RIP Darklands creator Arnold Hendrick

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From Microprose veterans Facebook group:

 

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Comments:

 

[octavius]

It's always the good guys that die from cancer...

 

[Duralux for Durabux]

Rest in peace RPG master. RPG codex you.

 

[Pope Amole II]

I'm the author of one of the few (if only) printed russian reviews for Darklands, lol. Did it when I was a high schooler. Said review was probably a crime against a humanity because I was a high schooler, duh, but still, what an awesome game that was. RiP.

 

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May 25th:



WOW. Passing of the torch?

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

This seriously sucks to read. Darklands was one of the earliest games I ever bought for PC and remains to this day a masterpiece that had a giant impact on shaping my love for RPGs. One of the best games ever made.

I'll miss you, Mr. Hendrick. Your fame will forever remain unequaled.

RIP

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

That sucks. I could never get into the combat in Darklands, but I'll always admire it for the rest of it. I'm curious though, there was a version of Magic the Gathering before the Windows one? Crap, some people just get all the bad luck.

 

[AArmanFV]

What a shame, but we'll never forget his work. I still have a boxed copy bought years ago from ebay, one of the first CRPGs I had in physical format.

 

[Citizen]

 

[someone else]

I liek shooting powder guns in Darklands, also the char gen.

 

[MRY]

I elaborated my thoughts (posted in the news thread) on his passing here: http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2020/05/arnold-hendrick-rest-in-peace.html

Arnold Hendrick, Rest in Peace



On May 25, 2020, Arnold Hendrick, the creator of the revolutionary board game Barbarian Prince and the revolutionary computer game Darklands, was taken by cancer, just shy of the three-score-and-ten years the Psalmist allots us. “It is too soon cut off, and we fly away.”

I never met him; I know next to nothing of his life story. But all the same, Mr. Hendrick had a direct and significant impact upon me. Fallen Gods is inspired by both Barbarian Prince and Darklands. Both games are marvelously inventive and brilliantly realized. Sometimes works of fantasy are called “escapism.” To “escape” literally means to shed one’s cloak. (One can ponder the age of brigandage when slipping a robber’s clutches in that manner was frequent enough to coin this expression and put it in common currency.) Mr. Hendrick’s games were the opposite—the player does not shed his cloak so much as garb himself in another’s clothes. Contrary to the genre’s name, most RPGs do not achieve this effect. The player’s role is not that of a hero, but that of a hedge fund analyst, crunching numbers, maximizing upside and minimizing downside. But in Barbarian Prince and Darklands, the player is immersed in the characters and the setting. For a while, he sees a different world through different eyes. A person is greatly enriched by such an experience, while merely shedding a cloak—in contrast—leaves one a little poorer, even if we sometimes need to escape to survive.

When I began designing and developing Fallen Gods years ago, I tracked down Mr. Hendrick’s email address. When our game was ready, I wanted to show it to him as tangible evidence of the impact and inspiration of his work. But I kept delaying the email because I wanted to make sure Fallen Gods was worth his time. Now there is no time left.

So I must end where I started: I never met Arnold Hendrick; I know him only through his published games and articles about game design. To me, all of them bespoke an abiding curiosity, a creative vision, and an overflowing generosity toward his players. The man put 136 saints in Darklands. May they speed him to his Maker.

 

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https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/363914/Obituary_Darklands_creator_Arnold_Hendrick.php

Obituary: Darklands creator Arnold Hendrick

Gamasutra has learned that Arnold Hendrick, creator of MicroProse's 1992 RPG Darklands, has passed away at the age of 69.

The news comes by way of RPG Codex and a Facebook group for former MicroProse employees. Former MicroProse artist Matt Scibilia informed the group that Hendrick passed away on Monday May 25th, after an apparent battle with terminal cancer.

Darklands has been credited by RPG developers such as Todd Howard and Josh Sawyer for inspiring their own role-playing experiences. Howard even credited the game as being a major inspiration for the Elder Scrolls series. For Sawyer's part, he helped interview Hendrick in a retrospective discussion about Darklands, and has done numerous breakdowns of the game.

In his later years, Hendrick left a number of insightful comments here on Gamasutra that you can find here.

 

[Shinji]

Damn, he wasn't even that old yet (less than 70)

May he rest in peace

 

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Oh nice: https://www.pcgamer.com/arnold-hendrick-creator-of-influential-90s-rpg-darklands-has-died/

Arnold Hendrick, creator of influential '90s RPG Darklands, has died
Hendrick died last week after a battle with cancer.

Arnold Hendrick, the creator of the 1992 Microprose RPG Darklands, has died. A message posted in a Facebook group for former Microprose employees said that Hendrick's passing came after a battle with cancer.

Hendrick has credits on multiple games from Microprose's heyday, including Gunship, Sid Meier's Pirates!, F19 Stealth Fighter, Silent Service 2, and American Civil War: From Sumter to Appomattox. But Darklands may be his best-known work. It wasn't a hit, largely because it was wracked with bugs at release, but featured remarkably deep systems and attention to detail, and genuinely unique, "realistic" game world: a mythologized version of the 15th-century Holy Roman Empire, in which the creatures and dangers that people of the era believed were real actually are.

