![]() ![]() What with piling onto the topic having become such a tradition in design circles, I couldn’t bear to let Covert Action‘s historical moment go by without adding the weight of this article to the pile. The question of just what’s the matter with Covert Action - the question of why it’s not more fun - continues to be asked and answered over and over, in the form of Meier’s own design lectures, extrapolations on Meier’s thesis by others, and even the occasional contrarian apology telling us that, no, actually, nothing‘s wrong with Covert Action. Indeed, he dwells on it to such an extent that the game and its real or perceived problems still tends to rear its head every time he delivers a lecture on the art of game design. ![]() The fact that it has remained a staple of discussion among game designers for some twenty years now in the context of how not to make a game is due largely to Sid Meier himself, a very un-middling designer who has never quite been able to get Covert Action, one of his few disappointing games, out of his craw. By all rights it should have passed into history unremarked, like thousands of similarly middling titles before and after it. And, while it wasn’t a big hit, nor was it a major commercial disaster. Covert Action, while not a great or even a terribly good game, wasn’t an awful game either. One such case is that of Covert Action, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley’s 1990 game of espionage. The stories behind these games, carrying with them the strong scent of excess and scandal, can’t help but draw us in.īut there are also other, less scandalous cases of notable failure to which some of us continually return for reasons other than schadenfreude. From E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to Daikatana to Godus, this little rogue’s gallery inhabits its own curious corner of gaming history. ![]() In the lore of gaming there’s a subset of spectacular failures that have become more famous than the vast majority of successful games. (For some truly cringeworthy examples of artfully tousled machismo, see the Pirates! reissue or Space Rogue.) The results almost always ended up looking like bad romance-novel covers this is actually one of the least embarrassing examples. Covert Action‘s cover is representative of the thankfully brief era when game publishers thought featuring real models on their boxes would drive sales. ![]()
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