Long before Joel Billings became one of the pioneers of computer strategy gaming, he was a child looking for someone willing to fight another battle across a cardboard map.
His interest began in 1965, when his father, Robert Billings, brought home Avalon Hill’s Tactics II and taught his seven-year-old son how to play. Robert had served in World War II and later became an English professor with a strong interest in military history and game design. He experimented with homemade games of his own, building battlefields from wood, nails, carved pieces, and other household materials. Joel took to commercial wargaming even more intensely. By his own later recollection, once he encountered Tactics II, he was hooked.
There was one problem. Wargames required opponents, and opponents were not always easy to find.
Billings recruited members of his junior high chess club into wargaming, organized a club of his own, and later played games through the mail. At one point he was participating in nine simultaneous play-by-mail games in two tournaments. He even paid for a commercial list intended to connect isolated wargamers with other players in their area. The difficulty of finding another person willing to spend hours moving counters and consulting combat tables would eventually help shape his thinking about computers.
The machine, Billings gradually realized, could do more than calculate combat results. It could become the missing opponent.
From Tank to the Idea of a Computer Opponent
Billings attended Claremont McKenna College, where he studied mathematics and economics and became interested in econometrics, mathematical modeling, and forecasting. In 1976, during a computer programming course, he created a simple BASIC wargame called Tank as a class project.
The program survives.
Among the records Billings later donated to The Strong National Museum of Play is a printout of the BASIC code for Tank, dated to the fall of 1976. The archive also contains the BASIC source code and production notes for Computer Bismarck, allowing researchers to trace a direct line from a college programming exercise to the first commercial product of the company Billings would soon create.
Billings did not initially see computers as replacements for board wargames so much as solutions to their limitations. A computer could manage calculations and bookkeeping, but two possibilities were particularly important to him.
The first was an artificial opponent. Many dedicated wargamers spent considerable time playing solitaire, effectively commanding both armies because no human opponent was available.
The second was fog of war. A tabletop player could usually see the entire battlefield, including forces his historical counterpart would never have known were present. Billings had experimented with ways to hide information in board games, including double-blind play with a referee. Computers could perform that job automatically, showing each player only what his forces should reasonably know. Decades later, Billings still identified the computer opponent and fog of war as the two ideas that convinced him computer wargames had a future.
In 1979, fresh out of college and preparing to attend business school, he faced a decision that would determine the rest of his career.
He could continue along the conventional path, or he could try to build the kind of computer wargames that almost nobody else seemed interested in making.
Choosing the Apple II and Founding SSI
During the summer of 1979, Billings was working in Silicon Valley and thinking seriously about computerized wargaming. A friend had introduced him to the TRS-80, convincing him that personal computers had become capable enough to make his idea possible.
He first approached programmers and established game companies. The response was not encouraging. A programmer at IBM reportedly doubted that enough people wanted complicated computer strategy games. Billings approached Avalon Hill, the company whose games had dominated his childhood, but found little interest there either.
Billings later remembered that rejection as important. If established companies would not publish what he wanted to make, he would have to become a publisher himself. His ambition was to create what he later called the “Avalon Hill” of computer strategy games, a company known for sophisticated games aimed at people who wanted to think rather than simply react.
To find programmers who understood wargaming, Billings placed questionnaires in local hobby and computer stores. John Lyon and Ed Willeger responded. Both had programming backgrounds, but just as importantly, both understood the peculiar culture of historical wargames.
Another early connection proved equally important. Billings met Trip Hawkins, then working at Apple and several years away from founding Electronic Arts. Hawkins encouraged him to build for the Apple II, whose graphics capabilities offered possibilities that text-oriented systems could not match. The surviving archival finding aid specifically credits Hawkins with convincing Billings to use the Apple II.
Billings abandoned the safer route toward business school and founded Strategic Simulations, Inc., better known as SSI, in 1979.
He was twenty-one years old.
Computer Bismarck and the Birth of SSI
For SSI’s first game, Billings chose the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck during World War II. It was a natural subject for the kind of game he wanted computers to make possible. Naval warfare depended heavily on incomplete information, scouting, searches, uncertain enemy positions, and long stretches in which commanders had to make decisions without knowing exactly where the opposing fleet was located.
John Lyon programmed the game, while Billings shaped the design and the company forming around it. SSI called the finished product Computer Bismarck.
The game appeared in early 1980. Contemporary Computer Gaming World coverage later identified February 1980 as the moment SSI entered the market and described Computer Bismarck as the first serious wargame published for a microcomputer. The Strong is slightly more cautious in its historical description, calling it the first computer wargame to achieve commercial success. Either way, it occupied an important place in the development of computer strategy games.
