Nicolaos Tsitsonis

Posted on Jan 17

The BIG History of Game Design Documentation (1/2)

#gamedesign #gamedev #ux #gdd

I. Preface: “The Unsent Letter”

Have you ever wondered where a great game truly begins? Not with the first line of code. Not with the first polygon of a model. Not even with concept art. It begins with a thought that was caught and pinned to paper.

In this industry, it is customary to talk a lot about the advancement of technology. We know everything about the evolution of engines, the console wars, and how, in a matter of decades, pixels turned into photorealistic landscapes. But we have a massive blind spot. We know almost nothing about the evolution of thought. About how the very method of extracting an abstract idea from one’s head and turning it into a system — one that can be not only felt but built — has developed. We learned to build logical bridges between our “I want the player to feel this” and the technical “the system must work like this,” turning ephemeral dreams into clear instructions for other people.

Today, we call this tool by a name that is simple and almost yawningly boring — Game Design Documents. In the mass consciousness, this is just a stack of papers or an endless page in documentation apps, a byproduct of development. But in reality, hidden behind this bureaucratic name is the only method to keep a project from decaying. It is the DNA of the game, captured in text; an attempt to synchronize the vision of dozens, and sometimes hundreds of people, so that in the end, they build the same castle, and not a hundred different huts.

And the paradox is that most modern designers, when answering the question “how do I do this?”, rely only on their own (often painful) experience or on the blind copying of templates, without even suspecting whose shoulders they are standing on.

The conversation about how to write GDDs in this day and age, how to distinguish working tools from cargo cults, and why the modern approach often fails — that is the topic of my next, separate article. But to critique the present with any authority, one must understand the past. You cannot fix a mechanism if you don’t know who invented it and why.

And right here, on the path to this essence, I must make a confession. To confess my love. A love for these very, seemingly boring, “documents.”

This is not a blind, enthusiastic infatuation. Oh, no. Rather, it is the most complex, exhausting, sometimes white-hot frustrating, yet most sincere connection I have ever had. I hate GDDs for their ability to turn into dead weight, into a bureaucratic formality, into a graveyard of ideas and prototypes. But I adore them for what they can be in the hands of a master: For being the architectural blueprint of thought, for being an X-ray of creative intent, for being the most honest artifact that captures the vision of the game and its author.

Over the last five years, I have tried, in one way or another, to understand this profession, to understand what truly hides behind the title “Game Designer.” And again and again, my search led me to these documents, to these imprints of history. And so, what you are about to read is not just a historical reference. Consider it my personal love letter, suffered for and forged over these years.

A letter to the history of Game Design thought, frozen on paper.

To truly understand the modern GDD in all its complexity and contradiction, we must trace its evolution. Therefore, our journey will resemble the work of a historian and an archaeologist simultaneously. We will start long before the first pixel appeared on a screen, looking into the world of tabletop games and wargames, where the first principles of formalizing rules were born. Then we will proceed through the dawn of arcade machines, the golden age of 8-bit consoles, the birth of 3D graphics, and finally, we will reach our days with their “live” documents. At each stage, we will uncover the context, study the artifacts, and ask questions — answering them as we go.

However, any love letter risks becoming too sentimental if feelings aren’t backed by facts. I have tried to assemble not just a chronology, but a logical chain: how one discovery in documentation led to the next, how limitations birthed new formats, and how the desire to make a better game forced people to reinvent the wheel again and again. We will walk this path, following in the footsteps of the pioneers, so that by the end, we arrive in the present not as stumbling blind wanderers, but as people who understand the foundation we stand upon.

But for now, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who inspired, criticized, supported, and loves my wordiness. I hope you find digging through this as interesting as I did.

Enjoy the read!

P.S. This research was originally authored and published in Russian by me. While this translation has been adapted for an international audience, the source text remains the primary reference. The publication can be accessed here: LINK. I have made every effort to ensure accuracy, but feel free to point out any inaccuracies you might find!

II. 177 BC — 1958: “The First Manuscripts”

Looking at dates labeled “BC,” one can’t help but stifle a yawn. I get it. It sounds like the start of a stuffy lecture where a gray-haired professor is about to blow the dust off some pottery shards.

“Ooooh, antiquity, mysticism, sacred meanings…”

But here’s the thing: people have always played. Always. Play as a phenomenon is older than culture itself. And if there were games, that means there were rules. And if there were rules, then someone must have invented them, right? That means our work existed long before electricity. And the question that shifts the perspective sounds obvious:

“How did they even manage to survive to this day?”

And since you clicked on an article with the word “Documentation,” the answer is even more obvious: they were simply written down. Yes, you can create something eternal and distinct to a people, like chess or football, where rules are passed from father to son, but for everything else, you need a medium. Otherwise, any rule dies along with its creator exactly one minute after their heart stops.

And there is a grim yet mesmerizing beauty in this. As long as the rules remain in the head, the game is mortal. But the moment you fix them in place, you effectively separate the creation from the creator, making it independent. The author departs, eras change, but the logic continues to work, forcing people millennia later to experience exactly the emotions that were written down.

So, let us sit at the same table with our ancient colleagues.

177 BC — The Oldest Game Rules (Royal Game of Ur)

Essentially, there are two types of games in the world: physical and mental. The former, such as footraces or hide-and-seek, managed to survive thanks to simple, intuitively understandable rules and the power of oral tradition. But the latter — games built on complex, non-obvious systems — are far more fragile. I am certain that countless brilliant, abstract games were irretrievably lost, dissolving in time along with their creators. And it is all the more striking that a complex, quote:

“Race game with betting elements”

Which the “Royal Game of Ur” is, not only reached us but retained its playability. Largely thanks to a single clay tablet.

This artifact, dated to approximately 177 BC, is a cuneiform text meticulously compiled by a Babylonian astronomer-scribe. Instead of relying on memory, he performed the same fundamental task that we do today: he fixed the structure and explained the game rules for future generations.

Carved into the clay are:

A diagram of the game board, serving as a visual aid.
Rules for movement and betting, constituting the core of the gameplay.
Descriptions of special squares that added a layer of uncertainty to the game and were even used for fortune-telling.

The history of this tablet itself is a separate detective story that I won’t dive into here. For the most curious, there are excellent articles (straight out of LiveJournal, no less… «Sumerian Game of Ur») and also, separately, the video «Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur») on this topic. For us, the outcome is what matters: Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, having deciphered this ancient text, was able to fully reconstruct the mechanics and play the game in our time.

Just think about it! A game created in Mesopotamia survived millennia not thanks to oral tradition, but because someone deemed its rules important enough to carve them into clay. And it works. More than two thousand years later, when only ruins remain of Babylon itself, and the language of its creators has become dead, we can still sit at a table and experience the same thrill as they did.

1824 — The First Wargame Manual (Kriegsspiel)

You have surely seen this scene in movies or series about great commanders: a huge table, on it a map with detailed terrain. Generals, furrowing their brows, move wooden tokens across it, designating regiments and divisions, planning the next brilliant offensive. But what if I told you that this isn’t just planning? That this is a game? And that Napoleon himself had a hand in its popularization?

Surprisingly, the strategy genre was born long before computers and even before many board games we are used to. There is an excellent breakdown on this topic which I VERY STRONGLY recommend watching, titled «Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games», which proves that the roots of our beloved RTS and turn-based strategies go back to 19th-century military headquarters. Or maybe this was the first “real” board game in the modern sense, the first D&D without dragons and heroes? (Spoiler — not exactly, but indirectly it will become so)

About Kriegsspiel

Let’s move to 1824! Prussian officer Georg Heinrich von Reisswitz Jr. publishes a detailed manual for his military simulation game — Kriegsspiel (War Game). Its goal was extremely pragmatic: to serve as a simulator for training officers, teaching them tactics and strategy in maximum realistic conditions. For this complex system to work without its creator, an exhaustive document was needed. And it was created.

The manual, titled «Anleitung zur Darstellung militärischer Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegsspiels» (Instruction for the Representation of Military Maneuvers with the Apparatus of the Kriegsspiel), was, in essence, the first “prototype” of a GDD in history. Its nearly 100 pages contained everything needed to reproduce the game:

Rules for creating the game board (map scale).
Description of units and their characteristics (troop types).
Detailed rules for troop movement.
System tables for resolving combat outcomes.
Procedures for the judge-arbiter, who processed hidden actions and introduced the element of chance.

This document was so precise and self-sufficient that after a demonstration to the King of Prussia, the game received official approval as a mandatory training tool. The manual was printed and distributed throughout the army. At this moment, a significant shift occurred: “design” ceased to be tied to its creator. The game turned into a reproducible system that could be run by anyone holding this instruction.

The seriousness of this approach is underscored by the words of General von Müffling, who, after the game’s demonstration, declared:

“This is not mere amusement”

Reisswitz achieved his goal — maximum realism, and this was fixed in his rules. And most importantly for our history: Thanks to this elaborated “design doc,” Kriegsspiel quickly spread through the armies of other countries, where it was adapted and local versions were created, and people still play it or its digital versions to this day.

