In the late 1970s, home computer gaming was still an industry waiting to be defined. The Apple II had only recently arrived, the TRS-80 was introducing thousands of people to personal computing, and software companies were experimenting with what these new machines could become. Arcade-style games were an obvious direction, but Joel Billings saw another possibility.
Billings had grown up playing complicated tabletop wargames filled with maps, counters, charts, calculations, and rules. He understood their appeal, but he also knew their weaknesses. Battles could require enormous amounts of bookkeeping, and finding another person willing to spend hours moving counters across a map was sometimes as difficult as winning the game itself.
A computer could solve both problems. It could calculate results, keep track of information hidden from the player, enforce the rules, and, most importantly, become the opponent.
That realization eventually produced Strategic Simulations, Inc., better known as SSI, one of the most important strategy game companies of the early computer era. From Computer Bismarck and Gary Grigsby’s massive historical simulations to Pool of Radiance, the Gold Box games, and Panzer General, SSI spent more than two decades translating complicated systems into playable computer worlds.
Its history is unusually well preserved. The Joel Billings Strategic Simulations, Inc. papers at The Strong National Museum of Play contain SSI’s early business plans, meeting minutes, financial statements, stockholder reports, domestic sales figures, customer statistics, correspondence, the company’s presentation to TSR for the Dungeons & Dragons license, and even annotated BASIC source code for Computer Bismarck. Together with contemporary magazine coverage, the collection provides a rare opportunity to follow an early game company from its founding ideas through expansion, acquisition, and eventual disappearance as an independent name.
A Wargamer Looking for an Opponent
Joel Billings’ interest in strategy games began long before SSI.
According to a 1985 profile in Antic, his father, Robert Billings, introduced him to Avalon Hill’s Tactics II when Joel was seven years old. The younger Billings became absorbed in wargaming and eventually discovered one of the hobby’s recurring problems. There were not always enough opponents.
He created a wargaming club while still in school and later played games by mail, at one point participating in several games and tournaments simultaneously. By college, however, another interest was beginning to merge with the first.
Billings studied economics and mathematics and worked with econometrics, forecasting, and mathematical modeling. That meant working with computers, and he gradually recognized that a machine could do more than calculate economic data. It could perform many of the calculations that made sophisticated tabletop wargames cumbersome, while also providing the opponent that solitary players lacked.
The idea was already taking shape by the time Billings attended Claremont Men’s College, now Claremont McKenna College. The Strong collection preserves BASIC source code for a simple game called Tank that Billings created for a class project in the fall of 1976. It is one of the earliest surviving pieces of the story that eventually became SSI.
By 1979, Billings had graduated and was preparing to attend the University of Chicago’s graduate business school. He spent the summer working at Amdahl, the Silicon Valley computer company, but the idea of starting a computer wargame business would not leave him alone.
The decision was not obvious. There was hardly an established computer-game industry to enter, much less a proven market for complicated historical simulations.
Billings began trying to determine whether that market actually existed.
Finding the People Who Would Build SSI
Billings placed questionnaires and notices in hobby shops around California’s Santa Clara Valley looking for an unusual combination of skills. He needed programmers, but he also needed people who understood wargames.
Two important responses came from John Lyon and Ed Williger.
Lyon had years of professional programming experience and an interest in miniature wargaming. Williger was another programmer and dedicated wargamer. Their arrival gave Billings something he had been missing, people capable of translating the logic of a tabletop simulation into computer code.
Around the same time, Billings met Trip Hawkins, then working at Apple Computer years before he founded Electronic Arts. Billings had considered the TRS-80, and early development work was performed on a borrowed North Star computer, but Hawkins encouraged him to take the Apple II seriously because of the machine’s graphics capabilities. The decision would help place SSI inside the rapidly expanding Apple software market.
Surviving records at The Strong show how seriously Billings approached the business side. The archive contains a preliminary business plan from about 1979, a Five Year Business Plan dated August 24, 1979, and two copies of a Strategic Simulations Business Plan dated December 1. According to the archive’s finding aid, these documents discussed the early computer-wargaming market, company strategy and objectives, financial analysis, statistics, and personnel. An “Authorized Apple Distributors” list from September 1979 also survives.