Billings wanted the product to look serious. At a time when some computer software still arrived in simple bags or minimally produced packaging, SSI treated Computer Bismarck more like a professionally published board game. It came in a large box with substantial documentation and physical player aids.
Selling it was another matter.
In February 1980, SSI mailed approximately 30,000 promotional flyers to Apple II owners. Orders arrived slowly at first. Then the company demonstrated the game at an Applefest in San Francisco. Thousands of computer owners encountered SSI there, orders increased sharply, and the company began attracting something almost as valuable as customers: programmers with games of their own.
That unexpected flow of outside designs would transform Billings’s original plan.
Building a Company Around Outside Designers
Billings initially imagined SSI employing programmers who would steadily produce games inside the company. The marketplace suggested a different model.
One of the most important early submissions came from Dan Bunten, later known as Danielle Bunten Berry. Bunten sent SSI a football simulation that impressed Billings because it was more polished than much of the work his young company was producing internally.
SSI published it as Computer Quarterback in 1980.
The game sold quickly, and Billings recognized the advantage of becoming not simply a developer but a publisher for independent designers. Instead of requiring SSI to conceive and program every title, talented outsiders could create the games while SSI handled testing, development, documentation, packaging, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution.
That model became one of SSI’s defining characteristics.
By 1985, Antic reported that almost all SSI games came from outside contributors. Six of the twelve titles the company had published during the previous year were created by regular contributors, while the other six came from newcomers. SSI had also developed tools that made it easier to build maps, calculate line of sight, and transfer games among different computer platforms.
For designers interested in subjects too complicated or too specialized for mainstream publishers, SSI became a natural home.
Billings had created the opponent he had struggled to find as a boy. Now he was also creating a gathering place for people who shared his fascination with strategy.
Gary Grigsby and the SSI School of Wargaming
One of the most important relationships in Billings’s career began with a technical support call.
In 1982, Gary Grigsby telephoned SSI with a question about Torpedo Fire. Billings happened to answer the phone. During the conversation Grigsby mentioned that he designed games.
The call became the beginning of one of the longest partnerships in computer wargaming.
Billings later recalled that Grigsby, Chuck Kroegel, and Dave Landrey were particularly important to SSI’s early success. Many of the company’s developers and employees also became shareholders, reinforcing the sense that SSI was as much a community of gamers as a conventional software business.
Grigsby became extraordinarily productive. Games such as Guadalcanal Campaign, War in Russia, Kampfgruppe, and others helped establish SSI as the dominant name in serious computer wargaming. The company produced military simulations at a pace that mirrored the prolific tabletop publishers Billings had admired.
SSI’s games were not always welcoming to newcomers. They could contain long manuals, dense statistics, complex rules, and graphics that existed primarily to convey information. For their intended audience, however, those qualities were often attractions rather than defects.
The company was not trying to disguise its simulations as arcade games. It was selling the pleasure of commanding armies, studying equipment, comparing capabilities, and making decisions within complicated systems.
By 1985, Antic found SSI operating from modern offices with around sixty games in its catalog. Billings was still fascinated by the details that made traditional wargaming seem intimidating to outsiders. Asked what appealed to him, he enthusiastically described charts containing weapons, tanks, guns, ranges, speeds, and penetration values.
For Billings, the numbers were part of the fun.
More Than Wargames
The irony of SSI’s success was that its founder loved military wargames most, but many of the company’s best commercial opportunities came from somewhere else.
Sports games had performed well almost from the beginning. Economic and political simulations broadened the catalog further. Fantasy games and computer role-playing games became increasingly important during the middle of the 1980s.
Billings later acknowledged that wargames usually represented only a small portion of SSI’s overall revenue, even though he continued to devote personal attention to them. The company’s role-playing games increasingly paid the bills.
Titles such as Questron, Phantasie, and Wizard’s Crown pushed SSI deeper into fantasy role-playing. The transition was less strange than it might appear. Computer role-playing games and historical wargames shared an appetite for rules, statistics, character or unit attributes, tactical combat, and complicated interactions that computers could manage more easily than players using paper.
Inside SSI, fantasy gaming was already part of the culture.
Billings later recalled that his wife described the company as a “treehouse for gamers.” Employees worked long hours, but they also played board games, role-playing games, miniatures, sports, and eventually collectible card games together. Billings might spend the day managing the company and the evening testing games.
That culture became crucial when one of the most valuable licenses in gaming suddenly became available.
