30周年回顾 第一章 要有魔法

Chapter One

"First, There was Magic"

We've all entertained the romantic notion that every great idea comes with a sudden thunderclap of inspiration, a definable moment when it springs fully formed into the world like mythical Athena springing from the head of Zeus. It's an appealing thought that such a moment can be easily pinned on a map, or marked down on a calendar, and that we can step back and say, "It all started here, on this day..."

所有人都曾怀有这样浪漫的想法：在某个特定的时刻，伟大的灵感会在一瞬间突然迸发，仿佛神话中的雅典娜从宙斯的头颅中突然诞生一般。这种想法很吸引人，那具体的时刻可以被清晰地标记在地图上，或者记录在日历上，然后我们可以回溯过去说：“这一切都始于这一天……”

“It was 3:00 a.m. on New Year's Eve and we were in Denny's. We'd just come from the club and I'd had enough Long Island Iced Teas to blind an elephant. Suddenly I'm scribbling on the back of a napkin..." Different versions of these creation myths have been told hundreds of times. "I'd been awakened from a terrible nightmare the day after the election, and as I was taking a shower the whole idea just materialized on the shower screen. I just had to write it down." The eureka moment makes for great film and television, but in reality, those moments are rare—exceptionally so in the world of game development. Great games are usually developed through a grueling years-long process of trial and error, often by the resynthesis of ideas borrowed from other games or other mediums. Sometimes they don't begin in one place but in several, developed by honing and refining lessons learned from previous projects. Heroes of Might & Magic has just such an origin story. It was a fusion of elements drawn from several tabletop strategy titles and the highly successful Might & Magic computer role-playing game, and it expanded the core gameplay first presented in King's Bounty by New World Computing in 1990. While it has any number of influences, and has, over the years, had many hands involved in its making, one man alone was responsible for creating the environment out of which Heroes would eventually be born.

“那是新年前夜的凌晨三点，我们正在丹尼餐厅里。我们刚从俱乐部出来，我喝了太多长岛冰茶，以至于能把大象的眼睛都喝瞎了。突然，我就在一张餐巾纸的背面奋笔疾书……”关于这些创作神话的不同版本已经被讲述过数百次了。“选举结束后第二天，我被一场可怕的噩梦惊醒，当我在淋浴时，这个想法就出现在淋浴屏上。我只需要把它写下来。”这种顿悟时刻非常适合拍成电影和电视剧，但在现实中，这样的时刻非常罕见——在游戏开发领域更是如此。伟大的游戏通常是通过漫长而艰苦的数年试错过程开发出来的，也常常是借用其他游戏或其他媒介中的想法和概念进行重新组合。它们大多并非始于某个特定的时刻。而是借鉴之前项目的经验教训，经过多次改进和优化。《魔法门之英雄无敌》的起源故事也是这样。它融合了多款桌面策略游戏、以及大获成功的电脑角色扮演游戏《魔法门》的元素，并扩展了 NWC 公司于 1990 年首次推出的《国王的赏金》的核心游戏玩法。尽管它受到了诸多影响，并且多年来有众多人员参与了其制作过程，但负责创造《英雄无敌》的诞生环境的，只有一个人。

In the summer of 1983, as teen computer wizard David Lightman matched wits against the warmongering WOPR on movie screens everywhere in the motion picture Wargames, Jon Van Caneghem was setting out to start a war of his own, albeit on the much smaller screen of his Apple II. He was a math major at UCLA. Like many of his contemporaries, he'd grown up on The Lord of the Rings, played both traditional tabletop strategy games as well as the grandfather of all role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons, a game which was far from being the well-accepted, mainstream success that it is today. Coordinating the schedules of friends to pull together in-person gaming sessions was frequently difficult, though the role-playing part of RPGs was not his favorite aspect of the game. “I didn't really care for the interaction or, you know, changing your voice to be the oracle or whatever,” Caneghem admitted. “What I loved most about D&D was the game system, and the game mechanics, and the stories, and the adventure, and the exploring.”