1904 — The Board Game Patent (The Landlord’s Game)

It probably won’t come as a surprise if I say that the Industrial Revolution couldn’t help but leave its mark on the world of games. The second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were not just the time of factories and steam engines, but also the first real boom of mass leisure. And while some placed bets at the races or spent time in saloons playing poker, others were creating the first commercial board games. And one of them, perhaps the most iconic for our history, was The Landlord’s Game — the direct ancestor of the hotly loved (and equally hated) “Monopoly.”

About The Landlord’s Game

In the early 20th century, game documentation took the next logical step: It moved from the military and academic plane into the legal one — through patents. In January 1904, inventor and designer Elizabeth J. Magie received a patent for her real estate trading game. Her goal, besides entertainment, was a visual demonstration of the economic principles of Georgism — essentially, a critique of land monopolies (which would turn out to be a very ironic twist of fate).

To protect and distribute her idea, Magie filed an official US patent. This document became, in essence, a formalized GDD. It laid out everything needed to reproduce the game:

A clearly formulated goal (accumulating the most wealth).
Core mechanics (rent, taxes, buying property).
A visual scheme of the game board, surprisingly similar to what we know today.

Moreover, Magie, like a true Game Designer, added variability to the rules: She proposed two sets of rules — anti-monopolist and monopolist, to visually demonstrate different economic outcomes to the players. This is one of the earliest examples of system design where rules are used to convey the author’s message.

Here history takes a dramatic and, perhaps, very instructive turn. Magie’s patent, conceived as a legal shield, ironically turned into a blueprint that preserved her ideas for someone else’s triumph.

Three decades later, while the game “circulated among the people,” gathering house rules, it fell into the hands of Charles Darrow. He and Parker Brothers effectively appropriated Magie’s key design elements (naturally, without her knowledge), but they did something terrible to the original. They cut the second, “fair” part of the rules from the game, leaving only the mode of predatory accumulation. Thus The Landlord’s Game, created as a warning against the evil of monopolies, was repackaged into the commercial superhit “Monopoly” — a game that literally celebrated this in its name.

This made Charles Darrow the first “Game Designer” in history to become an official millionaire. Was this fame deserved? Well, while Darrow swam in money, telling the press a beautiful legend about how he allegedly invented the game alone, the real inventor Elizabeth Magie received only $500 from Parker Brothers and a categorical refusal of royalties.

Her name was erased from history for decades, and the patent was bought only to remove a competitor from the market. However, even half a century later, the truth could not be hidden, and the real history of authorship turned out to be far more fascinating than the official legend. (More about this relationship triangle between Magie, Charles, and Parker Brothers in the video «The Strange Truth Behind the Success of Monopoly» and «Who Really Invented Monopoly?»)

Magie’s patent itself (US №748,626) is not such a dry legal text after all. It is, albeit very short, a “full-fledged” design document for that era. But most strikingly, besides mechanics, it also contained ideology. Magie strove to show how landlords enrich themselves at the expense of tenants.

This strongly reminds one of modern GDDs, which have a “Design Pillars” or “Vision Statement” section describing the main goal and idea of the project. She was ahead of her time, fixing not just “how to play,” but “why to play.”

1913 — H.G. Well’s Tin Soldiers (Little Wars)

In childhood, while visiting my best friend, I often saw these whimsical but very beautiful tin soldier figures on the shelves in his father’s room. Back then, I thought it was just some “adult quirk” — statues for beauty, just another trinket that adults, for some reason, do NOT play with. It turned out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people collect detailed miniatures from the Warhammer universe and spend hours playing out full-scale battles on tabletops. But surprisingly, the root of both these hobbies is the same, and it’s not even the Kriegsspiel mentioned earlier (although it was partly the inspiration!). It is something far more personal and accessible, born of the imagination of a great writer.

About Little Wars

English writer H.G. Wells, the very author of The War of the Worlds, did something revolutionary for his time in 1913. He published the book «Little Wars», which is, in essence, the first mass-market manual for a military tactical game with miniatures (about this, but slightly deeper, is told in the video «The First Ever Wargame… sort of.»). Wells, being a passionate gaming enthusiast, systematized what people did spontaneously before him. He developed and, more importantly, wrote down simple and clear rules for playing with tin soldiers on the living room floor:

Movement rules for infantry and cavalry, measuring distance with a ruler.
Shooting rules using toy cannons (which actually fired projectiles!).
Conditions for resolving melee attacks.

It was a full-fledged, (turn-based!), combat simulation, but its goal was no longer officer training, but pure entertainment. This time, for the first time, game rules born in the head finally became not a tool for a narrow circle of specialists, but a full-fledged consumer product. The book became incredibly popular, was reprinted many times, and set the standard for documenting rules for an entire hobby.

The full title of Well’s book is an artifact of the era in itself:

“Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boy’s games and books.”

Being a convinced pacifist, Wells even added a section to the rules with philosophical reflections on the futility of war.

But most important for us is the story of the birth of the idea itself. Wells recalled how one afternoon, after lunch, he and his friends started shooting a toy cannon at soldiers. At some point, he exclaimed that to turn this messing around into a real game, only one thing was missing — written rules. Soon, he created them.

This book became the spark that ignited a flame in a whole generation of future Game Designers. And one of them, Gary Gygax, one of the future creators of Dungeons & Dragons, not only drew inspiration from Little Wars but also wrote the foreword to its 2004 republication. Thus, the thread from Wells’ tin soldiers stretched directly to the birth of tabletop role-playing games (which we will talk about later!).

1938–1958 — Fundamental Works on Play (Huizinga, Caillois, Jünger)

I simply could not leave out this final segment of the chapter. It’s personal. I am madly in love with this trio of thinkers and have already devoted a separate, short piece to them and their works: «Why is everyone but Game Designers writing about games?»

What relation do their works have to the history of game design documentation? Directly, almost none. But to the formation of game design as a meaningful discipline, and not just abstract “entertainment” — the most direct one. I won’t go deep into their theories here, but I am obliged to close the period of “first manuscripts” beautifully.

Because long before the first pixels lit up on screens, scholars and philosophers were already investigating play as a fundamental human phenomenon. Their works, written decades before the birth of our industry, created that very theoretical framework upon which we, consciously or not, rely to this day.

Johan Huizinga, in his seminal work «Homo Ludens» (Man the Player, 1938), postulated that play is a primary and necessary condition for the emergence of all human culture. It was his famous thesis:

“Play is older than culture”

That turned everything upside down: play is not part of culture; rather, culture grows out of play.

A generation later, French sociologist Roger Caillois developed Huizinga’s ideas in the book «Man, Play and Games» (1958). He did what every system designer must do: he classified the unclassified. Caillois proposed an elegant system, highlighting four basic game patterns: Competition (agon), Chance (alea), Simulation/Role (mimicry), and Vertigo/Ecstasy (ilinx). He also introduced a scale ranging from free, spontaneous play (paîdia) to play with rigid, formal rules (ludus), essentially describing the entire spectrum of gaming experience.

And finally, standing apart, German philosopher Friedrich Georg Jünger, in his essay «Games: Key to Their Meaning», 1953, offered perhaps the most prophetic view. For him, play was:

“The only truly natural phenomenon in the world”

And he, as if looking into the future, predicted the appearance of our profession and, I am not afraid of the word, science:

“All this together would constitute the subject of a new science, the emergence of which today can only be dimly foreseen — a science that would consist not of mechanical inventions, but of the discovery of new rules of the game.”

With this thought, we will conclude our dive into antiquity. Ahead lie electricity, screens, and the first attempts to create those very “new rules of the game” for a completely new world.

III. 1966–1989: “The Birth of the Draft”

1966 — Meeting the Father of Video Games (Ralph Baer)

And so, in the mid-60s, in a world that knew neither arcade machines nor home computers, a man appears who turns this philosophy into an electrical circuit.

I am sure 99% of people don’t even know this name. And yet, while the fame of Nolan Bushnell (creator of Atari), William Higinbotham (creator of Tennis for Two), or Alexey Pajitnov (creator of Tetris) resounds in the gamedev pantheon, the figure of this man — Ralph Baer, undeservingly fades with every passing year.

But if we look at these four as real people, we get a rather strange “family.” Higinbotham is the forgotten physicist uncle who accidentally invented electronic tennis and went back to doing science. Baer is the meticulous father who writes everything down, patents everything, and eventually drags the entire, newly formed industry to court. Bushnell is the rebellious son who saw Baer’s ideas, made an arcade out of them, and turned video games into a more successful business. And Pajitnov is the grandson from another country and another era, who would later bring Tetris into this family album.

And yet, it is Baer who should rightfully be considered the father, or even the grandfather (although this is debatable given the figure of Higinbotham), of all video games or, at the very least, of game design documentation.

