The Australian Wizard & Play-by-Mail Games.

In 1983 I started a business with a partner called The Australian Wizard. My partner was an experienced programmer and I had an idea for a game. Within six months we had over 200 customers and business was doing reasonably well.

Our first game was called Spiral Arm and is a 50 player science fiction colonise and conquer style game. It was very successful and eventually lead to a new version a few years later called Spiral Arm II.

Other games we developed (not always successfully) were: Kingdom, Midgard, El Mythico, Barbarians, Worlds in Conflict and Lords of Aquilonia.

Play-by-Mail is a system of gaming where the players DO NOT need a computer to play a computer based game. Only the moderator has to have a computer. Turns are printed out and sent to players, who fill in their instructions and send them back for input. The moderator inputs the data and runs the turn processing. A turn result report is then dispatched to all players and the process repeats itself. Turns are usally held every two weeks, depends on the mail. The benefit of this system is that you can play a large number of people at the same time. Spiral Arm was for 50 players but that was an arbitrary ceiling we set. Other games of this genre have unlimited players.

The spread of computers and the Internet, along with networkable games, has seen PBM games die back quite a bit. Which is why we got out of the running side of things and now just license.

At present we have license holders in the following countries: Australia, New Zealand, United States, England, Germany, Belgium.

I havent given up on PBM games as yet, I think there is a market out there for games with delayed turnarounds. You would be surprised at the extent of diplomacy that went on in Spiral Arm between each move. It was this anonymous, distanced interaction with other players that most players enjoyed. Without a time delay this is not possible.

Some modernisation of PBM can certainly be suggested, play by e-mail to start with. We never really got into electronic data entry either.