Barcia began laying down the basics of his first game in the late 1980s, and thus its mechanics and interface are most indebted to the conquer-the-galaxy board and computer games which appeared before that point. It’s therefore ironic to note that it’s actually Master of Magic which betrays a major influence from Sid Meier’s 1991 magnum opus. Master of Orion was frequently billed as “ Civilization in Space” by a slightly lazy press. Just don’t try this at home, budding designers. Master of Magic is simply fun - every bit as much fun as Master of Orion.
Nevertheless, it all comes out okay in the end the game’s variety, generosity, and sheer chutzpah win through. Where Master of Orion is polished to perfection, its every element carefully considered and tested, Master of Magic is a far more ramshackle affair, a pile of diverse ideas thrown together - some more fully realized than others, some literally not working at all if we want to get pedantic about it. Master of Magic is a wildly different experience from Master of Orion, enough so that one would scarcely guess it to have come from the same designer. In reality, though, such could hardly be further from the truth. Given the new game’s title and its short development cycle, one might suspect it to be little more than a reskinned Master of Orion. If there’s no rest for the wicked, it would seem that Barcia and company had been very bad indeed. It would ship under the MicroProse imprint in time for the Christmas of 1994, only a year after its predecessor, despite being one of the most complex strategy games yet made for a computer. Within two weeks, they were charging full-speed ahead on Master of Magic. As soon as the one game was finished, he wrote up a design document for the next one and shared it with the rest of the SimTex staff.
While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that would take place in a fantasy rather than science-fictional milieu. Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one.
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