Why? Because on September 1, 1966, while his colleagues at Sanders Associates were racking their brains over improving the quality of black-and-white TV, Baer was thinking about something slightly different. Sitting on the steps of a bus terminal in New York, waiting for a colleague, he sketched out an idea in a notebook that would subsequently become the patent: «Appliance for Playing Games on Ordinary TV Set». And all this on 4 pages of a worn-out notebook in his spare time.

Before we continue our conversation about the documents that started it all, I must make a remark. One can and should read about Ralph Baer, his patents, and his legacy in detail on his official website —ralphbaer.com. There you can also buy his book «Videogames: In the Beginning» (based on which this chapter is written) or, since it is an old and valuable read, access it for free on the Internet Archive. And if you want to meet him, so to speak, in the flesh (these videos were filmed shortly before his death more than 10 years ago), then be sure to watch the documentary videos «Meet Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games» or the more modern version «Father of Video Gaming — Life and Times of Ralph Baer».

About Ralph Baer

So, what matters is not that he proposed playing on a TV screen, but how systematically he approached the matter. Baer immediately described a whole platform with several classes of games in his four pages:

Action and Chase (two dots chasing each other).
Sports Games (the prototype of Pong and tennis).
Board and Card Games.
Artistic Applications (creating patterns).
Educational Games (arithmetic, geometry).
Chance Games.
And also a Game Monitoring system.

He also thought through the commercial side of the issue: The device, according to his preliminary estimates, was supposed to cost about $24.99 and connect to the TV via a separate channel (he called it Channel LP — “Let’s Play!”). Besides game concepts, Baer immediately proposed technical details for implementation on 60s electronics: signal generation, color effects, noise patterns, etc. He both invented the game and laid the architectural foundation for an entire spectrum of interactive scenarios.

The document initially had a rather strict legal form: Each of the four pages was dated and witnessed by engineer Bob to secure the priority of the invention. Even then, Baer understood: properly executed documentation is a powerful weapon for the future.

(By the way, later this “weapon” would fire at full blast in the Magnavox vs. Atari case. If you want to read how Baer’s neat signatures turned into the basis of the first major legal scandal in the video game industry, check out the breakdown on r/HobbyDrama — Video Games: Atari vs. Magnavox and the origins of videogame licensing)

Further development quickly went beyond the scope of a single document: Over the next few years, Baer, together with colleagues Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, created a series of prototypes TVG #1–8.

TVG#1 (vacuum tubes) — just moving two dots.
TVG#3 — color mask, first experiments with “feedback noise.”
TVG#4 — “ball,” an idea by engineer Bill Rusch: a dot controlled by the circuit — and immediately Ping-Pong and Handball are born.
TVG#7 “Brown Box” — wooden case, switch cards, two gamepads, and a light gun. You can already play Soccer, Volleyball, Target Shooting, Golf, and even “draw” patterns in artistic mode.

This “Brown Box” was the first full-fledged gaming system that included not only switchable modes (ping-pong, hockey, golf, target shooting with a light gun) but also a mechanical game selector via interchangeable switch cards — effectively the prototype of modern cartridges.

Baer literally lived by the principle:

“From day one — take notes. Even if they are just scribbles. Everything must be saved, signed, and dated.”

And it was this meticulous approach that allowed him not only to create the first home game console (literally more on that in a moment) but also to successfully defend his patents, earning millions of dollars in numerous legal battles with other gaming giants, starting with Atari and continuing with Nintendo and Sega.

It is impossible to overestimate the legacy of the four-page document of 1966. Baer himself considered it so significant that he later donated the original, along with the first prototypes of the console, to the Smithsonian Institution, calling it:

“The document that started the history of video games.”

It’s funny that if you ask an average person “where did video games begin” (and yes, besides my text, the answer to this question is in the beautiful and interesting video «The First Video Game»), they will likely mention Spacewar, Pong, or in the extreme case — Tetris. But outside of mass memory, history looks much stranger. The real starting point for lawyers, historians, and museums (and in this case, for us) is the neat dates and signatures under Baer’s patent. And if you trace step by step how these four keep circling each other, a series of scenes with a touch of absurdity emerges.

In the first one, Baer and Bushnell shake hands on the courthouse steps during the proceedings between Magnavox and Atari over Pong (which I mentioned just above); around them are folders with patents, lawyers, and references to that very 1966 notebook intended to secure priority for television games.

Meanwhile, lawyers deepen the excavations and pull Tennis for Two out of the archives: physicist William Higinbotham is invited to court as a witness, and his oscilloscope tennis, once made to liven up a boring exhibition, turns into an argument in the dispute of big companies and an important marker of the “zero point” of video games.

Then Baer tries to turn a rival into a colleague: sends a fax in 1977, comes to the Classic Gaming Expo in the late nineties, prepares for a symbolic match in Pong, which never happens, and in the mid-2000s neatly describes this whole series of unfulfilled meetings in letters.

Later, Bushnell calmly recounts in an interview that he saw Baer’s Odyssey and that his arcade tennis resonated with the early experiments of other engineers.

And parallel to this runs the Pajitnov branch: Tetris appears in a Soviet research institute, goes through a chain of licensing wars, turns into a global symbol, and in 2024 the game’s fortieth anniversary is celebrated in Los Angeles at the World Tetris Day party, where Bushnell sits in the hall among the guests.

At some point, if you imagine how a single line runs through all these dots — the court, the oscilloscope, the arcade hall, the programmer’s office in Moscow, the anniversary party with tetrominoes on the screen, then… It becomes a bit unsettling: you realize you are holding in your hands a history that started with a couple of pages in a notebook and gradually populated the entire world with games.

And this is, on the whole, not an exaggeration: It contained almost all key elements — from gameplay and genre variety to the idea of peripheral devices. This is far more than needed and, of course, not exactly what is needed for a GDD, but what do you expect from the first console and an attempt to form entire genres?

However, designing such a platform is only half the battle. Explaining to millions of people who have never encountered anything like it exactly how to play is a completely different task. That is how the need to create new documentation for a mass audience arose.

1972 — Rules for the First Video Games (Odyssey)

Whatever your first console was in your memories, be it Atari, NES, Sega Mega Drive, or the more modern PlayStation and XBOX, your idea of it boils down to a simple principle: insert cartridge or disc, turn on — play.

But the world’s first home game console, Magnavox Odyssey (that very “Brown Box” by Ralph Baer), was… something completely different. All games, in essence, existed not inside the console, but… outside?! The console itself was just a generator of moving dots. And the entire gaming experience, the whole meaning of what was happening on the TV, was created with the help of transparent plastic overlays on the screen, tokens, dice, and, most importantly for us, in the rule book.

Imagine this design task. How to introduce the user to this box, full of whimsical gadgets, and a couple of squares moving on the screen, when they have absolutely no experience interacting with anything like this? The concept of “Video games” simply did not exist.

It was here, analyzing this part of this period, that I honestly experienced my biggest cultural shock. I am talking about the so-called «Odyssey Installation and Game Rules» (no, really, open this link right now!) — essentially, a collection of 34 rules for different games. And while up to this moment, I confess, I often stretched the definition with patents and clay tablets, calling them proto-GDDs, this document… this is truly a real, full-fledged monumental document! The first step from an engineering blueprint to a player manual, but how did it happen?

About Magnavox Odyssey

So, it is 1972, and Baer’s engineering ideas, meticulously recorded in his notes, finally take commercial form — the first home game console, Magnavox Odyssey. If the previous chapter was about creating the platform and its prototypes, now it is high time to understand how to explain to millions of ordinary people what to do with a box that outputs only a few moving dots.

It is important to clarify immediately: Odyssey had no processor or programmable logic. It was an entirely analog construction consisting of discrete transistors, diodes, and resistors. That is why the box, besides the console itself and two controllers, was literally stuffed with various physical things and printed materials intended to compensate for hardware limitations:

Six game “cartridges” (not to be confused with familiar ROM cartridges, these were just switch circuits that changed the logic of dots on the screen).
Ten vinyl overlays attached to the screen via static charge, adding “graphics” for each game.
Cards, dice, poker chips, and even paper money.
And, most importantly — the 36-page manual «Game Rules». (that very «Odyssey Installation and Game Rules»)

It is this manual that deserves our close attention. It can safely be considered the first mass-market GDD that fell directly into the hands of end players. Each of the twelve game scenarios included in the base set was described in the form of step-by-step instructions containing:

Specific goal of the game.
Detailed setup (choosing the switch card, applying the overlay to the screen).
Scoring rules (yes, players had to count points manually).
Fully written turn structure.

For example, the famous “Table Tennis” was represented on the screen by just two dot-paddles and a line-net. All the rest of the logic — service rules, counting points up to 15 — was entirely left to the players and the manual. The score had to be marked independently, on paper or using special chips.

An even more striking example was the game “Haunted House.” It was supplemented by a paper maze map and a deck of cards with text tasks. One player controlled the “ghost” dot, and the second — the “detective,” who moved across the paper map, following instructions from the manual.

