Jim Dunnigan had been introduced to Avalon Hill wargames while serving in the U.S. Army in Korea, but his return to civilian life in 1964 marked the beginning of a revolution that would eventually topple the industry leader. Upon his return, Dunnigan began to contribute articles to Avalon Hill's house publication The General and independent wargaming magazine Strategy & Tactics, quickly establishing himself as a critical voice within the community. In one of his contributions to The General, Dunnigan criticized what he saw as a lack of historical accuracy in Avalon Hill's 1965 release, Battle of the Bulge, a bold move that caught the attention of Thomas Shaw, the man in charge of Avalon Hill. Shaw asked Dunnigan to design and submit his own wargame, and the result was Jutland, published by Avalon Hill in 1967. Two years later, after designing 1914 for Avalon Hill, Dunnigan struck out on his own after concluding there must be a more effective way to publish games. He quickly gathered a staff of like-minded designers, including Al Nofi and Redmond A. Simonsen, setting the stage for a company that would redefine the hobby.
The Magazine That Became A Game
Dunnigan acquired Strategy & Tactics, which had been in financial trouble, from its founder Christopher Wagner, and founded Simulations Publications in 1969 with Redmond Simonsen as co-founder to keep the magazine in publication. However, SPI quickly proved that it was primarily a game publisher rather than a magazine publisher; not only did it start to publish a variety of wargames, but each issue of Strategy & Tactics included a complete wargame, comprising a map, rule book and a sheet of die-cut counters. This innovative format turned a hobbyist magazine into a product that delivered immediate playability, a strategy that set SPI apart from its competitors. In SPI's first two or three years, it embarked upon an expensive advertising campaign, including full page advertisements in Scientific American magazine, a move that brought the hobby to a much wider audience. New subscribers received free copies of its most successful game, Napoleon At Waterloo, an easy to play pocket-sized game with a foldout map and 78 pieces punched from card stock. This advertising campaign led to a much larger subscriber base and SPI came to be seen as a serious competitor to Avalon Hill, the company that had founded the board wargaming hobby.The British Expansion And The Dallas Disaster
In 1974, SPI started to ship some of their wargames to J.D. Bardsley in the UK, who acted as a sales representative using the name SP/UK. Bardsley sold the games either via mail order or face to face at games conventions, and sales increased rapidly, with SP/UK selling 25,000 units by March 1976. To handle the increased sales, SPI formed a formal British subsidiary, Simpubs Ltd. in June 1976, which immediately created the bi-monthly periodical Phoenix with J.D. Bardsley as managing editor. Yet, the company's expansionist ambitions would lead to its downfall. In an attempt to expand its customer base, SPI entered into a much-publicized arrangement with Lorimar Productions to produce the Dallas role-playing game based on the soap opera Dallas in 1980. The game proved to be an infamous failure, and Simonsen later remarked that the 80,000 copies printed were 79,999 too many. This miscalculation drained resources and signaled a shift in focus that would prove fatal to the company's financial stability.