April 27, 2009

Wild Bill Stealey reflects on the past and a ‘thrilling’ future
By Michael Lafferty

MicroProse founder launches new company dedicated to massively multiplayer online games

The year was 1982 and a career military pilot was enscounced in the business world. He met a developer who was little known at the time. What Wild Bill Stealey and Sid Meier accomplished with the founding of MicroProse set the benchmarks for so many of the popular video-game genres that entertain millions of gamers worldwide.

But the story of his journey in the video-game industry is full of entertaining perceptions and anecdotal moments that reflect success, some stumbles, but an indomitable will that seems to do more than rebound, he continues to move in new directions.

To understand Wild Bill, it seems important to understand his past and his flying career, which set the foundations of his love for military simulations and even will drive what is upcoming.

So, during a phone interview, the story began logically with his love of flying.

He was 12 when he was first introduced to flying in an old L-19 spotter plane from the Korean War. It was doing touch-and-go’s and Bill termed it scary but “anything that scary had to be fun.” And that put him on the path to fly planes for a living. Though he retired as a Lt. Colonel, he didn’t get into the Air Force Academy when he first applied because of his eyesight. So he went to college for a year and won an appointment to the academy, but there still was the eyesight factor to overcome.

“I figured if you can’t be real, real good, you might as well be real, real smart,” he said. So he memorized the three eye charts the Air Force used. So when asked to read a line, he knew it by heart. The airman administering the test caught on and asked him if had memorized the eye chart. Wild Bill answered that yes he had. The airman replied that that was really smart, checked him off on the eye exam and off he went to pilot training.

He managed to finish pilot training and then spent seven years in the cockpit flying for the Air Force on active duty, then another 18 in the Guard and Reserves.

“I was strictly a throttle jockey in the military,” he said.

Wild Bill was a Forward Air Controller for the PA ANG. Many of his Air Force Academy classmates were also Forward Air Controllers and Stealey lost nine classmates who were FACS in Vietnam during one month in 1972. 

When asked if FAC flying was somewhat dehumanizing, looking down at the action, Wild Bill said, “It was probably very dehumanizing except that everybody in the world shoots at you. They can all see you. If you hide behind a tree in your black pajamas, it’s hard to see you. When you are flying over 100 knots in a Piper Cub, without any real offensive weapons, the bad guys know that if they can see you and they can get you, no larger aircraft are going to bomb them.”

“It was fun, it was scary, and exhilarating,” he said.

After talking a bit longer about his military service, the topic rolled around to his involvement as one of the founders of MicroProse.

“I left the military because I was a C-5 co-pilot and I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. He thought he was going to get into an F4 and had hopes to fly with the Thunderbirds but instead was assigned as a transport pilot, which was something he really didn’t want to do. He ended up leaving and becoming a forward air controller for the Pennsylvania Guard.  So he went back to graduate school, on the path to a Masters in Business Administration, “and all of a sudden I’m out in the business world.”

“The neat thing about that is they counted profits and losses, not body bags, which I thought was a lot more fun although it was just as cutthroat in some places. When I got in the consulting world, I started using computer simulations to make financial models. All these consulting firms I worked for wanted me to do these financial models.”

He finally figured he needed a home computer and Visi-Calc (check this), which was the original spreadsheet program. So he was looking to buy a TSR-80 (trash 80) with all of 8k memory. While he was looking at the prospective machines, he saw a machine playing a game called Star Raiders. He ended up buying a “toy” computer, an Atari machine that had both Visi-Cal and Star Raiders on it. It was an Atari 400. He then realized there was a users’ group at the company he was working for and he went down to see them and realized they were “stealing software.

“They weren’t paying for it,” he said. “They were just downloading it and looking at it. So I went to the founder of the group, and said I’m an Air Force Academy graduate and I said you are stealing software. He said ‘no, no, no, we are not stealing it, we are just looking at it. … I said Mr. Meier, I’m not going to be in your group – Sid Meier’s user group – and I left.

“And about three months later, Sid and I were the only two at a convention of all these General Instrument people – he was the one techie and I was the one finance person – and he said, ‘c’mon, Bill, I know where there are some cool games. And we went downstairs and he kicked my ass at the MGM/Bally’s here in Las Vegas for about an hour at all the video-games, and I was really pissed. I was the fighter pilot and he was the programmer and I saw a Red Baron game and I said ‘Sid, I’ll bet you a quarter I can beat you at this one.’ And I sat down and scored 75,000 points, he sat down and scored 150 points. He said ‘I could write a better game in a week.’ And fighter pilots don’t like to be out-bragged and I said, ‘if you could, I could sell it.’ Three months later he brought me a game called Hellcat Ace, and I had forgotten all about it. He said, ‘Bill, you said you could sell this,’ and I thought ‘holy crap, what did I get myself into.’ I took the disk and it was Hellcat Ace and I wrote him a four-page memo of what was wrong with it, a week later he came back and said he had fixed all that and we started selling Hellcat Ace. It took me two years to convince Sid that we had a company. By then I had done $200,000 and $30,000 in expenses. “

He did it by calling up companies and, pretending to be a customer, ask if they had the game, Hellcat Ace. When he was told they did not, he turned up the pressure by calling each week and complaining about the company called not having the game. In other words, he created his own demand for the game. He would call and identify himself as the MicroProse rep.