By the way, Ralph Baer himself noted in his book that for early demonstrations, he even recorded an audio cassette with voice instructions, understanding how important it was to clearly convey to the user the rules of this new, unseen entertainment.

With this approach, Odyssey demonstrated how closely documentation can be integrated into the gameplay when the hardware is not yet capable of independently implementing all game logic.

And this, perhaps, is the whole magic of that moment. We, modern designers, write documents in the hope that they will one day be embodied in code. We create a blueprint for the internal logic of the game, which is reproduced by a computer. But Ralph Baer and his team wrote a document that became a game with the help of the player themselves. Their game engine was not silicon, but paper, and the main processor executing the rules was the human being.

In 1972, the manual, the design document, was not an instruction for the game. It was the game.

1970–1974 — The Birth of RPGs and DIY GDDs (Chainmail, Blackmoor, Dungeons & Dragons)

When talking about Dungeons & Dragons, it is impossible not to mention Chainmail and Blackmoor — in essence, these are all iterations of the same game, the same design document (rulebook), which ultimately crystallized into the first “full-fledged” edition of D&D. And as I promised, that very thread, stretched from H.G. Wells’ tin soldiers, will now lead us to the goal.

By the 1960s, a whole subculture of “wargamers” was flourishing in the USA. It was fertile soil: Magazines were published, conventions were held, and enthusiasts constantly exchanged their own “house rules.” For Gary Gygax, one of the most active participants in this community, Wells’ book was a true revelation. It legitimized “playing soldiers” for adults and, among other things, showed that rules could and should be written down, creating self-sufficient systems for entertainment that could be shared.

It was in this vibrant environment, where anyone could become a designer by writing their own rules, that the first official step toward D&D was born — a rulebook called Chainmail.

About Chainmail

Initially, in 1971, it was an ordinary medieval wargame with miniatures. Gary Gygax, together with Jeff Perren, developed a set of rules for battles of knightly armies, relying on amateur developments and popular scenarios of that time. Guidon Games published Chainmail as a small booklet «Chainmail — rules for medieval miniatures», and it quickly became a hit within a narrow fan circle.

However, the main feature, the very element that changed everything, was the section — «Fantasy Supplement». As Gygax himself recalled, he grew bored with strictly historical battles. Influenced by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Howard, he decided to enliven the battles with wizards and monsters. For the first time in a commercially available wargame, dragons, elves, hobbits appeared, as well as heroes and wizards capable of casting lightning and fireballs.

It was the first attempt to systematically document and, more importantly, balance fantasy elements. The rules clearly stated that a “Hero” is equal to four ordinary fighters and requires four simultaneous hits to die, and the “Fireball” spell has a specific blast radius in inches on the game board.

From a documentation standpoint, Chainmail was a product of its era: typewritten text, amateur illustrations, cheap paper. In retrospect, its significance is important merely as part of an iteration. It is the first documented iteration of the combat system that would lay the foundation for D&D. (For those who want to hear this story from the lips of the participants themselves, there is a video «Chainmail 50th Anniversary», where they share their memories).

But any rulebook, even the most brilliant one, is just a tool. The real magic here happens when it falls into the hands of another creator who sees in it not just a way to enact battles, but something much greater. And while Gygax and Perren were standardizing the rules of fantasy warfare, in another state, a young enthusiast named Dave Arneson was asking a completely different question:

“What if these rules are not for armies, but for a single hero?”

About Blackmoor

The entire complete, tangled, and incredibly fascinating story of what happened next is brilliantly told in the documentary mini-series «Secrets of Blackmoor — The True History of Dungeons & Dragons». This is gripping and interesting material for anyone who wants to understand where D&D truly originates.

But for our purposes, for the history of GDD, the key moment is this: Arneson, tired of the strict rules of his “Napoleonic” campaigns, unknowingly committed a revolution. He lowered the action underground, shifted the focus from a massive battlefield to the cramped corridors of a castle with dungeons. From an entire army to a single character.

And before we continue, let me ask a question. Does this sound familiar?

A constantly evolving world with its own history and rumors.
Individual characters with classes, characteristics, and levels.
Gaining experience and treasures for exploring dungeons.
Using graph paper to draw maps.

Everything we love today in games from Skyrim, Diablo, and Baldur’s Gate to Civilization and modern MMOs — someone already did. Not on a computer, but on paper, in a basement in Minnesota.

To realize this idea, insane for those times, Arneson took Chainmail as a basis, adapting its rules for one-on-one combat. But everything else — the core and DNA of the entire RPG genre — he invented and “documented” himself:

Personal characteristics and classes (fighter, magic-user, and others).
Health points (full-fledged HP — Hit Points!).
Both experience (XP) and levels for progression.

Initially, the Blackmoor campaign rules were not formalized as a single code. Arneson ran the game relying on his own handwritten notes and masterly improvisation. He even released an amateur bulletin for players, the «Blackmoor Gazette & Rumor Monger» — essentially, the first form of “patch notes” in history describing events in the game world. But a full-fledged “rulebook” that could be passed to another person did not exist.

And therein lies, perhaps, an amusing irony. The greatest role-playing campaign, which launched an entire genre, was born not from a clear, structured document. It was born from 18 pages of creative chaos, seemingly understandable only to the author himself. These were just personal notes, which, however, turned out to be enough to trigger a dramatic chain of events.

Gary Gygax, having learned about Arneson’s successes, did what any Game Designer should do upon hearing about a revolutionary idea: he invited him over to see everything with his own eyes. In late 1971, Arneson arrived in Lake Geneva and ran a game session for Gygax.

(A curious detail: in Lake Geneva, where this first meeting unfolded, today you can see a memorial plaque engraved with a D20 and a dragon. In the town where D&D took its first real step, this plaque looks surprisingly appropriate. A modest shot that could open a documentary film.)

For a man accustomed to large-scale battles on open terrain, this experience — exploring cramped dungeons in the role of a single hero — was a revelation. He saw the heart of a completely new gaming experience in Arneson’s chaos. Gygax understood: this could be turned into something special.

Thus began their legendary collaboration. The mechanism fell into place naturally: Arneson was the generator of ideas, and Gygax was the editor who gave these ideas form. Arneson sent Gygax that very draft, 18 pages of scattered, xeroxed notes.

And the saddest part of the story of these “18 pages” is that, honestly, no one has ever seen them. Not a single confirmed scan, not a single photocopy: historians like Dan Boggs write directly that we have neither the original nor copies, only scattered testimonies of Gygax, Kuntz, and other participants in early events. Boggs, in his breakdown article «The Mystery of the 18 Pages of Notes», carefully records how even the number of pages changes in different sources, and Jon Peterson in «Playing at the World» fits this mythical package into the chronology: somewhere at the end of 1971, Gygax receives “18 pages of rules and additions to Chainmail” and sits down to work on his version.

However, these pages themselves have not survived, like a lost piece of a mosaic, the shape of which we can only guess because the other fragments join in a strange way.

And yet Gygax, upon receiving them back then, admitted that he could decipher literally nothing in them. And here a fundamental conflict of two design philosophies manifested itself, which remains relevant to this day.

Arneson was a proponent of improvisation and imagination. He believed that it is impossible and unnecessary to create a rule for every case.
Gygax, on the contrary, was a pedant and a systematizer. He believed that to create an understandable and, importantly, sellable product, a clear, exhaustive structure was needed.

This is how Arneson jokingly explained Gygax’s decisive role as an editor:

“He could type, and I couldn’t.”

Behind this joke lies the essence: While Arneson generated revolutionary concepts, Gygax, communicating with him by phone (the phone bills, according to Arneson, were impressive), pedantically reworked them into coherent, structured text.

It was Gygax who added to the game what made it a finished system:

Clearly defined character classes.
Expanded lists of weapons, equipment, and spells.
Tables for generating characteristics using different types of dice.

By mid-1973, the co-authors had a manuscript ready. Legends have it that the final title “Dungeons & Dragons” was born when Gygax’s four-year-old daughter, hearing it, exclaimed:

“Dad, I like ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ best!”

But several drafts from those years have also reached us, for example, the «Dalluhn manuscript» — a text considered the earliest surviving compilation of rules. These artifacts show that by the end of 1973, the core of D&D was formed. The last, most important step remained — to publish this new type of game and bring it to the world.

About Dungeon & Dragons.

“We can sell 50,000 copies”

Lacking confidence that major publishers would understand their concept, Gygax and Arneson first tried offering D&D to third-party companies. Gygax even presented the game to the industry giant — Avalon Hill. With “honed” commercial enthusiasm, he assured them. However, Avalon Hill was merely bewildered.

“They couldn’t understand a game where there are no winners or losers, which just keeps going,”

Arneson recounted.

Faced with rejection, in October 1973, Gygax decided on a desperate step: to publish the game himself. Together with a friend, he founded his own firm — Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).