In 2009, Todd Howard credited Darklands as an inspiration for The Elder Scrolls games, and more recently Obsidian's Josh Sawyer wrapped up a long-running Darklands livestream on Twitch. You can read a retrospective interview he did with Hendrick on RPG Codex in 2012. Sawyer also paid tribute to Hendrick on Twitter:

After leaving Microprose, Hendrick worked at developers including Interactive Magic, Kesmai, Electronic Arts, and Area 52 Games, before becoming a freelance consultant in 2016. He was 69 years old.

Thanks, Gamasutra.

 

[LESS T_T]

A eulogy by Bill Stealey, the co-founder of Microprose: https://old.reddit.com/r/MicroProseOfficial/comments/gvwd5g/the_terrible_loss_of_arnold_hendrick/

MicroProse lost one of its early pioneers last week, Arnold Hendrick. The entire MicroProse family sends our condolences to Arnold’s family.

Arnold joined MicroProse in 1985 and did everything from game design, documentation, and writing all those great and really big manuals that most players loved to read. He started helping our Co-Founder Sid Meier document Solo Flight II. Arnold then went on to do the game design and manuals of other great MicroProse games including Gunship, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Red Storm Rising, M1 Tank Platoon, Silent Service, and others.

Arnold’s crowning achievement was the game Darklands, an RPG, he had wanted to do since joining MicroProse. Darklands still gets recognition on the original concepts he brought to RPGs.

Arnold loved history and always did extensive research on any subject matter for any game he was designing. Arnold could back up any conversation with facts and research. Many an hour of discussion was had with Arnold and the senior staff at MicroProse on details. Arnold generally turned out to have the better arguments. One notable time he was overruled, and Silent Service got a deck gun.

Arnold was one of the biggest contributors at MicroProse. We believe Arnold would love to be working on all of the great new sims that MicroProse is developing today. Arnold demonstrated the true and real Spirit of MicroProse, and we salute him for his many contributions to MicroProse. We will try to live up to his legacy.

Salute and Blue Skies, Arnold.

JW Wild Bill Stealey
CEO iEntertainment Network
Co-Founder and CEO MicroProse Software, 1982 -1993
Lt. Colonel, USAF Retired

 

[MRY]

Lovely eulogy -- grounded and concrete, as one might expected from a retired USAF officer. But

We believe Arnold would love to be working on all of the great new sims that MicroProse is developing today.

Wait, what? I thought MicroProse had gone under like 20 years ago?

 

[SerratedBiz]

Oh nice:

Oh nice? What the fuck is wrong with you?

 

[LESS T_T]

Wait, what? I thought MicroProse had gone under like 20 years ago?

Yeah, but they seem to be focused on military sim: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-warbirds-2020-omg.128056/page-4#post-6744638

 

[vonAchdorf]

From Sid Meier's Memoir:

One of these titles in progress was a helicopter game for the Commodore 64 called Gunship, which was created by Andy Hollis and a new designer named Arnold Hendrick. It had a heavy influence from the pen-and-paper role-playing games that Arnold had started his career making, including the somewhat radical concept of permanent death. You could save your progress and continue accruing victories at a later date, but Gunship gave no option to reload from a saved game after a failed mission. If you died, you died - although some players pulled off a deus ex machina rescue by quickly ejecting the floppy disk before their data could be overwritten. Other atypical features of the game included naming your character, and choosing your helicopter's weaponry while staying under maximum weight requirements, similar to allocating skill points in a traditional RPG. A level-20 wizard in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign could run from a battle or spend a night sleeping at the inn to replenish his stats, while the Gunship helicopter pilot could sit out a mission under the guise of sick leave, or take some needed R&R off-base. These character mechanics had been tested for more than a decade by board gaming veterans, and Gunship would be one of the first to successfully bring them into the digital realm.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Unfortunately, the memoir doesn't talk about or even mention Darklands, but this paragraph talks about ideas in Pirates! which we'll also see in Darklands later:

It wouldn't have been a MicroProse game without a massive manual, so near the end of the development, Arnold Hendrick joined our team to begin work on its eighty-eight pages of sepia-toned text. This was without any added bulk for copy protection, because we had graduated to providing players with a separate foldout map of the Caribbean for even greater difficulty in sharing. Physical novelties like this ran double duty as collector's items, and were commonly known as "feelies," a reference to the tactile entertainment featured in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World.
...
Along with crafting the manual, Arnold also injected a healthy dose of realism into Pirates! to counterbalance the cinematic bravado. He pushed for accuracy in the historical campaign mode, and argued against the use of famous pirates who hadn't been alive during the time frame I'd chosen, like Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte. If anything, though, these underpinnings of realism ended up bolstering the larger theme of romanticized adventure. As Arnold explained in the designer's notes, "those men were psychotic remnants of a great age, criminals who wouldn't give up... There was no political intrigue or golden future to their lives, just a bullet or a short rope. We found them unattractive and uninteresting compared to the famous seahawks and buccaneers that preceded them."