This article tells part of the story of New World Computing.
Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO, it started to become obvious to everyone who worked for him that the torch he carried for computer games no longer burned as brightly as it once had. A younger version of Van Caneghem had spent almost three years designing and programming Might and Magic I, the CRPG that introduced New World to our world, virtually all by himself. Now, he was coming into the office just two or three times a week, leaving even on most of the days when he did make an appearance by shortly after lunchtime. His all-dominating current passion, it was becoming clear, was racing sports cars on tracks all over California and beyond. His colleagues sensed that, in his mind, he had already created his magnum-opus CRPG with Might and Magic IV and V, two big games that could be combined into one to form The World of Xeen, an absolutely massive one. Meanwhile he had poured all of his best strategy ideas into The King’s Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic. He was ready to take two steps back from the day-to-day at New World, to become a part-time designator emeritus and spend the rest of his time driving his cars. In due course, Van Caneghem’s disengagement would become a problem for the company, arguably even one of the direct causes of its downfall shortly after the millennium. Right now, though, at the end of the 1990s, there was still sufficient momentum to keep things gliding along reasonably well. In fact, 1999 would become New World’s best year of all in purely commercial terms, being the first with major new releases in both the Heroes of Might and Magic and Might and Magic franchises.
A sequel to a game as successful as 1996’s Heroes of Might and Magic II seemed like a no-brainer by industry logic. And yet New World was oddly nervous about spending too much money on it. For the Heroes games were turn-based experiences with hand-drawn pixel art, in an era when real-time 3D was more and more the rage. Accordingly, Heroes III was handled cautiously, allocated only a limited budget and window of time to come to fruition.
Production began in September of 1997, with the hiring of two key figures. David Mullich, who was to be director and project leader, was a grizzled games-industry journeyman whom we’ve met twice before in the course of these histories, at widely separated intervals: once for his highly experimental 1980 game The Prisoner, an enduring icon of the early Apple II scene, and once for I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the equally uncompromising point-and-click adventure game he made in 1995 with the visionary and infamously irascible science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. Both of these projects lived well out on the artsy end of a career that also encompassed plenty of less challenging, more straightforward fare. Needless to say, Heroes III would belong more to the latter category than the former. For neither of Jon Van Carneghem’s signature franchises had ever set out to touch hearts and minds in any profound way, just to show their players a good time.
Whereas Mullich had been in the games industry almost since before said industry had existed, the man selected as Van Caneghem’s “co-designer” on Heroes III — in reality, this meant that he was a lead designer subject to his largely absentee boss’s veto power — was a rank beginner. Greg Fulton had never shipped a game before; relatively short stints at Activision and the interactive division of Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks had culminated only in cancellations, as the industry navigated the shrinking market for multimedia-heavy adventure games and the growing one for 3D-modelled action. Nevertheless, Van Caneghem saw something — perhaps something of his own younger self? — in the games-addled, absurdly enthusiastic twenty-something who turned up for an interview with a notebook full of ideas for where to take the Heroes franchise after the departure of Phil Steinmeyer, Van Caneghem’s previous co-designer. Against all the odds, the kid got the job.
Fulton’s brief was most emphatically not to reinvent a wheel that was still rolling along perfectly well. He was rather to take the game that Jon Van Caneghem had originally designed under the name of The King’s Bounty back in 1990, then expanded upon twice with the help of Steinmeyer to create Heroes I and II, and expand upon it yet one more time by adding more monsters, more treasure, more factions, and whatever else seemed advisable without mucking up the rather brilliant core design. On his side, he fully understood what was expected of him.
We had to use the existing Heroes II engine within a tight window of time. On top of this, we had a passionate fan base who absolutely loved Heroes II, and, for its sequel, didn’t necessarily want a radical departure. I could not play fast and loose with the design of Heroes of Might and Magic III. I needed design evolution, not design revolution. Thus, my overarching guideline for Heroes III became, “If it isn’t in the spirit of Heroes of Might and Magic… kill it.”
So, over the course of seventeen months, Heroes II was transformed into Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia. The graphics resolution was bumped up from 640 X 480 to 800 X 600, and the game was given a moodier, more realistic, less cartoon-like look to suit changing aesthetic fashions. The space where tactical combat took place was made about twice as large to allow more room for maneuvering. Scenario designers were given the option of adding an underground level to their overland maps. Two new playable factions were added to the six of Heroes II, and more buildings were made available to construct in each faction’s towns. Each faction got a new unit type as well, and all units instead of just a select few were made upgradable. The heroes who led the armies were allowed to bring up to seven rather than five different types of units with them. More CRPG elements were added to the game, with each hero being given one innate special ability and a wider range of secondary skills to learn. The magic system was expanded, with the spells at the player’s command now divided into separate, elemental schools that magic-oriented heroes had to learn separately.
Half a dozen campaigns were created in lieu of the single one — playable from either side — of Heroes I and II. Not only were these campaigns given more fully fleshed-out story lines — the one that gave the game its subtitle followed directly on from the story of Might and Magic VI — but the individual scenarios that comprised them were given more continuity by allowing players to bring heroes and equipment with them from scenario to scenario. And for those who preferred to play with or against other humans, the networked multi-player mode was given an extra coat of spit and polish.
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