SSI was therefore being built not simply around the belief that computer wargames would be interesting, but around an attempt to determine whether a sustainable business could be constructed around them.
Billings ultimately chose SSI over graduate school.
The company began in extremely modest surroundings. Contemporary Softalk reporting described programming taking place in Billings’ apartment, where disks, documentation, packaging materials, computers, and boxes crowded the available space. Lyon worked nights on the software after finishing his regular job, and Susan Billings joined the early management operation before SSI’s first game reached customers.
The first test of whether the idea could survive outside that apartment was Computer Bismarck.
Computer Bismarck and the Birth of SSI
John Lyon programmed Computer Bismarck, a simulation of the 1941 hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. It allowed players to command forces involved in the North Atlantic campaign and could be played against another person or the computer.
That second possibility was crucial. The machine was not simply keeping score. It could occupy the empty chair on the other side of the table.
SSI released Computer Bismarck in early 1980. Computer Gaming World later credited it as the first serious wargame commercially published for a microcomputer, while The Strong describes it as the first computer wargame to achieve commercial success. The distinction matters because experiments with computerized strategy existed before SSI, but Computer Bismarck demonstrated that a specialized commercial market could be built around sophisticated computer wargaming.
SSI treated the physical product seriously as well. At a time when computer software might arrive with minimal packaging, Computer Bismarck was presented more like the elaborate tabletop games its intended audience already knew. Rules, maps, reference material, and professional packaging helped tell buyers that this was not simply another novelty program.
The marketing challenge was more difficult.
In February 1980, Billings mailed approximately 30,000 promotional flyers to Apple II owners. The response initially came slowly. Then SSI demonstrated the game at an Applefest in San Francisco. Thousands of computer enthusiasts could suddenly see what Billings and Lyon had been trying to build, and orders increased dramatically.
Computer Gaming World later argued that something even more important happened. SSI gained a reputation for treating strategy games seriously, and that reputation began drawing game submissions from designers who wanted a publisher.
Within months, the apartment was no longer sufficient. Softalk reported that Computer Bismarck had been introduced in early 1980 and that by March the growing company needed separate quarters. SSI would move more than once as its catalog and staff expanded.
The company had survived its first battle. Now it needed more games.
Building a Company Around Outside Designers
One of SSI’s greatest strengths became its ability to find designers who understood complicated systems.
Ed Williger followed Computer Bismarck with Computer Ambush, a tactical World War II game whose early version was notoriously slow. Billings later recalled that processing a single turn could consume hours. The limitations of early personal computers were constantly colliding with the ambitions of designers who wanted to simulate increasingly detailed worlds.
SSI kept pushing anyway.
Among the people who eventually published games through the company were Dan Bunten, Roger Keating, Gary Grigsby, Charles Kroegel, David Landrey, and numerous other programmers and designers who would become important figures in computer strategy gaming.
Bunten’s Computer Quarterback expanded SSI beyond military history into sports. Cartels & Cutthroats explored economics. Roger Keating contributed strategy titles before becoming a founder of Strategic Studies Group in Australia. Gary Grigsby developed an especially close association with SSI through detailed military games that eventually made his name almost synonymous with computer wargaming.
This outside-designer model became central to SSI.
By 1985, Antic reported that almost all of the company’s games were being written by outside contributors. Of the twelve games SSI had published during the previous year, six came from established contributors and six from newcomers. SSI supplied publishing, development support, marketing, and increasingly a collection of internal tools that helped designers create maps, handle line-of-sight calculations, and transfer games between different computer systems.
The result was a catalog that grew far beyond what a small internal development team could have produced alone.
SSI also had to follow the computer market itself. Apple II software had dominated the company’s early sales, but the Commodore 64 later became increasingly important, while the IBM-compatible market grew rapidly during the second half of the 1980s.
By fiscal 1987, Computer Gaming World reported that SSI had more than $5 million in annual sales, approximately fifty full-time employees, and almost ninety published titles during its first eight years. Its Fall 1987/Winter 1988 catalog still offered fifty-seven of them.
For a company that had begun in an apartment around an uncertain niche, SSI had become one of the established names in computer gaming.
More Than Wargames
The name Strategic Simulations understandably became associated with tanks, ships, battle maps, and military statistics, but the company began expanding beyond traditional wargames almost immediately.