Winning the Dungeons & Dragons License
In 1987, TSR decided to license the computer rights to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Competition was intense. According to contemporary coverage in Dragon, ten companies sought the license. SSI was not the largest bidder, nor was it the company most obviously positioned to dominate a graphics-driven consumer market.
Billings believed SSI had another advantage. Its employees actually understood the game.
For the presentation to TSR, SSI brought multiple computers and demonstrated the fantasy software it had already produced. Billings told Dragon that the company’s research and development staff played AD&D, understood it, and genuinely wanted to champion the property.
The presentation was important enough that the original 1987 SSI packet prepared for TSR survives among Billings’s papers at The Strong. The archive places it alongside the company’s early business plans, correspondence, financial records, meeting minutes, sales figures, and internal historical material.
SSI won the license.
The agreement, signed in May 1987, changed the company. Instead of producing a single licensed game, SSI envisioned an entire line of Dungeons & Dragons computer products. In the same period, Electronic Arts acquired a 20 percent stake in SSI, and the companies later entered an affiliated-label distribution relationship.
The wargaming company Billings had created because Avalon Hill would not publish his idea was about to become one of the major names in computer role-playing games.
Pool of Radiance and the Gold Box Era
SSI’s most important AD&D release arrived in 1988.
Pool of Radiance brought the rules, character classes, races, alignments, monsters, spells, and tactical combat of tabletop Advanced Dungeons & Dragons into a computer role-playing game set in the Forgotten Realms.
Its box became the visual foundation for what players would call SSI’s Gold Box series.
The game was a breakthrough.
Records from the SSI archive indicate that Pool of Radiance eventually sold 264,536 copies in North America, far beyond the quantities associated with SSI’s earlier niche strategy games. Even its clue book sold more copies than any previous SSI game had managed.
The success changed the identity of the company. SSI continued publishing wargames, but to a growing portion of the gaming public the letters SSI now meant Dungeons & Dragons.
More Gold Box games followed, along with other TSR-licensed products. The company that had begun with a computerized hunt for the Bismarck was now sending players through fantasy cities, ruins, dungeons, and tactical battles.
Yet the connection to Billings’s original interests remained visible. Gold Box combat was turn based, tactical, rule heavy, and concerned with positioning and statistics. In many respects SSI had applied lessons learned from years of historical simulations to fantasy role-playing.
The subject had changed, but the company still believed that complicated systems could be made playable on a computer.
Growth, Risk, and a Changing Industry
Success also made SSI more complicated to run.
Billings had begun with family financing and a small group of programmers. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, computer games required larger teams, greater technological investment, more expensive production, and much larger financial risks.
Billings later described SSI as a family and employee-funded business that frequently operated with limited capital. That model had worked when a small team could publish a computer game for a specialized audience. It became increasingly difficult as the industry moved toward larger budgets and rapidly changing technology.
The Gold Box line also could not remain dominant forever. Sales declined as the underlying technology aged and competitors pushed computer role-playing games in new directions. SSI’s exclusive relationship with TSR came to an end in the 1990s, removing the franchise that had provided much of the company’s profit.
Billings still had one major wargaming success ahead of him.
Panzer General and a Return to the Roots
In 1994, SSI released Panzer General.
The game retained the hexagons, units, equipment, and military history associated with traditional computer wargaming, but presented them in a far more accessible form. Players moved through a linked campaign in which the results of one battle affected the forces available in the next. The interface reduced much of the bookkeeping and friction that had made earlier simulations difficult for newcomers.
Billings received credit for campaign design.
Years later, when asked which game he had most enjoyed helping design, Billings chose Panzer General. He emphasized that his own role had been relatively small and credited the larger SSI team, describing the game as a labor of love produced by an unusually talented group.
The achievement carried a certain symmetry. SSI had spent years becoming known for fantasy role-playing games, yet one of its defining later successes came from returning to the military strategy genre that had inspired Billings to create the company in the first place.
Panzer General also demonstrated that historical wargames did not have to choose between depth and accessibility. A game could preserve meaningful strategic decisions while removing unnecessary obstacles between the player and those decisions.
That lesson would influence computer strategy games far beyond SSI.
Selling SSI and Leaving the Executive Office
By 1994, Billings and his family faced a difficult decision.
The financial risks involved in remaining an independent software publisher had grown substantially. Billings later explained that his family could no longer assume the level of risk required by the rapidly expanding industry.
SSI was sold to Mindscape in late 1994.
