MicroProse

United States · Founded 1982 · Closed 2001 · 1982 – 2001

Founded after a programmer beat a retired fighter pilot at a flight game by reading its code, then told him he could write a better one in a week.

MicroProse began with a bet made in Las Vegas in 1982. Mutual friends introduced Bill Stealey, a retired military pilot, to Sid Meier, a programmer, on the grounds that both were interested in aviation. Playing the arcade game Red Baron, Meier beat Stealey repeatedly, and then explained why: he had worked out how the game was programmed and could predict what it would do. He added that he could design a better one in a week. It took two months, the game was Hellcat Ace, Stealey sold fifty copies on his first sales call, and the two of them had a company. For most of the 1980s MicroProse was the serious end of the market for military simulation — F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service, Gunship, F-19 Stealth Fighter — games with thick manuals and a real expectation that the player would read them. Then Meier's design work broadened the company past the cockpit: Sid Meier's Pirates! in 1987, Railroad Tycoon in 1990 and Civilization in 1991, which did not so much enter the strategy genre as become it. Success did not translate into stability. Debt accumulated, two arcade machines failed to earn back what they cost, and an initial public offering was used to raise cash. In 1993 Stealey approached Gilman Louie of Spectrum HoloByte and asked him to buy MicroProse outright rather than let it fall to an unknown acquirer; Stealey departed the following year, later summarising the merger as one company with a lot of cash and few products joining another with a lot of products and no cash. Hasbro Interactive acquired the business in 1998, and when Infogrames took over Hasbro Interactive in January 2001, MicroProse ceased to exist.