Redmond A. Simonsen

Redmond Aksel Simonsen (June 18, 1942 – March 9, 2005) was an American graphic artist and game designer best known for his work at the board wargame company Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in the 1970s and early 1980s. Simonsen was considered an innovator in game information graphics, and is credited with creating the term "game designer".

As art director at SPI Simonsen supervised the release of over 400 game titles, and had game design or development credit for over twenty games. In addition, he variously held positions of executive art editor and co-editor or executive editor for the SPI magazines Strategy & Tactics, MOVES and Ares. Simonsen was the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame inductee for 1977. He was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured as the king of clubs in Flying Buffalo's 2008 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.

Early life Simonsen was born and raised in Inwood, Manhattan, the second son of Astri Nordlie Simonsen and August Emil Simonsen, an immigrant from Norway. His father was a high ironworker who died in a fall from a building; his mother then worked as a domestic and raised her three children August, Lois, and Redmond. Simonsen attended the Stuyvesant High School from 1956-1960. He served two tours in the United States Air Force, and was accepted for enrollment at Cooper Union, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1964. Subsequent work as a graphic artist included designing the book jacket for Is Paris Burning? (1965), album covers for London Records, and KOOL cigarette advertisements. He also worked as a photographer, and sold pictures to TIME, Newsweek and The New York Times.

Strategy & Tactics and SPI

Main articles: Strategy & Tactics and Simulation Publications, Inc.

Redmond Simonsen was the graphic designer on the wargaming hobby fanzine Strategy & Tactics.

The format of Strategy & Tactics (S&T) was ambitiously changed to a bi-monthly magazine with a complete game inside every issue, along with an accompanying historical article. Dunigan created Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1969, with Simonsen as his co-founder. Dunnigan and Simonsen's newly incorporated SPI began publish non-magazine games as well. At that time the main wargame publisher, Avalon Hill, released only one or two new games a year. The response was overwhelming. the company experienced exponential growth. By the mid-'70s SPI's revenues exceeded $2 million annually, with up to forty employees.

Simonsen acted as founding editor for SPI's Ares Magazine, a fantasy/science fiction game magazine following the same approach as Strategy & Tactics, until replaced during the TSR takeover.

Simonsen also wrote fictional backgrounds for various SPI games, notably for StarForce and Battlefleet Mars, often with humorous elements hidden in the text.

Physical systems design

It was at SPI that Simonsen coined the term "physical systems design" to describe the application of graphic design concepts to board games. He defined it as follows:

I should perhaps explain what I mean by the term "physical system". The term is really my personal jargon for the graphic engineering of game elements. The more graphic engineering the artist can build into the game equipment and rules, the easier and more enjoyable becomes the play of the game.

The role of "game developer" was unknown in the games industry at the time. Simonsen invented the role as "A professional who was responsible for turning the designer's prototype into a 'camera-ready' product. Thus, he was responsible for managing playtests, editing and writing rules and play aids, preparing sketches and other graphical elements, and ensuring that the 'house style' was preserved across several games."

After SPI Marketing lapses as well as financial mismanagement led to declining real income for SPI,

Along with former SPI designer Brad Hessel, he founded Ares Development Corporation to produce video games. Simonsen had already successfully "ported" the board game The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora to the Apple II, creating one of the first real-time strategy games. A multi-game contract with Texas Instruments fell through when they pulled out of the home computer market in 1984.