Sports games appeared early. Economic simulations followed. Science fiction and fantasy became increasingly visible.
The transition was not really a rejection of SSI’s original philosophy. Whether the subject was a football season, an economy, a fantasy kingdom, or the Eastern Front, SSI was interested in systems. The company specialized in giving players rules, resources, units, statistics, and decisions, then allowing those elements to interact.
Role-playing games were therefore a surprisingly natural direction.
By the middle of the 1980s, SSI was publishing titles such as Questron, Phantasie, Shard of Spring, and Wizard’s Crown. The latter was especially important because its detailed tactical combat pointed toward the system that would later appear in SSI’s most famous role-playing games.
The transformation was already visible by 1985. Antic described SSI as the leading company in the computer strategy and simulation field, but its catalog was becoming difficult to define simply as a collection of historical wargames.
Then came the opportunity that changed SSI’s identity more dramatically than anything since Computer Bismarck.
TSR was looking for a company to bring Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to computers.
Winning Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons and computer games had been circling one another for years. Early computer role-playing games borrowed heavily from tabletop role-playing concepts, but an official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer line carried something much more valuable: the rules, names, worlds, monsters, and reputation of the most famous tabletop role-playing game in the world.
SSI wanted the license.
The importance the company placed on the opportunity is visible in its surviving records. The Strong archive contains the information packet SSI presented to TSR in the spring of 1987 while seeking the Dungeons & Dragons license. That document sits alongside company plans, correspondence, financial records, and later acquisition material, making the TSR proposal one of the major turning points preserved in the Billings papers.
SSI won.
The company acquired the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer license in 1987. The same year, Electronic Arts purchased a 20 percent interest in SSI, connecting Billings’ company more closely with the firm founded by the same Trip Hawkins who had encouraged him toward the Apple II years earlier.
SSI now faced a challenge very different from adapting another historical campaign. Players already knew how AD&D was supposed to work.
The computer version needed character classes, races, alignments, spells, monsters, equipment, exploration, tactical combat, experience, and the mathematical machinery of the tabletop rules. It also needed to make all of that understandable to someone sitting in front of a home computer.
SSI and TSR began promoting an entire line of products. Company material published through Inside SSI described plans for role-playing games, action titles, Dungeon Master’s utilities, and other projects using TSR properties. The most important was a Forgotten Realms role-playing game called Pool of Radiance.
It became the game that changed SSI.
Pool of Radiance and the Gold Box Era
When Computer Gaming World received an advance version of Pool of Radiance in 1988, the magazine described a game that combined familiar elements from several successful computer role-playing traditions. A first-person exploration window shared the screen with character information, while tactical combat shifted the action into an overhead battlefield.
The underlying accomplishment was less obvious from screenshots. SSI had taken the dense AD&D rule system and placed much of its bookkeeping inside the computer.
A player could create a party, choose races and classes, equip characters, explore the ruined city of Phlan, fight monsters, gain experience, cast spells, and make tactical decisions without manually resolving every rule that would have required books, dice, charts, and a Dungeon Master at a table.
That was the same fundamental promise Billings had seen in computer wargaming years earlier. The computer could absorb the tedious parts of a complicated game without removing the decisions that made it interesting.
Pool of Radiance became a major commercial success. Research using SSI’s surviving sales records at The Strong places North American computer sales at 264,536 copies, far beyond the company’s previous releases. Even its clue book reportedly outsold every earlier SSI game.
The distinctive gold-colored packaging helped give the resulting family of games its enduring nickname: the Gold Box series.
SSI followed Pool of Radiance with games including Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, Pools of Darkness, Dragonlance adventures, Savage Frontier titles, and games based on TSR’s Buck Rogers setting. The engine became familiar enough that players could move between titles while understanding the basic language of exploration and combat.
The AD&D agreement also produced games outside the traditional Gold Box format. SSI published Westwood Associates’ Eye of the Beholder, which approached Dungeons & Dragons through real-time first-person dungeon exploration, and the licensed era also included experiments in action games, strategy titles, utilities, and online play.
The Strong describes Pool of Radiance as the beginning of SSI’s enormously successful Gold Box period and notes that the title significantly increased company sales.
By the end of the 1980s, the transformation was unmistakable. SSI had entered the decade trying to convince computer owners to buy serious historical simulations. It was leaving the decade as one of the leading computer role-playing publishers in the industry.