Billings remained with the company and continued as SSI’s president and CEO through December 1995. In 1996 he moved into a larger Mindscape executive position overseeing games, while Chuck Kroegel became president of SSI.
Billings quickly discovered that the job was taking him away from what he actually wanted to do.
He did not want to spend the rest of his career as an executive inside an increasingly large corporation. He wanted to work on games.
By late 1996, he had returned to SSI as a producer, once again working with designers including Gary Grigsby. He contributed to projects such as Steel Panthers III and later produced the World War II naval simulation Fighting Steel.
The corporate ownership above SSI continued changing. Mindscape became part of The Learning Company, which was acquired by Mattel. The SSI name eventually passed to Ubisoft in 2001 and was retired.
Billings, however, had already begun moving back toward the type of small, specialized wargame development operation with which he had started.
2 By 3 Games and Coming Full Circle
In 2000, Joel Billings joined Gary Grigsby and Keith Brors in forming 2 By 3 Games.
The name was a joke with a purpose: World War II games made by three guys.
Their new company concentrated on the kind of historically detailed computer wargames that had originally brought Billings and Grigsby together. The group worked with Matrix Games and developed projects such as Uncommon Valor, War in the Pacific, World at War, War in the East, and War in the West.
The technology had changed enormously since Computer Bismarck. Research could now involve contributors from around the world. Historical data that once required shelves of books and correspondence could be shared through the internet. Patches, test versions, scenarios, and databases could be distributed instantly instead of mailing floppy disks between designers and testers.
Billings’s fundamental interests had changed much less.
He still cared about artificial opponents, historical research, uncertainty, logistics, military organization, and the ability of computers to model systems too cumbersome for a board game.
Gary Grigsby’s War in the East 2, released in 2021, credited Billings as an executive producer more than forty years after SSI’s first game. His participation in the game’s community continued well beyond its release.
The twenty-one-year-old who had wondered whether computers could solve the problems of solitaire wargaming had spent an entire career pursuing the answer.
Preserving the History of SSI
Billings also did something unusually valuable for historians of video games.
He saved the records.
In April 2012, he donated a substantial collection of SSI material to The Strong National Museum of Play. The surviving papers cover the period from 1976 to 2001, with most dating from SSI’s principal independent years between 1979 and 1996. The collection is open for research.
Among the surviving material are SSI business plans from 1979 and 1980, corporate minutes, income statements, audit reports, shareholder documents, sales figures, customer surveys, correspondence, advertising material, company histories, an annotated organizational chart, the 1987 presentation used in pursuing the TSR license, and the company’s tenth-anniversary yearbook.
There are also the source-code printouts for Tank and Computer Bismarck. The latter includes notes and drawings created during production.
For historians, those records are unusually important. The early video game industry was filled with small companies that disappeared quickly, often taking their internal documents, source code, correspondence, and financial records with them. Memories recorded decades later can explain what people believed happened, but contemporary business plans and sales reports show what companies were actually planning, spending, producing, and selling at the time.
Because Billings preserved his records, SSI can be studied not merely as a list of games but as a business, a workplace, a community of designers, and an experiment in creating a new form of entertainment.
Why Joel Billings Matters
Joel Billings did not invent the wargame, the personal computer, the computer role-playing game, or the strategy game. His importance comes instead from recognizing unusually early how naturally several of those worlds could fit together.
As a child, he wanted opponents.
As a college student, he saw that computers could process rules and calculations.
As a wargamer, he understood the importance of hidden information.
As an entrepreneur, he recognized that talented independent designers needed a publisher.
As the head of SSI, he helped build a company capable of turning complicated tabletop-style systems into commercial computer games.
That path led from Tank and Computer Bismarck to Gary Grigsby’s historical simulations, from Wizard’s Crown to Pool of Radiance, from the Gold Box games to Panzer General, and eventually back to deeply detailed historical simulations at 2 By 3 Games.
Billings once said that when he founded SSI, his dream was to create the Avalon Hill of computer strategy games.
In an important sense, he did.
SSI became a home for players who wanted games that expected something from them. Its best titles asked users to study a battlefield, understand a system, weigh incomplete information, and live with the results of their decisions. Even when the company wandered far from military history, that philosophy remained visible.
More than four decades after Computer Bismarck, the central idea behind Billings’s career still defines a major branch of computer gaming: a machine can do more than display a battlefield.
It can hide what the commander should not know, remember what the player cannot, calculate what would otherwise slow the game to a crawl, and provide the opponent who was missing from the other side of the table.
