Matrix Games recently acquired the rights to work on a plethora of old Talonsoft titles (The Operational Art of War series, Campaign Series, Battleground series, etc.) which has some people asking whether Matrix was looking backwards rather than toward the future of wargaming. While we await the release of the first Matrix Edition of The Operational Art of War (dubbed TOAW 3) let’s examine this question in a bit more detail.

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I’ll begin this piece as I normally do when writing about The Operational Art of War (TOAW for short); I am a huge fan of the series, a longtime member of the TOAW community, and I walk up to the table of TOAW 3 wanting to like this game. I’ve also had an opportunity to watch the development team over the past six months and I’ve seen this game go from "stock" to "highly modified" during that period. I certainly make no claim on being an innocent bystander, but I feel competent enough to provide a relatively objective viewpoint. Keep this in mind as you read on, in case you want to say "Horse Hockey!" to me.

One question many people will be asking is why take an old game (and yes, this game first arrived on the scene in 1998!), invest a bunch of money into it, etc., instead of spending that money on developing new material? There are many possible explanations I could give you;

First, this title (under Talonsoft) had the unfortunate fate of being bought and sold to various game companies who for a variety of reasons did not take an interest in further development. Thus, over the last four years we saw virtually no improvement to the game. Despite repeated pleas by a variety of concerned parties, no one could touch the code because of the complexities of the legal web spun around it. Even Norm Koger, the original developer and "father" of TOAW, was unable to make updates because of the legal snarls. Removing the game from this mess, and exposing it to the light of day is one of the most important reasons why this needed to be done. Similarly, because of this period of relative hibernation, one could argue this game has been cryogenically frozen in time and really isn’t as old as one may believe…and hasn’t run its full course yet.

Second, there are some titles and series which wargamers just plain enjoy, despite their age. In discussions with David Heath at Matrix Games, he has told me several times that he acquired the Talonsoft titles because he enjoys playing them – plain and simple. While he would like to make enough money to cover his costs to update them (both now and in the future), I don’t see any evidence this was done purely to cash in on the popular titles. He stated he wanted to remove them from legal limbo, invest a modest amount of money to bring back the original developers where possible, bring new coders on where needed, fix long-standing bugs, add oft-requested features, and make these games even better and more accessible to a new audience of gamers. I believe it would have been a lot easier and cheaper to just re-release the exact same games in new boxes… Kudos to Matrix for not taking the path of least resistance.

My personal view is that this game really deserves to remain in circulation – being one of the most complete packages in operational gaming you will find anywhere. In my previous review of TOAW: A Century of Warfare I outlined some of the features which make this game great, as well as some that have consistently turned off other players. Matrix Games is looking to plug many of the holes in this title and make a great game even better. In my view, that is as good a reason as any to tackle this project.

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