The Company Behind the Catalog
SSI’s surviving corporate records make it possible to look beyond individual games.
The Strong collection includes financial statements from 1980 through 1984, income statements from 1985 through 1992, audit reports from 1988 through 1992, stockholder reports from 1990 through 1993, and early financial forecasts. Separate files preserve domestic sales statistics from 1980 through 1994 and employee statistics from 1985 through 1992.
Those records reveal something important about preserving video game history. Games themselves tell only part of a company’s story.
Boxes and disks show what reached store shelves. Corporate records can show what sold, what failed, how quickly a company expanded, who owned it, what executives expected to happen next, and how those expectations compared with reality.
SSI’s archive even contains customer-response-card statistics stretching from 1981 to 1997. Those records potentially allow historians to study not merely what SSI made but who actually bought its games and how that audience changed as the company moved from Apple II wargames to Commodore 64 role-playing games and eventually to the PC market.
Few pioneering game companies left behind such a concentrated documentary record.
That makes SSI important not only because of its games but because its business can be reconstructed with unusual depth.
When the Gold Box Began to Tarnish
Success created its own problems.
The Gold Box engine was productive and familiar, but computer technology was changing rapidly. Graphics, interfaces, storage capacity, sound, and consumer expectations were advancing, while competitors were producing increasingly sophisticated role-playing games.
SSI continued releasing successful licensed products, but the company that had gained an enormous advantage from obtaining the AD&D license was also increasingly dependent on a property it did not own.
By the early 1990s, even SSI’s public identity had shifted. The company still produced wargames, but it was no longer viewed primarily as a wargame publisher. Its association with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had become too strong.
Then the relationship with TSR ended.
Contemporary gaming publications were already reporting the separation in 1994. Computer Gaming World described it memorably as SSI moving beyond AD&D after its “divorce” from TSR. The Strong’s historical summary likewise places the loss of the lucrative AD&D license immediately before SSI’s acquisition by Mindscape later that year.
Losing Dungeons & Dragons could have been the closing chapter for SSI.
Instead, almost at the same moment, the company rediscovered its oldest identity.
Panzer General and a Return to the Wargame
In 1994, SSI released Panzer General.
The subject looked like classic SSI. Once again there were tanks, aircraft, artillery, infantry, maps, historical campaigns, and World War II. The approach, however, was very different from the daunting simulations that had helped establish the company.
Panzer General was built to be approachable.
Players moved units across a hex-based map, captured objectives, managed a continuing core force, improved experienced units, and progressed through a campaign. The game retained enough military detail to satisfy strategy players while making the interface and fundamental rules understandable without demanding that newcomers study an enormous technical manual before they could begin.
A 1994 Computer Gaming World preview recognized the difference. The magazine described a game descended in part from the Japanese Daisenryaku style of strategy design, with SSI taking a simpler underlying approach and adding historical detail, interface improvements, and campaign structure.
It worked.
Panzer General became a major hit and eventually one of the most successful wargames of its era. SSI producer Rick Martinez later recalled that the company expected a respectable genre success, not the scale of the response that followed. The game’s combination of accessibility and depth pushed it far beyond the traditional hardcore wargaming audience.
The design generated an entire General family, including Allied General, Pacific General, Fantasy General, and other variations on the underlying idea. SSI also continued producing more traditional military titles, including Gary Grigsby’s Steel Panthers series.
There was an irony in the timing.
Just as SSI proved that it could reinvent the computer wargame for a new generation, the independent company was disappearing.
Mindscape Buys SSI
Mindscape acquired Strategic Simulations in October 1994.
The transaction ended SSI’s existence as an independent publisher roughly fifteen years after Billings had chosen a computer-game company over business school. Contemporary industry reports covered the acquisition, and the Billings archive itself preserves material concerning the merger and acquisition.
The SSI name did not vanish immediately.
Billings remained president and CEO through December 1995 before stepping away from executive management to concentrate more closely on game production and design. SSI continued to appear on games, advertisements, and packaging, increasingly identified as part of a larger corporate organization.
This was a familiar pattern in the rapidly consolidating 1990s software industry. Successful independent publishers found themselves surrounded by increasingly large companies capable of funding bigger projects, buying advertising, managing international distribution, and surviving the escalating cost of game development.