The first “headquarters” of TSR sounds grand only in retrospect. In reality, it was the basement of Gygax’s house at 330 Center Street, Lake Geneva. A small room cluttered with boxes of miniatures, drafts, and papers. A couple of tables, shelves, and a typewriter — that was the entire “office” from which the first rules were sent to print. A simple, cramped workspace that perfectly reflected how the company began.

In January 1974, the first thousand copies of Dungeons & Dragons were printed. The game came in a boxed set format, inside of which lay three rule booklets:

«Men & Magic» — character creation and magic rules.
«Monsters & Treasure» — bestiary and description of valuables.
«The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures» — guide for the Master.

These three thin booklets, printed on cheap paper, with typos and amateur illustrations, became that very first “GDD” for the newly emerged genre. But the most important thing was hidden in the details; the title page read:

“Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames…”

And in the preface, the authors directly recommended that players have the Chainmail rules on hand to resolve complex battles and even a map from another board game (Outdoor Survival) for world travel.

And herein lies an unusual difference. If Ralph Baer created a finished, self-sufficient product, then Gygax and Arneson released an open platform for creativity. Their “design doc” was not a strict instruction, but essentially a mod, an add-on over already familiar games, inviting players to think further, experiment, and create their own worlds.

The initial print run sold slowly but surely. And then, thanks to word of mouth, interest began to grow. Players across the country discussed the outlandish game, asked questions, and offered their own rule variants and new monsters.

It was then that the second revolutionary feature of D&D documentation appeared: It was living and iterative. To answer hundreds of questions, in 1975 TSR began publishing the magazine «The Strategic Review», where Gygax personally clarified controversial points and, in essence, “patched” the game by publishing system updates.

Thus, by 1974, Dungeons & Dragons had turned from an author’s draft into a cultural phenomenon. Its first three booklets, though they looked modest, set a standard that is alive to this day: “Player’s Handbook,” “Dungeon Master’s Guide,” “Monster Manual.”

By the way, while forming this whole thought and piecing the history together, two videos from the channel DM It All helped me greatly. The first, «The History of Original Dungeons & Dragons» tells precisely about the period we just analyzed. The second, «The History of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons», narrates the next stage of the company’s development, and although I couldn’t note anything particularly important there specifically for the history of GDD, I nevertheless strongly recommend watching both — they brilliantly convey the spirit of that era.

1978–1984 — The Golden Age of Arcade Games (Space Invaders)

Despite the loud title “The Golden Age of Arcade Games,” for the history of game design documentation, this period remains surprisingly modest. No matter how much I searched (and believe me, I dug through a hundred different sites and videos), there was essentially nothing particularly significant that could be called a “full-fledged GDD” during this time.

Okay, I’m fibbing a bit. After all, one figure and one game still shine to this day, remaining one of the most cited phenomena in media — Tomohiro Nishikado and his Space Invaders.

But before we talk about the “Invaders,” we need to answer the main question:

“Why was no one documenting game design at this time?”

And the answer is both simple and complex. First, and this is obvious, arcade games were mechanically simple. Often it was one key mechanic and a maximum of five minutes of truly interesting, engaging gameplay (which was extremely addictive, by the way), designed to eat your coin.

Second, I do think “design documents” existed. They just didn’t have a formal, archivable form. Industry giants like Atari, Namco, Midway, or Taito and their talented programmers couldn’t just be shooting in the dark, making interesting games. It seems to me (and these are admittedly guesses with a dash of observation) that everything we might call a design document was kept in offices on whiteboards, on sticky notes attached to monitors, or in verbal speech between colleagues.

And there wasn’t much need for it if the idea is so simple that it can be described in one sentence:

“A ship shoots at aliens that are descending lower and lower.”

Game design was certainly forming, and many brilliant decisions were made in this era. But the text is dedicated specifically to documentation. Technical documentation (board schematics, device patents) certainly exists. But is it worth our attention in the context of design? I believe not.

But if you are still interested in this short but significant period in general, there are several excellent videos to help you immerse yourself: «Video Game development throughout the 80s», «The Golden Age of Arcade Games» and «What Happened to Arcade Games?».

And now to that very shining exception. To the game and to the man who, unlike many, left traces behind.

About Space Invaders

Space Invaders stands out against its contemporaries for several reasons, and each of them is, in essence, a lesson in game design and its documentation.

First is the conceptual design. Knowing about the existence of Breakout from Atari, Tomohiro Nishikado wanted to create a game that gave the player more control. A picture was immediately born in his head: An enemy army is advancing from the top of the screen, which must be fought off. Thinking through the images, he went through options: planes, tanks, soldiers. But planes and tanks looked ridiculous in pixels, and shooting at little people would have been too cruel for the Japanese audience of those years.

And here history makes another circle. Learning about the release of Star Wars and remembering a book with interesting “marine alien creatures,” he turns again… to H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”! And so, the thread stretched from tin soldiers has reached all the way to Japanese arcades.

As a result, Nishikado made the first sketches of the future enemies. And these first, now cult, sketches of pixel aliens — in theory, can be considered the first concept document of this era. It is the fixation of visual design born of meaningful choice.

Second is the system design and its fixation. While most arcade machines had static or linearly increasing difficulty, Space Invaders gave us one of the most famous and elegant difficulty curves, which was born… from limitations.

The fact is that hardware back then was limited in sprite rendering speed. When a whole army of aliens was on the screen, the game ran slowly. But as the player destroyed enemies, the load on the processor dropped, and the remaining aliens began to move faster.

Nishikado could have “fixed” this by normalizing the speed. But he acted like a true Game Designer — he turned the limitation into a mechanic. This decision was not accidental. To check the logic of the behavior of this complicating system, he kept flowcharts.

And although even with the help of neural networks I couldn’t squeeze any intelligible information out of these papers (but we will trust the sources!), the very fact of their existence is a breakthrough. It doesn’t matter if they described the logic of the code or the gameplay. A flowchart is a tool for visualizing a system used by hundreds of thousands of Game Designers today. And this is, perhaps, the very first of the known flowcharts used as a game design tool.

Space Invaders shows that even in an extremely simple arcade game, design decisions can be deep and systemic, and their fixation, be it concept art or a logical diagram, helps turn an idea into a legend.

But the golden age of arcades was short-lived. Technology did not stand still. And while coins were pouring into machines, a new revolution was already brewing in homes and universities, which would require far more complex and detailed documents from designers.

1985 — Three Geniuses, Two Brothers (Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros)

Ahem, apologies for the lyrical digression, but I simply must address this MASSIVE point. If I tried to list all the videos worth watching and articles worth reading to realize the greatness of Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, it would take several pages.

Here is just a small part (and only videos):

I will tell you the gist of everything right here, specifically about documentation. But it is simply impossible not to note how strongly Miyamoto and his colleague, and concurrently best friend, Tezuka, influenced the gaming industry and, in our case, game design documentation. Therefore, I will merely note that even in such a large text, I will miss a lot, and I advise those particularly interested to catch up using the videos above.

And now — to business. To how these two geniuses designed some of the most important games in history.

About Donkey Kong

To begin with, we should dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s, pointing out the unique role of Shigeru Miyamoto. As he himself recalls and admits:

“In the beginning, the people who made video games were technologists, they were programmers, they were hardware developers. But I was not. I was a designer, I studied industrial design, I was an artist, I drew pictures.”

And therein, perhaps, lies the key. His thinking was not burdened by the weight of technical limitations. In his head was not a line of code, but a picture. Not a function, but an emotion. He designed not a program, but an experience he wanted to convey to the player. An experience he himself had felt in his childhood.

And the first such documented sketch of this experience turned out not to be Super Mario Bros, but Donkey Kong. And yes, I know that chronologically this game should have been in the chapter about the golden age of arcades. But precisely here, in the context of Miyamoto’s thinking, this artifact looks most logical and correct. After all, it was almost the only arcade hit that had such a history and such an approach to design.

It all started with a simple one-page document — a game concept for an arcade machine. And who do you think Miyamoto saw in the main roles? Mario?

Not at all.

Initially, and this is even stated in the document, the main characters were supposed to be from the cartoon “Popeye”: Popeye himself as the savior, his sworn enemy Bluto as the kidnapper, and Olive Oyl as the damsel in distress.

But Nintendo never received permission to use these characters in a separate full-fledged game (although Nintendo, together with the creators of Popeye, had made games before this). This is one of the most fortunate “no’s” in the history of the industry. Because it was this refusal that forced Miyamoto to create two of his own, now legendary characters — Mario and Donkey Kong.

This early concept document is important to us not only as a historical curiosity. It shows the principle of Miyamoto’s thinking: He put the interaction system — the game loop — at the forefront.

“Climbing ladders and dodging (obstacles), rescue Olive (Olive Oyl)”

This skeleton was so strong and understandable that any skin could be “put” on it, be it a sailor or a plumber. And it was this approach to design, focused on intuitively understandable gameplay, that formed the basis of the next, truly great design document.

