Witless.

At GenCon that year, I knew we’d made a bad choice when some skinny guy with thick glasses and thinning hair stood in front of our booth for over an hour, touching the game and saying over and over again: “unnnnnhhhhhh. Rums on the attack. Scary. unnnnhhhhhh.” John Morris would try to engage him in conversation, and he’d make the same stock reply, “I only play (some other company’s games),” and begin his chant again. He finally left when nerd repellent arrived — an absolutely beautiful young brunette woman with her hulking blond boyfriend. I smiled at her, shook his hand and started the song and dance, but he said, “No, dude, it’s her hobby.” She proceeded to ask detailed questions for the next 15 minutes, got a complete demo of the game system, and bought a copy of everything we then made while Fabio stood behind her quietly laughing his ass off.

Not all lovely young women took to it so readily. The new head buyer at Diamond Comics Distributors, the world’s largest specialty game distributor, critiqued the line harshly when she took it over. “You have children now. You can’t afford to do things this stupid ever again. Your company has to grow up, and so do you.” Some publishers still hold grudges for similar things she told them; I made her our vice president.

The Long Road to Valhalla

Over the next 10 years Red Steel sold steadily, but was always outpaced by our newer, shinier titles. Stung by the experience, we didn’t go back to “real wargames” for many years. In retrospect, the North Sea game would not have made it to Origins 1996, but Monte Cassino was a far better choice.

	The 119694_avalanche Press staff dances with joy or, uh, something. Untouched by flame. Draw your own conclusions.

For the past several weeks, we’ve run Viking Funeral sales on older games. These are titles that have been around for many years and have less than 500 copies left but more than 100 — meaning they’re not likely to sell out for a long time, maybe years, but there aren’t enough of them left to be worth mounting a marketing effort. Some of them had weak packaging (Invasion of Italy), some had to get out of the way for a new game series on a similar theme (Napoleon in the Desert and Eylau). Red Steel is attractive, with very few flaws as a game; as a product, it has many. With the system getting a rebirth with Island of Death and Alamein, Red Steel doesn’t need to be around as the series’ sales benchmark.

So far, we haven’t had to burn any of the titles we’ve threatened to give a Viking Funeral. Gamers have snatched them from the flames. Red Steel has had its day, and new games will take its place. With the warehouse reaching peak capacity, some of the stock has to go into remote storage, and I just can’t justify paying fees to hold these old games.

At $11.25, Red Steel is a wonderful value. And when the sale’s done, we’ll burn whatever’s left over.

I liked making the game, but it’s become a constant reminder of what happens when you put personal ego in front of sound business decision-making. These days, I make the games Liz Fulda approves. I’m not sure if I want to see Red Steel set on fire. It doesn’t hurt to remember why.

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