SSI survived, but ownership above it kept changing.
Mindscape became part of The Learning Company. The Learning Company later came under Mattel, and another ownership transition followed during the collapse and restructuring of Mattel’s software ambitions.
In March 2001, Ubi Soft announced that it was acquiring The Learning Company’s entertainment division from Gores Technology Group. The transaction gave Ubi Soft publishing rights to eighty-eight titles and brands, specifically including Pool of Radiance, and brought the remaining SSI operation and catalog into the Ubisoft organization.
The SSI brand was eventually retired.
The company that had once mailed thousands of flyers to Apple II owners was gone, but much of what it had helped build was now part of the vocabulary of computer gaming.
From Computer Bismarck to Pool of Radiance
Looking across SSI’s history, Computer Bismarck and Pool of Radiance can appear to belong to two completely different companies.
One recreated the hunt for a German battleship for early home-computer owners interested in historical wargames. The other allowed fantasy players to create parties of fighters, clerics, thieves, and magic-users and explore the Forgotten Realms.
Underneath, however, the philosophy was remarkably similar.
Both games took systems that had traditionally required physical components, written rules, calculations, and another human participant, then asked how much of that structure a computer could manage without taking meaningful decisions away from the player.
The same idea runs through much of SSI’s catalog.
A military simulation could let the computer resolve combat calculations. A sports game could process player statistics. An economic simulation could model markets. A role-playing game could track armor class, spells, experience points, monsters, and dozens of interacting rules. Panzer General could hide enough complexity to welcome a newcomer while still giving an experienced player room to think several battles ahead.
SSI did not invent every one of those ideas, and it rarely operated alone. Its history was filled with outside designers, licensed properties, partner companies, and changing technology.
What SSI did extraordinarily well was build a publishing identity around systems and strategy.
The Designers Who Passed Through SSI
That identity also gave a remarkable collection of designers a place to work.
John Lyon helped create the first commercial product. Dan Bunten brought sports and economic simulation into a company named Strategic Simulations. Roger Keating developed games for SSI before helping establish another major strategy publisher. Gary Grigsby’s long association with SSI produced a succession of increasingly ambitious military simulations.
Charles Kroegel and David Landrey became major figures in the company’s design and management. Numerous other programmers, artists, producers, and designers worked on the Gold Box games, the General series, and SSI’s enormous catalog of strategy, fantasy, science-fiction, sports, and role-playing software.
By 1985, the company’s reliance on outside submissions had become so central that Antic could report newcomers sharing the annual release schedule with established contributors. SSI effectively became an entry point through which individual designers could reach a commercial audience.
That may be one of the company’s less obvious contributions to gaming history.
SSI was not simply a studio that created games. It was a publisher that built an ecosystem around people who wanted to design unusually complicated ones.
Preserving Strategic Simulations
Much of the evidence that allows SSI’s story to be reconstructed survives because Joel Billings preserved his records.
In 2012, he donated the collection now held by the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong National Museum of Play. The papers cover the period from 1976 through 2001, with the largest concentration dating from SSI’s independent and early post-acquisition years.
Among the most remarkable objects is the BASIC source-code printout for Computer Bismarck, complete with production notes and drawings. The archive also contains the code for Billings’ 1976 Tank project.
Around those programs sit the records of the business that grew from them: business plans, board minutes, stock information, financial statements, domestic sales statistics, customer surveys, advertisements, company histories, correspondence, TSR licensing material, and acquisition records. The Strong separately holds SSI product catalogs covering much of the period from 1981 through 1996 and dozens of SSI-published games.
For historians of video games, it is an extraordinary survival.
Instead of remembering SSI only through old boxes and fading disks, researchers can study what Billings thought the market looked like before the company had released its first product, how SSI measured sales once the business began growing, how it pitched itself to TSR, and how ownership changed when the independent era came to an end.
The history of SSI can therefore be studied from the inside as well as from the games players remember.
Why Strategic Simulations Matters
Strategic Simulations began with a deceptively simple observation.
Computers could make complicated games easier to play without necessarily making them less complicated.
