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This is the story of King of Dragon Pass, an uplifting tale of a man you probably wouldn't notice who bet big on an obscure game a long time ago - and lost. It's uplifting because he got a second chance, a bit like when Lieutenant John Spartan got a second chance in Demolition Man to catch the villain Simon Phoenix after having been cryogenically frozen in time. Our story starts in 1996, three years after Demolition Man, and in the brain of David Dunham. He liked playing tabletop role-playing games in the setting of Glorantha - ring any bells? - and made computer software for a living. He happened to be friends with Glorantha creator Greg Stafford - renowned for his work on role-playing game Pendragon, and also a shaman - and the two of them decided to make a computer game based in that setting. And so David Dunham set about making "a game that had never been done before".
Not that he had a particularly springy springboard to launch his game making endeavour from - his computer software company A# employed only two staff: him and his wife. I'm a bit surprised, then, when David Dunham tells me King of Dragon Pass cost, in the late-'90s, half-a-million dollars to make! "Heh, it was quite expensive actually," he almost blushes. "It was very ambitious."
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