About Super Mario Bros

As Miyamoto made games for Nintendo, he met two figures critically important to our history. The first was Takashi Tezuka — another Game Designer who, in tandem with Miyamoto, would create not only Mario but also The Legend of Zelda. The second figure, who became their hands and heart, was programmer Toshihiko Nakago. (And here I cannot help but make a personal remark: Game Designers, never forget your programmers or anyone from your team! If you are reading this — you are the best!) It was Nakago who joined the team to embody the ideas of the two geniuses in code.

And right here, in the process of the birth of the idea for a new Mario game, something happens that forever changes the approach to development and, as a consequence, to its documentation. For the first time in our history, pre-production and prototyping appear so clearly as a conscious stage.

Miyamoto, thinking about how the game should feel, about the character’s size and jump height, drew several dozen sprites. And then he asked Nakago to make a small prototype that was supposed to answer the main questions about the core of the entire game — about the jumping mechanic.

As a result, a couple of days later, Nakago showed a prototype: There was no Mario, no enemies, no mushrooms on the screen. There was only a red dot jumping and running across the screen. And most importantly — its parameters could be easily changed to achieve the desired response, the desired feel of the game.

This prototype was not a game build in our usual sense, but a tool for calibrating feelings. It was created to answer the most fundamental questions:

How high should Mario jump?
How fast should he accelerate and stop?
What should the jump timing be to feel responsive and pleasant?

And all this was subordinate to one single, but most important question, which formed the basis of the entire future philosophy of Nintendo:

“Is this fun to PLAY?”

Precisely “play,” and not “story,” “graphics,” or anything else, is the pillar of game design for 90% of all Nintendo games to this day.

They didn’t test the level. They didn’t test the graphics. They tested the core of interaction itself, the most basic gameplay loop: Pressed a button — received a pleasant, responsive emotion. And only when the answer to this question was:

“Yes, it’s damn fun!”

Did they move on to the next stage — designing the world in which this mechanic would live.

Now that the gameplay core was found and calibrated, a new, much larger task stood before this trio: To build a whole world around this delightful, perfected jump.

And here Miyamoto and Tezuka, as Game Designers, for the first time in our history, begin to think in entire systems of game experience. They drew levels, they designed an adventure. And the tool for this became those very, now legendary, planning sheets on graph paper.

These were thoroughly elaborated technical design documents, real engineering blueprints created taking into account all the limitations of the Famicom console.

Each square on the sheet corresponded to an 8x8 pixel screen tile.
Each block, be it a brick, an enemy, or a “?”, was not only drawn — it was supplied with a color code or annotation understandable to the programmer.
The sheets even had structured fields for the date, author’s name, and comments, which reflects an almost “assembly line” approach to level design.

The goal was not just to draw a beautiful level, but to plan it within the rigid limits of the hardware. The designers thought in advance where objects could be reused to save precious memory, and how to distribute enemies so the game wouldn’t lag.

But despite this engineering precision, it was an incredibly creative process. Miyamoto and Tezuka placed translucent tracing paper over the original drawings to experiment with changes, try new ideas, move enemies and blocks without destroying the original plan. In essence, this was the first analog form of version control in game design documentation.

Moreover, in this creative cauldron, ideas were not rigidly tied to one game. It is important to remember that Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda were developed almost in parallel. They created mechanics and ideas that, as drafts and sticky notes show, freely migrated between projects. The idea of a secret passage or unusual enemy behavior, invented for Mario, could eventually find its place in the dungeons of Hyrule, and vice versa.

Miyamoto and Tezuka, like architects, designed entire emotional journeys on paper. And then they handed these blueprints to Nakago, their “builder,” and his crew, who were already sure that by the time of programming, the level was thought out, technically feasible, and, more importantly, fun to play.

These planning sheets are a real GDD in the form of an engineering blueprint, which combined creative vision, system design, and low-level technical requirements.

And even though I am missing many small but brilliant Game Design decisions made during iterations of both the documents themselves and the game, the success speaks for itself.

Such an approach, where design went hand in hand with the entire team from the very beginning to the very end (literally, since Miyamoto himself drew the final cover for the release in the last days), allowed creating such a verified and polished game that all fears related to console limits turned into a triumph. The game was so optimized that in the end, it took up only 32 kilobytes! (For the particularly meticulous, I advise a thread on Reddit where there are short explanations and links to interesting videos: «Super Mario Bros. game was just 31 Kilobytes. How’s that possible?») This even allowed Miyamoto to joke that they needed to “fill it up” to the standard 40 kilobytes, suggesting to the team:

“Well… Let’s add more blocks there?”

The approach of the three genius Japanese men showed the whole world that a well-thought-out game can not just sell well. It can immortalize itself, becoming a symbol of an entire generation.

And if there is a starting point for the modern game design document in that embryonic form in which we now know it, then this is the moment. It was the moment when the GDD ceased to be a concept, a set of rules, a technical assignment, or a piece of bureaucratic paper. It became a true tool of creation: Precise as an engineer’s blueprint, and inspiring as an artist’s sketch.

But we were still far from the era of true “Bibles.”

1987 — Treasure Maps of the GDD (Maniac Mansion)

What unites such modern games as Until Dawn, Life is Strange, Detroit: Become Human, and, for example, Road 96? Roughly speaking — variability. The illusion of choice. Non-linearity. A branching narrative, like a circulatory system, where every decision you make seems to matter. Today, as players, we take this for granted, but as Game Designers, we know that a monster hides behind every such fork in the road.

Because as soon as you give the player freedom of choice, your design task begins to grow exponentially. Every new decision, every dialogue, every possible interaction is a new head growing on the hydra of narrative design. And the more choices there are, the harder it is to keep track of this beast so it doesn’t get tangled in its own tentacles and devour itself.

But to understand how we even learned to tame this beast, we need to go back to 1987. To where four bold, delightfully naive dreamers from Lucasfilm Games decided to create not just a game, but a whole world living by its own non-linear laws. They didn’t just reinvent the adventure genre; they faced the same fundamental problems that trouble writers and designers of non-linear narratives to this day, and found an elegant solution for them.

This is an incredibly significant milestone in our history. A milestone about freedom, about Lucasfilm, about creative audacity, about SCUMM, about a hamster exploding in a microwave, and about how simple papers help unload our perpetually overloaded brains when we try to keep not one, not two, but dozens and hundreds of interactions, stories, and events in our heads.

About Maniac Mansion

And again, first of all, I must scratch a massive itch and lay my cards on the table. This part of our history is largely based on materials that I strongly recommend everyone watch to feel the spirit of that era:

And now to the point.

One can relate differently to George Lucas, his franchise, and his early business decisions, but denying his genius as an investor in talent is pure disingenuousness. After all, there is no better investment than investing in people, in their minds and their creative potential.

That is why the team creating Maniac Mansion was in completely unique, almost laboratory conditions. They were given a budget. They were allocated a separate house, given complete creative freedom, provided with food and everything necessary for life and work, essentially being told:

“Create. We believe that in the future this will recoup all invested funds.”

And just imagine this picture: Four (actually, a few more) young, ambitious people full of ideas and rebellious spirit — Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, David Fox, and Carl Mey — find themselves in this creative sandbox under the wing of the most influential and intelligent man in the entertainment industry at that moment. This meant only one thing — it was time to do something great.

But even here, Lucas showed his foresight. He forbade his internal studio from making games based on his own franchises. This didn’t mean he didn’t want Star Wars games — other companies made them under license. It meant something far deeper. He didn’t want his game studio to turn into a soulless merchandise production line. He wanted them to create new worlds, not exploit old ones. He gave them something more important than money; he gave them the most valuable thing a producer can give — the right to their own vision.

And so, without access to Jedi and lightsabers, but possessing boundless creative potential and full support, this team began pondering their first, truly own idea for a game. And it was in these conditions, free from the dictates of a franchise and commercial pressure, that those revolutionary approaches to design and its documentation, which we will now discuss, were born.

What immediately distinguished the process of creating Maniac Mansion from everything we had seen before was the culture of open creativity. Inside the team, anyone could suggest an idea, and if it resonated, it was immediately documented and put into circulation. Thus, pitch documents quickly began to circulate around their “office” — and these were some of the earliest examples of those very “pitches” we are used to seeing today.

On a few pages was everything needed to infect with an idea:

A bright logo.
Title page.
A brief description of the game, its goal, and how it should feel.
Interface sketches, concept art of characters, villains, and locations conveying the spirit of the future game.

One such pitch, «Maniac Mansion Design Doc», dedicated to the idea of a B-horror movie parody, was created in just a week, but the whole team and their manager liked it so much that it was decided — we’re doing it.

But despite the fact that the pitch document existed, the fundamental questions of “why?” and, far more importantly in their case, “how?” had yet to be answered. After all, for now, according to Ron Gilbert’s recollections, this game was merely a vague concept about “walking around a mansion and gradually uncovering the story.” And here we approach the second important fact of this history.

