On a recent episode of Night Dive's Deep Dive podcast, John Romero stopped by to talk about a range of interesting topics related to his 40-year career in games, but there was one story in particular that stood out to us the most.
That is, Romero's explanation on how a single Walmart executive in Texas led to the unlikely rise of the hunting sim (thanks PC Gamer for bringing this piece of video game history to our attention!).
The story was shared at roughly the 46 minute mark of the discussion, following a short discussion about video game discoverability, with Romero reflecting on the power that retailers used to wield in getting company's games in front of audiences.
Here Romero went on to explain how one of ID Software's partners, the publisher GT Interactive, eventually became the unofficial "gatekeeper of all Walmart [software] sales.", before talking about how an executive at the retailer ended up expressing their dissatisfaction with the games being pitched and put in a special request for a particular type of software — one they believed would sell thousands of copies.
"The main buyer for Walmart was in Texas," says Romero, speaking to Nightdive's vice president of business development Larry Kuperman over a video call. "And when GT went to them to basically go, ‘Here are all the games that I’m going to be putting in the store’, the guy [ended up saying], ‘I don’t know how to play any of these space alien games and whatever stuff you’re putting on the shelf. What I want is I just want a deer hunting game. You make one of those and I’ll guarantee you’ll sell out.’
According to Romero, after the meeting, a representative for GT Interactive then went to the Minneapolis-based publisher WizardWorks, which it had acquired earlier in 1996 to be part of their GT Value Products umbrella, asking them to put out a game to satisfy this request.
WizardWorks then commissioned the Indiana studio SunStorm Interactive — a company best known for working on Build Engine add-ons — resulting in the 1997 hunting sim Deer Hunter.
According to publications like The Wall Street Journal and PC Games magazine, Deer Hunter was developed by a small team of five over three months for somewhere an estimated $125,000, and was positioned as a budget game costing customers at the time roughly $20.
Following its release, the majority of the reviews ended up criticizing the game for being "boring" and for offering little "in the way of longevity". However, that didn't matter one bit as it ultimately ended up becoming a huge success for the all involved, dominating PC Data's best seller list, and reportedly outselling games like Riven, Tomb Raider 2, and Quake II.
As a result, it ended up inspiring several similar titles the following year — many of whom all tried to emulate this same formula, with some of the more successful titles being Elsinore Multimedia's Cabela's Big Game and ValuSoft, Inc's Wild Turkey Hunt.
You can watch the full video of the podcast here.