In 1993 MicroProse was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte and eventually it was folded into the company and, more or less, was no longer a game-developing entity. Wild Bill takes responsibility for the end of MicroProse.

“There were two big things I did wrong,” he said. “When I went into the coin-op video-game business, it was a disaster. We recovered from that … but I had been running it for 11 years straight, and we had a new board and they said ‘Bill, you’ve done a great job but hire a president, hire a guy in Europe, and you take a few months off, take a sabbatical and I did, but I put the wrong people in place. When Sid and I were in charge of it, we made sure there was a big bonus for everyone who was on time and on budget. These other guys, they took the bonus program away and put everybody on overtime. Do you know how fast a game comes out when everyone is on overtime? It doesn’t; you can always make a better explosion.”

When Stealey came back from his sabbatical, in October of 1992, the company had eight games due for release. Only one released, and Wild Bill took over again, firing the president, the Europe representative and then, ultimately, he sold the company.

“We just didn’t put the games out that year,” he said.

“So basically, when you take your eye off the ball, when you don’t focus on the things you are good at – and what am I good at? I’m good at military simulations and military subjects, being a 25-year military officer. Sid was really good at Pirates and Civilization and the Red Storm Rising, and – of course – the original creativity. But what I was good at was managing the military side.

“I hated to see it (MicroProse) go away, too. I was very sad. You can imagine what a downer it is for a guy who’s been running a company for 11 years and all of a sudden you don’t know if you have the money to make payroll. It was a tough period.

“But what I’m very proud of is … Sid had made $800 on his first four games; we made Sid famous. Second, out of MicroProse I can identify at least 30 companies that have been successful from our alumni. And we did some great games.”

But while there was the evolution from the MicroProse games, Stealey’s new company – Thriller Publishing and Thriller New Media – is moving back to the base of what the entire MicroProse crew had done together.

So what lead to re-entering the software video-game business, and in particular, tackling it from the massively multiplayer perspective?

“I’ve been actually running an online game for 13 years now,” Stealey said. “Mostly I ran it because I was old and bored and in North Carolina. I purchased this game in 1997 from a group of guys that were in Texas. Air Warrior was the first online flight simulator out there, done by a bunch of really smart people from the University of Virginia. At times I paid $12 an hour to fly World War II fighters.

“We had an online community of about 20,000, and that was pretty early. We were doing massively multiplayer, online flight simulators in the early to mid 90s. And some guys who had worked on Air Warrior developed this game called War Birds, and I said, ‘boy, that’s it, that’s where we are going to go. You know Sid and I played online tank in the middle-80s, but it was my modem to his modem. But the most fun was when you were playing with someone else.”

In order to buy War Birds, Stealey gave up $10 million dollars of Interactive Magic stock (the company he founded in 1995), but it paid off. The game had a community of 20,000 users with some paying up to $100 a month in subscription fees.

“And that’s back when we were charging $2 an hour to play the game,” Stealey said. “Over time that went away, but we still owned the game.

“So I’ve been in the online business a long time. It’s not the fantasy online role-playing online, I don’t know anything about that side. So when we decided to bring the band back together from MicroProse, we said what are we good at? ‘Military sims.’ Where is the market going? ‘Online.’ Let’s do military, spy, espionage, action, first-person shooter but do them as MMOs.

“I think there are a lot of people who like those kind of games. My son, who is in his 30s, plays online with his Call of Duty buddies, but that’s just six people. I said ‘Bill, why don’t we get an army of 600, why don’t we do a massive one?’ He said ‘that would be fun, dad, no one does that.’ Well, I’m going to do it.”

While Thriller has yet to announce its first project, there are three properties that have been purchased and are being worked on, and there are three-to-four other properties they are currently in negotiation to purchase and develop. Then there is their original IP, a series of games, that “leads to a story – sort of like Bourne 1, Bourne 2 and Bourne 3.”

In fact, Thriller Publishing is planning on announcing their first title at Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3) in Los Angeles the first week in June.  One thing seems certain, though – if Wild Bill Stealey is involved, the name of the company will appropriately reflect the games that Wild Bill and his team are behind.

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