Adventure games existed before Maniac Mansion. But they were quite unfriendly toys. Imagine a game where you see a static picture, and all your actions boil down to typing verbs into a command line, trying to guess exactly which word the Game Designer intended: “TAKE LAMP,” “OPEN DOOR,” “TALK TO TENTACLE.” Guess the wrong verb — the game doesn’t understand you. It was a constant, exhausting duel not with the mysteries of the world, but with the syntax of the Game Designer.

It was this design horror that Ron felt. He essentially reassembled the adventure concept, adding innovations that lay on the surface but which no one before him had dared to implement.

The transition from text adventures to Maniac Mansion can be compared to the transition from the MS-DOS command line to the Apple/Windows graphical interface. It felt literally the same. Instead of forcing the player to guess verbs, Gilbert brought them onto the screen: “OPEN,” “CLOSE,” “USE,” “TALK TO” — all these became buttons. The player could simply hover the cursor over an object and choose how to interact with it. Thus, essentially, the point-and-click genre was born.

But this wasn’t the only innovation. By removing one headache, Gilbert created two others for himself. He conceived a game with multiple playable characters (initially up to 20! characters were planned), each with their own unique “abilities” and, consequently, their own unique ways of solving puzzles. He conceived a game with multiple endings. He conceived a world that shouldn’t break from the player’s actions.

The narrative design of this game was an order of magnitude more complex than anything done before. And to cope with this complexity, the team needed a new tool. A tool that would help them see this entire web of interconnections as a whole.

And so, after some time, when the initial excitement of creative freedom had subsided, that very monster they had spawned stood before the team in all its glory. To create a non-linear story with three playable characters that can be freely switched between. With multiple endings depending on who survived and what they did. With dozens of unique interactions for each item… This was a task that NO ONE had faced on such a scale before them.

The team was tormented by many doubts. But solutions came with them. And right here, studying the artifacts remaining from that time, for the first time in our entire history, we see the birth of narrative design as a separate, conscious discipline.

Looking at these documents, one must understand: What is now standard practice for us was a breakthrough for them.

Screen connection maps showing how locations are connected to each other.
Character-object interaction diagrams describing what will happen if a specific character uses a specific item.
Room flowcharts describing all puzzles, triggers, and object states in each location.
And, of course, branching plot diagrams in the form of lines and dots, showing how player actions lead to different consequences.

All this appeared here for the first time. They realized that to keep such a complex system in their heads, it needed to be taken out of the head and fixed on paper.

But when a problem is elegantly solved on paper, when all the logic is written out and the connections are drawn, the next, now technical question inevitably arises:

“And how do we program all this now without going crazy?”

And here we approach another brilliant innovation born of necessity. To SCUMM.

No, no one was getting “scammed.” SCUMM is a scripting language that literally stands for “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion”. It was invented by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder precisely as a result of working on this game.

And the most telling moment, when design documents and a technical solution finally hit the same point, happened as follows:

After many months of development, the team was on the verge of frustration. The number of features, characters, and narrative branches they wanted to add to the game was rapidly shrinking under the pressure of harsh reality: Implementing all this on existing tools was almost impossible.

And on one such day, David Fox approaches a dejected, tired Ron Gilbert and says, “Come with me.” Ron, thinking he’s about to be shown another bug, reluctantly follows him to the console. David, controlling a character in the game, walks into the kitchen, points to a hamster in the inventory and to the microwave, and then says: “Go on, try it, Ron.”

Ron clicks on the hamster. Clicks on the verb “Put.” Points to the microwave. The hamster ends up in the microwave. Then he chooses the verb “Use” and points to the microwave again.

The door closes. The microwave starts humming. And a couple of seconds later, an explosion is heard. The screen goes “dark” for a moment, and when the light returns, only a red splat remains where the microwave was.

After which laughter rings out in the room. Long-awaited, liberating laughter.

What was actually important in this seemingly cruel scene? That the SCUMM system finally worked. And it worked so well that this entire sequence of actions with the hamster was “programmed” by David in less than ten minutes, without writing a single line of complex code.

From that moment on, creating complex game logic and non-linear interactions became incredibly simplified. SCUMM as a “programming language” for designers existed for decades more, and its logic and principles live on in the engines of modern AAA projects to this day.

And all because someone was “free” enough to dream of a complex, non-linear story, and smart enough to first write it down on paper, and then create a tool that would allow this dream to be realized.

Despite the uniqueness of the circumstances in which the Maniac Mansion team found themselves, their approach to documentation and understanding how to combine it with development remains relevant today. This story highlights a crucial principle: Competent documentation in the hands of competent people and an open team can not only crystallize an idea but also become a common language for the entire team, turning creative chaos into a working system that frees you from burnout.

This solid foundation — a combination of detailed paper planning and powerful tools in the form of SCUMM — allowed LucasArts to release a whole galaxy of legendary adventure games in subsequent years, which still play freshly and interestingly today.

But while a whole team was building complex narrative labyrinths, elsewhere one man alone was trying to document and recreate something entirely different — the perfect, realistic animation of movement.

1989 — Above the Director’s Chair (Prince of Persia)

Modern platformers, be it Celeste, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, or even Tomb Raider with Uncharted, were most strongly influenced by just two games. We’ve already analyzed the first one — Super Mario Bros. And the second… well, the title speaks for itself. It is Prince of Persia.

This story will beautifully close our period of “drafts.” So, meet another legend whose name you might not have heard — Jordan Mechner.

It is important to note: everything I will tell you next is not conjecture or a compilation of Wikipedia articles. My main source was the book «The Making of Prince of Persia». To get to the truth, I had to order the printed version of this edition, as only it contains the full, uncut journal entries of that period. It is this unique inside look that will allow us to understand how the masterpiece was created.

And now it’s time to drink a potion, rewind time, and see how one man practically single-handedly documented a revolution in game animation. Saddle up! Or, in our case, rather, onto the ledges and slabs.

About Jordan Mechner

To understand how and, most importantly, why Prince of Persia was created, one must first understand the man standing behind it. Jordan Mechner, above all, saw himself as a director. And this passion for cinema, this desire to tell stories through a camera lens rather than lines of code, was his guiding star. But the harsh truth of life, as often happens, had its own plans for him.

And these plans were stunning. While still a student at Yale University, Mechner single-handedly creates the game Karateka, which blows up the market and becomes the number one bestseller in the catalog of publisher Brøderbund Software. It would seem, here it is — success, the dream of any aspiring developer. But for a creative soul whose dreams lay in another plane, this success became more of a gilded cage. His journals of that period exude an almost existential weariness. After graduating from college and a not-so-profitable deal on Karateka, he feels emptiness:

“I don’t want to spend another three years moving pixels, even if it’s fun. I want to make movies.”

So, having finished college, with a small but sufficient reserve of money for a couple of years of quiet life, Mechner faced a choice: what to do next? Chase the dream of Hollywood or continue to strike while the iron is hot? By a lucky coincidence, the answer came by itself, assembling from three seemingly unrelated parts. First, fresh impressions from watching Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Second, a fascination with the platformers of that time. And third, knowledge of rotoscoping — an animation technique that giants like Disney were using extensively at that moment.

All this came together in his head into one simple but fundamental question:

“Why has no one yet made a game where the character’s movement felt real?”

Even his own Karateka, with its very high-quality animation for its time, seemed to him insufficiently… alive. And other games on the market did not give this feeling. This was that very challenge that could reconcile the artist, the director, and the programmer within him.

A narrative challenge was added to this technical one. Inspired by the classic stories from One Thousand and One Nights and the movie The Thief of Bagdad, Mechner found the ideal wrapper for his idea. Thus began the development of a game that was supposed to bring “life” to the industry. In both the literal and figurative sense.

About Prince of Persia

To be honest, going into a detailed chronology of the creation of Prince of Persia is a thankless task. Even from Mechner’s own book, it is evident that the process was quite chaotic (if you want to dive a tad deeper but not drown in the book like I did… Then watch this video: «How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II’s Memory Limitations»). Therefore, so as not to drown in this creative mess, let’s break everything down into three key components. And let’s start with the one that dictated the rules of the game — with limitations.

At the start of development, Mechner, having successful experience with Karateka under his belt, logically chose the Apple II as the target platform. In the mid-80s, it was still a popular home computer for which he already knew how to write code. The problem was that at this exact moment, tech giants started that very “megahertz race” (which in itself is an interesting topic for study, which I only mention in passing here), and it was changing the industry before everyone’s eyes.

Looking ahead, this decision came back to haunt him twice. First, by the end of development, the Apple II’s power became catastrophically insufficient to realize all of Mechner’s ambitions and his incredibly detailed animation. Second, both Jordan and the publisher had serious fears that the game, even if it turned out good, would be released on a dying platform and simply wouldn’t find its buyer.

“The Apple market is dying. … No matter how hard I try to convince people that there will be an IBM version, they act like it doesn’t exist.”

Did these fears come true? This rhetorical question is the ideal bridge to the most interesting part of this story.

