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The Beginning of Grand Strategy

The Birth of A Genre
How Risk made an industry.

Albert Lamorisse, a French film maker under a game company with an affiliation with the Parker Brothers, made history in 1957, when he published the first real strategy game. It was at the time called “La Conquete du Monde” or in English, “The Conqueror of the World”.

But before we dive into “Conquete Du Monde”, we must dive through his life up until this point, to explore the mind behind this classic game.
Image result for Albert Lamorisse
Albert Lamorisse, Inventor of Risk

Born in Paris in 1922, not much is out there on his early life. He found most of his success after World War 2, when he directed Rim (Although, it wasn’t very popular). This was his first step into the film industry. Although he really came into his prime after “The White Mane” a film about young boys who find an untamable white stallion, and then blew up with his short film “The Red Balloon”.

This is purely speculation, but I believe that World War 2 was a major inspiration for Risk. The dice roll adds a factor of “Risk” to it. Okay I'll stop. But In World War two, many important battles were decided by unknowns., Barbarossa’s failure was due in a large part to chance, and even the territories resemble World War 2 borders to a certain extent. But keep in mind, this is pure speculation.

In 1957, with the original publishing of Risk, the Grand Strategy genre was born. If you look at this tree, you can see that most of the early games were derived from board games that were direct descendants of Risk.
Svea Rike and Civilization both started as board games, and they gave birth to the biggest grand strategy games there are;
Civilization, and the Paradox series. Civilization as a board game was over complicated, but made an amazing video game, and Svea Rike hit the sweet spot with complexity. In the next essay, we will dive into the events and the people who started the jump into computer gaming

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  1. UnknownNovember 11, 2017 at 7:14 AM

    You seem to only care about PDS titles without taking into account the various other developers/publishers that did Grand Strategy and 4x games. For this, I really cant take this essay seriously without farther investigation on your part and understanding of the evolution of the genre as a whole. I hate to be the one to state that, but its a reasonable blurt, but centered upon PDS as the last point. To me that is flying in the face of many others that came before/during/and will come after PDS. You can take my suggestion/criticism as you like, but know it was not stated in malus.

    ReplyDelete
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