Joel Billings saw that opportunity when personal computing itself was still new. He found programmers who shared his obsession with wargaming, gambled on the Apple II, turned an apartment into a software company, and released Computer Bismarck into a market that had barely learned what a commercial computer game could be.
SSI then spent the next two decades testing how far that original idea could stretch.
It moved from battleships to football, from Guadalcanal to fantasy kingdoms, from Gary Grigsby’s military simulations to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, from the Gold Box to Panzer General. Along the way, the company helped establish the commercial computer wargame, became an important publisher for independent designers, transformed tabletop role-playing systems into successful computer games, and repeatedly found ways to make dense rule systems manageable on a screen.
Its independent life ended in 1994, and its name eventually disappeared under a succession of larger corporate owners. Yet SSI’s influence did not disappear with the logo.
Modern strategy games routinely expect computers to handle calculations that once filled pages of charts. Tactical role-playing games move characters across battlefields in ways that would be immediately recognizable to Gold Box players. Historical games balance accessibility against simulation depth using questions that SSI wrestled with from its earliest years. Computer adaptations of tabletop systems now form an entire branch of the industry.
In that sense, SSI’s story stretches far beyond the games carrying its name.
The company began because a young wargamer wanted the computer to sit on the other side of the table.
By the time Strategic Simulations was gone, the computer had become the table.
Sources & Further Reading
The Strong National Museum of Play. Finding Aid to Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) Papers, 1976–2001. Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, January 2014. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Billings, Joel. “A Short History of the People, Places, and Events Associated with the Founding of SSI.” Undated. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Preliminary Business Plan.” ca. 1979. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 11, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Five Year Business Plan.” August 24, 1979. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 12, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Strategic Simulations Business Plan.” December 1, 1979. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folders 13–14, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Authorized Apple Distributors.” September 1979. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 2, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. SSI Minute Book, 1981–1993 and 2001. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. SSI Company Meeting Minutes, 1984–1997. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 2, Folder 2, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. SSI Financial Statements, 1980–1984. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. SSI Income Statements, 1985–1992. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. SSI Domestic Sales Statistics, 1980–1994. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Strategic Simulations, Inc. Company Backgrounder.” June 1986. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 4, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “SSI Five-Year Plan.” January 1986. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 16, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “SSI Presentation to TSR for Dungeons & Dragons License.” Spring 1987. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 5, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. The SSI 10th Anniversary Yearbook. February 1990. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Box 1, Folder 6, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-Joel-Billings-Strategic-Simulations-Inc.-SSI-papers_052115.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. Computer Bismarck BASIC Master Source-Code Printout. 1980. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. Papers, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/the-strategic-simulations-inc-collection/
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Sink the Bismarck with Your Apple!” Advertisement. BYTE 5, no. 3 (March 1980): 165. https://www.mobygames.com/game/11015/computer-bismarck/promo/group-102845/image-1165713/
Strategic Simulations, Inc. “Computer Bismarck.” Advertisement. Creative Computing 6, no. 4 (April 1980). https://device.report/m/56b1d7a0b0ffa72cff2954957e67ef71d560431eb9b9c6983f461b98107d5931.pdf
Ansoff, Peter A. “Computer Bismarck.” BYTE 5, no. 12 (December 1980): 262–66. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12
Billings, Joel. “Company Report: Strategic Simulations.” The Space Gamer, no. 39 (May 1981): 10. https://archive.org/details/space-gamer_201601/Space_Gamer_39/
Tommervik, Allan. “Exec Strategic Simulations.” Softalk 1, no. 11 (July 1981): 4–6. https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/magazines/softalk/softalkv1n11jul1981.pdf
Ahl, David H. “Sweet Success at Strategic Simulations.” Creative Computing 7, no. 12 (December 1981): 92–94. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1981-12
Powell, Jack. “War Games: The Story of S.S.I.” Antic 4, no. 3 (July 1985). https://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n3/WarGames.php
Bateman, Selby. “The Popularity of Strategy Games.” COMPUTE!’s Gazette, December 1984. https://www.commodore.ca/gallery/magazines/gazette/Compute-Gazette-Issue-18-01.pdf
Strategic Simulations, Inc. Summer 1984 Catalog. Mountain View, CA: Strategic Simulations, 1984. https://bitsavers.trailingedge.com/misc/SSI%20Summer%201984%20Catalog.pdf
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