After all, it was the limitations of the Apple II that forced Mechner to invent. The platform could not adequately play video, and in general, there was no accepted pipeline in the industry at that time for creating realistic animation. Now we have Motion Capture, procedural animation, and a dozen specialized programs. But back then, Mechner was helped by… a camera! And a brother. And a karate teacher? And MOVIES???

Well, jokes aside. It was this set of strange findings that formed the basis of animation that still looks incredibly smooth today. The technique that Mechner essentially invented for himself consisted of several stages. The first and main one was to find a reference and record it. The movements of the future Prince are the movements of his younger brother David, whom he filmed running and jumping around a parking lot. Some combat and falling animations were spied in classic adventure films. Watching the storyboards of this archival footage today is a separate pleasure.

But what is especially important for us as Game Designers is that the blind creation of animations in the “might come in handy” category did not happen. Mechner kept journals in which he described ideas, but also made sketches of specific character interactions with the environment. He thought through and documented on paper in advance exactly how the Prince would step on pressure plates, climb ledges, fall, and die from traps.

Having this well-thought-out plan on hand, he purposefully filmed the movements he needed. And then the magic of turning VHS tape into pixels happened. I will omit exactly how he did it. For us, the fact itself is important: every smooth and lively animation in the game was not born by chance. It was first documented as an idea, then fixed on film as a reference, and only then, frame by frame, transferred into the game with a specific destination.

And before we move on to documentation as an artifact, we need to understand the vice grip Mechner was in. As I already said, the limitations of the Apple II were brutal, especially for the growing ambitions of the game. Initially, he designed the game without combat, a pure puzzle-platformer where you had to find a way to save the princess. But everyone who played the early prototypes said the same thing:

“I like games where you can shoot things. In your game, there are no rewards other than moving to the next level… Pure survival without triumph.” — Tomi

And also:

“It’s still not enough. … We need rewards in the game — like, for example, defeating the guard in Karateka. What makes a game engaging? Tension/release, tension/release. Prince of Persia has neither.”

At first, Mechner resisted desperately. He complicated the level design, added new traps, made the acrobatics even more sophisticated, trying to prove that the game was self-sufficient without fighting. But the “player’s” request remained unchanged. The verdict was in: without sword fights, the game wouldn’t be as exciting.

“Conclusion: my next step is to add combat.”

And here Mechner hit a wall. Given all the already created animations, the considerable number of levels, and other elements eating up precious memory, adding another full-fledged enemy character with his own set of movements was simply impossible. There was stupidly no memory for it. Either cut something out or invent.

And here, at the junction of despair and genius, a solution is born that should give any Game Designer goosebumps to this day. Mechner takes the sprites of the Prince himself, inverts the colors on them, writes the simplest behavior logic, and… gets an enemy. The Shadow. His own dark reflection.

Think about it. A technical limitation born of a lack of memory turns into a powerful metaphor. It adds to the game that very combat the testers lacked so much; it creates tension, drama, and mesmerizing action of fighting with oneself. And all this reaches its peak in the finale. To defeat your main enemy, you don’t need to fight him. You need to lower your weapon. Sheathe the sword and take a step forward, allowing the shadow to become part of you.

This was a catharsis born of a bug, which became a feature, which became a philosophy. This is that very moment when the game design sparkled, immortalizing itself as a piece of art. And it was especially touching for me to read this in the journals:

“Hundreds of thousands of kids who I hope will play this game will meet the Shadow exactly as I programmed him today. I hope he blows them away. I’m too involved to look at it impartially. If not — well, then I blew it.”

At the same time, in the future, this limitation would lead Mechner to study the Apple II documentation even more thoroughly, allowing him to win enough memory to shove in two additional opponents. And yet, if not for the limitation at that moment in time, this story would be far less exciting, and Prince of Persia would have lost its depth.

And now, when we see how such elegant solutions were born from chaos and limitations, we can summarize regarding the design document. Because so far, I have rather burdened you with the history of development. But without it, it would be impossible to emphasize the importance of… journals!

Having read the entire book “The Making of Prince of Persia” from cover to cover, I realized that I wasn’t reading a book at all. These were developer’s notes. In the most literal sense — a journal. A word that has already appeared more than once in the paragraphs above. And it’s true. It is this format of documentation that closes the last important gap in the history of GDD that we haven’t touched on before.

This area — personal journals — is well known to us, modern developers. Today we have a ton of convenient tools for version control, note-taking, task commenting, and so on. But I dare say that Mechner was one of the first to turn this into his systemic, conscious process. Yes, others took notes too, but more often out of necessity: to explain a thought to the team, patent an idea, fix a set of rules. Here, however, and this is fundamentally important, Mechner held a dialogue with himself. And this dialogue not only allowed him to leave behind a whole book. It became his main game design tool, helping to polish, discard, and improve ideas in real-time.

This deeply personal approach had quite practical consequences as well. Journal entries became the basis for more formal documents, such as the CWP (Creative Work Plan), which the publisher required. Without this habit of taking thoughts out of his head onto paper, the entire project risked dragging on, breaking under the weight of problems, or simply losing that very vision the author sought. I am 100% sure that thanks to these documents, containing every particle of the game, albeit bit by bit, it eventually came together into that masterpiece of its time. And all this exhausting, doubt-filled work found its highest justification in a simple but incredibly touching realization recorded in one of the journal entries:

“This is the one area in my life where I’m sure my efforts are doing good, not harm. It’s good, it’s mine, and thousands of people will be glad it exists. Of how many things in life can the same be said?”

Thus, Prince of Persia and the personal journal of its creator close the period of “drafts.” This entire era, from arcade machines to the first home consoles, was a time of small teams and lone geniuses. Their main tool was vision, and design documents, in their striking variety, served merely as a way to make this vision tangible and transferable. Whether it was Miyamoto’s engineering blueprints of levels, Gilbert’s narrative spider-web diagrams, or Mechner’s frame-by-frame storyboards of movements — all these artifacts performed the same fundamental task. They helped translate brilliant but ephemeral intuition, that very question “what if?”, into a clear, working, and reproducible system “this works like this.”

But the industry did not stand still, and the success of these games only added fuel to the fire of its growth. Lone enthusiasts turned into teams, teams into full-fledged studios. Development tools became more accessible, technologies more powerful, and games, as a consequence, more complex, higher quality, and more ambitious. In these new conditions, a personal draft understandable to one or two people and kept in a desk drawer ceased to work. When not three people, but thirty are working on a project, you need not a stack of personal notes, but a single source of truth accessible to everyone. The author’s sketch had to be replaced by something far more monumental and structured.

The time had come to write “Bibles.”

To Be Continued…

At this moment, I am forced to put not a period, but perhaps the boldest semicolon of my life.

I originally planned to release this material as one giant long-read. But when the word count exceeded all reasonable limits, and the number of open tabs and purchased books surpassed all health and safety standards, I realized: trying to squeeze the history of an entire industry into one article means showing disrespect to history itself.

I have been working on this material since the beginning of the summer of 2025. And what you read above is only the first half of the journey. My perfectionism, demanding not just a Wikipedia rehash but deep fact-checking, ordering rare print editions (as in Mechner’s case), and handling design and layout, dictates its own rules.

The second part, work on which is already in full swing, will be even harder. The most saturated and controversial eras await us:

IV. 1990–1999: “Time to Write the Bible” — about the monumental tomes upon which Doom, Deus Ex, and Half-Life were built.
V. 2000–2010: “Red Pen Manifestos” — about corporate culture and standardization.
VI. 2010 — Present Days: “The Death of the Author?” — about Wiki, Confluence, Notion, and how documentation became a “living organism.”
VII. Conclusion: “The Skeleton in the Closet” — summarizing the entire evolution.

Why did I have to split it? Because my approach to quality became a sort of trap for myself. I don’t want to just retell well-known facts. I want to dig deep. And that means: buying and reading literature, endless fact-checking, working on design, and, the hardest part of the second section — direct inquiries to publishers and attempts to reach out to the developers of that era themselves.

I do this in my spare time, investing my own energy and funds, with one simple goal: to create that very material that I myself desperately lacked five years ago when I was just trying to find solid ground under my feet, and thereby raise the bar of discussion in our community, proving that we are capable of serious, thoughtful analysis that goes beyond superficial retellings and hype.

I won’t lie: I have no idea how long this final sprint will take. Given the scale of the remaining work and the reliance on other people’s responses, the second part could come out in a few months or closer to the end of 2026 (I have several other articles in the works besides this one!). Let’s not make predictions. One thing I can say for sure: the second part will be released exactly when it is 100% ready.

Ultimately, my dream is to collect all this into a single, cohesive work. Perhaps into a conditional “Definitive Edition” — with final edits, additions, and a unified structure, which one could not just scroll through, but put on a shelf like a book. I hope the first half convinced you that this story is worth it.

Thank you for walking this path to the origins with me. On this note, I do not say goodbye. The history of game design documentation is just gathering momentum.

Vivat gamedev! And see you where the secrets are even deeper → t.me/slepokNTe 👀

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