Alan Emrich

Alan Emrich (October 1, 1959 – January 7, 2025) was an American writer and designer of board games and video games. He contributed to the design of Master of Orion and Master of Orion 3, wrote strategy guides for video games, and acknowledged as the originator of the term 4X to describe the genre of strategic turn-based games associated with games like Master of Orion. Before the rise of video games, Emrich wrote about and designed board games and organized conventions about them. He ran a small game publishing company called Victory Point Games (until he sold the company to a new owner) and lectured in game design and project management. In 2001, Emrich received the Blomgren/Hamilton Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement from ConsimWorld.com.

4X games

Emrich coined the term "4X" ("eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate") in his 1993 review of Master of Orion in Computer Gaming World,

Highlighting it as “Quadruple-X”. Emrich wrote, “Quadruple-X - I give MOO a XXXX rating because it features the essential four X’s of any good strategic conquest game: EXplore, EXpand, Exploit and Exterminate. In other words, players must rise from humble beginnings, finding their way around the map while building up the largest, most efficient empire possible. Naturally, the other players will be trying to do the same, therefore their extermination becomes a paramount concern. A classic situation, indeed, and when the various parts are properly designed, other X’s seem to follow. Words like EXcite, Experiment and Excuses (to one’s significant others) must be added to a gamer’s X-Rating list.”

Until April 2002, Emrich was a lead designer of Master of Orion 3, which attempted to add a 5th X, eXperience, to the genre. Then he left the developer, Quicksilver Software, for reasons neither party explained.

Strategy guides Emrich wrote or co-wrote the following strategy guides:

Career In 1977, Emrich and John Meyers co-founded the ORCCON game convention in Los Angeles, and later Emrich helped in the start-up of the GATEWAY and GAMEX conventions, also in Los Angeles. Emrich was the first Vice-President of the Game Manufacturers Association. In the 1980s, he founded a game company Diverse Talents Inc., which imported and exported games, ran the Los Angeles game conventions, and published several magazines including Fire & Movement. In this period, he also designed board and card games.

He was also a professor at the Art Institute of California at Orange County, where he taught Game Design, Prototyping, and Project Management to students — he regarded this as an "official instance of his lifelong passion for teaching". He also co-founded and owned Victory Point Games, a board and card game publishing company that was launched to produce small, budget-priced games based around submissions from students and professional game designers alike — he said founded the company in order to give his students "experience of the business side of game publishing".

Personal life and death Emrich was born in Long Beach, California, on October 1, 1959. He died on January 7, 2025, at age 65, in Keene, New Hampshire.