About the odd angles

When I was growing up, in the heart of suburban Texas, I was lucky enough to be doing so in a time when the game industry, both the traditionally printed and the newly digital, was beginning a great cycle of innovation. Of the many games that popped up in this verdant scene, one of my favorites was Steve Jackson’s Illuminati, a pocket-sized card game about secret conspiracies fighting over who would rule the world. It was clever and sophisticated for the simplicity of its presentation, and something about how it used the cultural symbols in my head and smashed them together felt more than surface-level interesting. As a young teen, I felt like the main character in the movie Close Encounters, sitting at dinner and staring into his mashed potatoes, muttering, “This…means something.”

But I wasn’t much older before I understood that the game’s sense of meaning comes not from the pattern that the game places over the symbols of our world, but the balance it builds over them. Illuminati is good game because it’s funny, and a little dark, but it’s a great game because it’s so well balanced. All players have a chance of winning, once they know how to play the game. The trick is to do the best you can with the cards you’ve been dealt, which is a pretty good lesson in any case. Our world is not actually fair, far from it, as much as many of our favorite entertainments might try to convince us otherwise. The best of them, I believe, go a little further, opening a crack in the firmament where we might find somewhere to grip, and pull, and effect some change.

I’d always felt that Illuminati had never gotten the attention it deserved, even in the 1990s when I found myself working under Steve Jackson to revisit it as one of the earliest collectible card games, Illuminati: New World Order. (I’m assuming most people likely to read this don't need the difference between “standard” and “collectible” card games explained to them.) INWO, as we called it, went on to win the gaming industry’s award for “Card Game of the Year”—an award created the previous year to recognize a brand new game called Magic: The Gathering, which remains a titan of the industry today. It was a bit of a letdown as our game’s time in the spotlight faded very quickly, and our labor seemed lost to history. The first great waves of CCGs from all the major players loomed over stores and buyers everywhere, crashing down and erasing the little footprints we’d left in the sand. Those of us who’d worked on INWO moved on to other things and that was it, at least as far as we knew.

As the years went by, Steve Jackson Games produced more boxed editions of Illuminati based on the structure of the original game—something like 100 cards, largely managed as a single deck from which everyone was pulling, versus the custom deck-building of the CCG model—and while some of them reused art from INWO, it was unlikely that we’d ever see its like again any time soon. Meanwhile, I spent many years in the tech industry learning and doing a wide range of interesting things with all sorts of interesting people, and eventually began wondering what new project might be interesting. What about a video game? Steve and I’d remained friends through it all, and I been humbled to find that after so long he still considered me someone to whom he could trust to make Illuminati as a video game. I’d spent literally decades running a very slow process in the back of my head, wondering how to capture the wild complexity of such a game, and having developed the kernel of something I thought showed promise, Steve agreed and we were underway.

One of the greatest challenges, from my perspective, was how much the world had changed along the way. I was not the same person, and the world had definitely moved on. Unfortunately, there were some ways in which it had somehow found its way further toward Illuminati than further away. Those fears I’d once had of our little footprints left in the sand being washed away? Far from true. People who’d never played the game in its heyday came to discover the cards like archeologists coming across clay fragments of cuneiform lettering scattered across a desert, struggling to put them together as part of a larger puzzle.

“This…means something.”

I don’t feel the need to link to the various conclusions people have drawn about the game’s many cards. They’re all a simple search away for anyone who thinks they might enjoy jumping down that rabbit hole.

Of course, the world was not done changing. A handful of months after SJ Games and my little company agreed to attempt the first Illuminati video game, the year 2020 happened: pandemic, lockdown, the works. The game, which worked so well largely because it presented a balance between various forces—between Conservatives and Liberals, for example—was being developed in a country where our cultural sense of these forces was no longer whimsically abstract. And as individuals, most of us had opinions one way or another. We didn’t always agree with one another, though not one of us wanted to see our cultural and governmental institutions attacked. Unfortunately, 2020—and the earliest days of 2021—saw some very different ideas flourish in some unprecedented ways.

We navigated the history being made around us as best we could. Illuminati had been at its best when it took a satirical but unflinching look at the reality around us, mocking the powers of the day—like how, as a tool for secret societies to cause trouble, the oldest editions included the Ku Klux Klan. It also excelled when presenting the fictional realities we humans created to exist alongside what was real—like The Men in Black, and the Fiendish Fluoridators. You…know they put fluoride in the water to control your mind, right? Oh, good.

Here’s the difference, though. The idea of secret cabals putting fluoride in water for dark purposes has somehow popped up all around the globe. It has no basis in truth but that doesn’t keep a good story down. Same with The Men in Black. Even before they sprang fully formed from Hollywood they’d been said to have appeared in stories from various cultures down through the centuries. That’s a far cry from a historical organization whose philosophies only somehow seemed to be on the rise.

For the video game, the Fiendish Fluoridators and The Men in Black stayed in, even when playing in the 1980s and the 1990s, while the KKK did not.

Getting to the end of this multi-year mission to create a darkly humorous game—sometimes darker, sometimes more funny—we shouldn’t have been surprised to brush up against one more strange little bit, another odd angle from which our work has somehow seemed to reach out and harmonize with reality in a way wholly unexpected and unplanned.

The second time we moved the game’s release date, we received a very friendly and helpful warning from Steam, the store from which we’re initially selling the game. They were in the middle of a semi-annual sale, and while they love promoting new games it seemed our little game’s launch would be drowned out among discounts being offered by larger productions. The sale was set to end after the 5th of January, so we said, “Great! Let’s launch the next day, please—and thank you!”

It was only once we set the release date, which Steam would not again allow us to move, that I said the release date out loud and realized what day that would be. It’s a day that has come to mean something in American culture. As with the KKK card, its meaning does not deserve to be promoted as positive or lighthearted. There’s a reason that the people who drove the events of that day are more and more often being found guilty of crimes, and are receiving longer and longer sentences for those crimes. It is nothing to joke about. It is not a game.

It’s unfortunate that ILLUMINATI, through its many incarnations, has had so many odd angles around it. There’s nothing we can do to change this particular synchronicity, though we will keep an eye yet more open in the future.

We refuse to glamorize the darkness in the world and in our lives. That would be shameful.

If through our humor we can draw out harmful things which hide around us—charting a course through the darkness with a light touch and illustrating truths which might otherwise be more difficult to grasp—then that would be more than worthwhile. It should be illuminating.