Whatever happened to Strategic Simulations Inc.?

I’ve been asking this question since the early 2000s, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t bother looking the answer up with Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. It turns out, however, that the disappearance of Strategic Simulations Inc. is not a mystery after all.

Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of the most unforgettable video game developers and publishers.

Strategic Simulations Inc. was founded by war games enthusiast Joel Billings. He hired two notable computer programmers to start the company’s reign in video gamedom: John Lyons, who wrote Computer Bismarck for the Apple II and later the TRS-80 in 1980, and Ed Williger, who wrote Computer Ambush. Both games, Bismarck and Ambush were written in the Basic language. Come to think of it, almost all games in that era were written in Basic.

With its founder being a war games fanatic, SSI naturally launched mostly strategy games in its first two years of operations, from Computer Bismarck to Southern Command. Interestingly, SSI also developed and published sports video games, such Computer Quarterback, a football simulation game for the Apple II and the Commodore 64, and Computer Baseball.

No, not all SSI titles had the word “Computer.” In 1982, SSI launched the RapidFire line of video games, which included Cytron Masters, Cosmic Balance, and Galactic Gladiators. Don’t ring a bell? How about Epidemic!, a real-time strategy game dealing with a global plague?

SSI’s more memorable games, however, came only in 1987 with its acquisition of rights to develop and publish Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video games from TSR. The first such game, Pool of Radiance, came out in 1988. Oooh, Alias and Dragonbait! Oh, wait, that’s Curse of the Azure Bonds, another SSI title.

Of course, who can forget SSI’s powerhouse of strategy games, Panzer General, which spawned a host of other “General” games, like Allied General and Pacific General.

So what happened to SSI after all these successful titles? It was acquired in 1994 by Mindscape. Later, it became part of Mattel, and later still, a division of Ubisoft. Unfortunately, Ubisoft retired the brand name, and thus the world had been robbed of the legacy of SSI.