Sources & Further Reading
Billings, Joel. Joel Billings’ Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) Papers, 1976–2001. Collection 112.1517. Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, NY. 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. Box 1, Folder 1, 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. “Preliminary Business Plan.” ca. 1979. Box 1, Folder 11, 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. “Five Year Business Plan.” August 24, 1979. Box 1, Folder 12, 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 Business Plan.” December 1, 1979. Box 1, Folders 13–14, 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. Box 1, Folder 4, 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. Presentation to TSR for the Dungeons & Dragons License. Spring 1987. Box 1, Folder 5, 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. The SSI 10th Anniversary Yearbook. February 1990. Box 1, Folder 6, 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. Corporate Minute Book, 1981–1993 and 2001. Box 2, Folder 1, 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. Financial Statements, 1980–1984. Box 2, Folder 3, 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. Domestic Sales Figures, 1980–1994. Box 3, Folder 1, 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
Billings, Joel. Tank. BASIC Source-Code Printout. Fall 1976. 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. Computer Bismarck. BASIC Source Code, Notes, and Drawings. 1980. Box 3, Folder 10, 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
“Exec Strategic Simulations.” Softalk, July 1981. https://manuals.plus/m/45c6397d3f9cb8172c1b96d36afe9f8b8c0dbb735ef746b4c04d6543c10c6056
Ahl, David H. “Sweet Success at Strategic Simulations.” Creative Computing 7, no. 12 (December 1981): 92–94. https://code198x.com/vault/genres/wargame/
Billings, Joel. “Napoleon’s Campaigns 1813 & 1815: Some Notes.” Computer Gaming World 2, no. 2 (March–April 1982). https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_2.2.pdf
Grigsby, Gary. “The History of a Wargame Design.” Computer Gaming World 2, no. 6 (November–December 1982). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Computer_Gaming_World_issue_2.6.pdf
Powell, Jack. “War Games: The Story of S.S.I.” Antic 4, no. 3 (July 1985). https://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n3/WarGames.php
Proctor, Bob. “Titans of the Computer Gaming World: Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI).” Computer Gaming World, no. 45 (March 1988). https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_45.pdf
“SSI Goes to EA.” Antic 7, no. 5 (September 1988). https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n5/LateNewsFlashes.html
Billings, Joel. “Life in the Wargames Biz: Joel Billings.” SUBSIM Review, September 1999. https://www.subsim.com/ssr/billings2.html
Pawelek, Peter “Zhukov.” “Interview with Joel Billings of 2BY3 Games.” CombatSim.com, 2001. https://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/2001/02/2by3-int/
Barton, Matt. “Matt Chat 181: Joel Billings Interview, Part One.” Matt Chat, 2013. https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/110539-joel-billings-video-interview-part-one.html
Barton, Matt. “Matt Chat 188: Joel Billings, Part Four.” Matt Chat, 2013. https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/111111-joel-billings-video-interview-part-four.html
Froholt, Joachim. “Interview with Joel Billings of SSI and 2by3 Games.” Spillhistorie.no, December 10, 2019. Interview conducted in 2014. https://spillhistorie.no/2019/12/10/interview-with-joel-billings-of-ssi-and-2by3-games/
Guillory, Brant. “GrogHeads Interviews Joel Billings of 2By3 Games.” GrogHeads, February 7, 2015. https://grogheads.com/interviews/7359
Rimmer, Jason. “Interrogation of Joel Billings.” A Wargamer’s Needful Things, August 17, 2016. https://www.awargamersneedfulthings.co.uk/2016/08/interrogation-of-joel-billings.html
Dyson, Jon-Paul. “The Strategic Simulations, Inc. Collection.” The Strong National Museum of Play, December 16, 2013. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/the-strategic-simulations-inc-collection/
Nutt, Christian. “Strategic Simulations, Inc. Founder Donates Company Collection to ICHEG.” Game Developer, December 16, 2013. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/strategic-simulations-inc-founder-donates-company-collection-to-icheg
Maher, Jimmy. “Opening the Gold Box, Part 1: Joel Billings and SSI.” The Digital Antiquarian, March 4, 2016. https://www.filfre.net/2016/03/joel-billings-and-ssi/
Merkle, Beth. “Armchair Generals Past, Present, and Future: A Short History of Wargaming.” The Strong National Museum of Play, January 1, 2020. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/armchair-generals-past-present-and-future-a-short-history-of-wargaming/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Why ICHEG Collects Game Company Newsletters and Magazines.” The Strong National Museum of Play. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/why-icheg-collects-game-company-newsletters-and-magazines/
MobyGames. “Joel Billings.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/person/14848/joel-billings/