Like so many gaming stories, Emperor of the Fading Suns began at a bar. This was not a tavern in Waterdeep, a pub on Delphi, or even a saloon on Severus. This was the hotel bar at the Computer Game Developers Conference (CGDC), which later became GDC, and is now known as the Festival of Games.
Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg arrived at CGDC representing White Wolf from Stone Mountain, talking to publishers like Activision and Capcom about making Vampire and Werewolf games. In the bar they randomly encountered two Dudes named Ken Lightner and Ty Pike, representing Several Dudes Holistic Gaming.
Their conversation started around conspiracies and initiation ceremonies, leading to the discovery that both companies called Stone Mountain, Georgia, home. Yes, four devs had to travel to San Jose to meet their neighbors. Before long the conversation turned, as bar conversations so often do, to religion, and how religion might manifest thousands of years in humanity’s future.
Following that CGDC meeting, Bill and Andrew returned to Stone Mountain where, in addition to their efforts to licensing the World of Darkness to big publishers, they recommended White Wolf partner with Several Dudes to create a Vampire strategy game similar to the award-winning Merchant Prince (now Machiavelli the Prince) game.
As it became clear that White Wolf had neither the ability nor interest to develop the World of Darkness in new ways, in 1995 all four dudes elected to form a new company that could develop games holistically. This meant using the differing strengths of TTRPGs, computer games, LARPing, miniatures and so on to give players a much wider look at game ideas than could happen through just one medium. Holistic Design Inc. was born.
That bar conversation on religions of the distant future turned into the Fading Suns, a post- (and possibly pre-) apocalyptic setting that would highlight humanity’s striving for greatness alongside its seeming predilection for self destruction. Needless to say, the Universal Church of the Fading Suns bears little resemblance to our bar musings on the future of religion, but still does a great job reflecting the many roles religion as held in human societies.
The original plan was to release both the computer game and the TTRPG at the same time, with the TTRPG set to begin the moment the computer game ended. In the computer game, the players took the role of one-of-five of the most influential humans alive, each striving to become Emperor of the Known Worlds. As soon as one won, the TTRPG began, with the players taking the role of those trying to survive the aftermath of the Emperor Wars, building humanity back up again – or tearing it down some more.
However, the initial publisher for EFS – strategy great and Machiavelli the Prince publisher Microprose – was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte. This caused them to reevaluate their plans and refocus on internal projects like CivNet rather than external projects like EFS. That left HDI again hunting for a publisher for the computer game while development on the roleplaying game continued. The TTRPG launched on schedule in 1996, at the same time HDI finally convinced Sega, through its new PC publishing arm Segasoft, to take on EFS.
The Segasoft team tried its best, but lacked both the strategy game and PC publishing experience of Microprose. EFS came out after it released games like Rocket Jockey and Scud, which while fun, did not sell like Sega expected. Surprisingly, HDI soon learned that EFS had become Segasoft’s best-selling game, going through two printings in its first few months. Unfortunately, HDI never got royalty reports from Segasoft before the publisher closed, so we do not know exactly how many copies of the original boxed version sold.
Instead of moving immediately to a sequel, HDI sought to create a game that would again give players a different perspective on the Fading Suns. This was Noble Armada, both the miniatures game and the computer game. HDI originally began Fading Suns: Noble Armada (FSNA) with Panasonic Interactive Media. That looked promising because not only did Panasonic have the resources to really push the game, but they were also distributing the Monty Python games!
Sad to say, a year into development of FSNA, the 2000 economic recession threw game publishing into disarray. Panasonic Interactive Media closed, sending HDI back to chasing after publishers. HDI continued to self-fund EFS patches (all the way to 1.4) through sales of the TTRPG books, but that soon became unsustainable as TTRPG distribution also went through its own recession. HDI released the EFS tools to the game’s modding community, but its own work on the game stagnated.
Part 2: Rising Like a Phoenix (Empire)
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