IN THE KNOW
PUBLISHER: 3DO
DEVELOPER: NEW WORLD COMPUTING
RELEASED: 1996
PLATFORM: DOS, WINDOWS, MAC, GBC
GENRE: STRATEGYH
Heroes Of Might And Magic II stands proud as one of the key PC games of the Nineties strategy boom. It has its roots in a less well-known game, King’s Bounty, released six years earlier by New World Computing. “Heroes was born from King’s Bounty and King’s Bounty was born from wanting to make a Star Trek game,” Mark Caldwell explains, “at the time, Gulf And Western owned Star Trek and was already making Star Trek books, games and trinkets, so they wouldn’t give us a licence. But we knew Task Force Games had made a Star Fleet Battles board game based on Star Trek. We thought we could licence that, and while they were interested, it turned out to be cheaper to buy the entire company.”
After Mark and Jon Van Caneghem bought Task Force Games, both a board game and videogame of was released. Jon remembers that, “ was my first attempt to make a strategy game and we got a lot of praise for it. When making games in those days, we had no idea if we’d make enough money to be able to make the next game. So after the success, it was obvious we were gonna make another