1983 年夏天，在电影《战争游戏》中，青少年电脑天才戴维·莱特曼与热衷于战争的 WOPR（战争操作计划响应系统）在各地的银幕上展开智力较量之时，乔·万·坎内根开始了自己的战争之旅，只不过那是在他那小小的苹果II电脑屏幕上进行。他当时是加州大学洛杉矶分校的一名数学专业学生。和他同时代的许多人一样，他从小就阅读《指环王》，玩过传统的桌面策略游戏，也玩过所有角色扮演游戏的鼻祖——《龙与地下城》，当时这款游戏远未像如今这般当作主流的成功之作广受认可。要协调朋友们的各项日程安排，以一起参加面对面的游戏活动往往很难实现，不过角色扮演游戏中的角色扮演部分并非是他最喜爱龙与地下城的一点。“要知道，我其实不太喜欢那种互动，比如要改变自己的声音来扮演神谕者之类的。”坎内根承认道，“我最喜欢龙与地下城的地方在于游戏系统、游戏机制、故事、冒险以及探索。”

ABOVE: The iron box is one of several images that can be viewed from the Might and Magic title screen, showcasing the adventures that players will soon experience.

上图：这个铁宝箱是《魔法门1》标题界面中展示的多个画面之一，它展现了玩家即将经历的精彩冒险。

While the rest of his friends were stuck with arranging regular gaming sessions for entertainment, Caneghem was eyeing his computer as a potential way not only to scratch his gaming itch, but also to delve further into his hobby as an Apple II programmer. The home computing revolution was booming, and software stores were no longer exclusively just outlets for operating systems and business applications, but also places where a dazzling array of gaming titles were crowding store shelves. Electronic Arts and Sierra On-Line, two soon-to-be software publishing giants, already enjoyed household recognition among enthusiasts. The appearance of both Sir-Tech's Wizardry: Proving Grounds and Origin Systems' Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness in 1981 signaled that role-playing games not only could be successfully adapted into an electronic format, but had the potential to greatly expand the horizons of the entire gaming industry.

当他的其他朋友们都忙于安排定期的游戏聚会以作消遣时，坎内根却把目光投向了他的电脑，他觉得这不仅能满足自己对游戏的渴望，还能让他更深入地投入到做苹果II电脑程序员的这一爱好之中。家用电脑革命正在蓬勃发展，软件商店不再仅仅是操作系统和商业应用程序的销售平台，更是各种精彩游戏作品云集的销售场所。电子艺界和雪乐山在线这两家即将成为软件出版巨头的公司，在爱好者中已经享有很高的知名度。而 1981 年 Sir-Tech 公司《巫术1：狂王的试炼场》和起源系统公司的《创世纪1:第一黑暗纪元》标志着角色扮演游戏不仅能够成功地以电子形式呈现出来，而且还具有极大的潜力能够大大拓展整个游戏行业的范畴。

“When I saw them take off, I was like, Wow! This is amazing! I could get the perfect RPG experience out of a computer game without having to wait for six people to get together on a Saturday. I could do a hundred battles in the same time it would take to do one with pen and paper." While Caneghem was enthralled with playing both of these groundbreaking computer role-playing games, a.k.a. CRPGs, he found himself growing dissatisfied that the computer wasn't allowing him to do things that he knew were perfectly reasonable and technically possible. Why weren't they letting him do what he wanted? As his dissatisfaction grew into outright annoyance, he realized the only way he could get the game experience he wanted was to dive into game development himself.

“当我看到它们热卖时，我说，哇哦！这太棒了！我可以在电脑游戏中获得完美的角色扮演游戏体验，而无需等周六时六个人聚在一起。用笔和纸完成一场战斗的时间，我可以完成上百场战斗。”坎内根对这两款开创性的电脑角色扮演游戏（简称 CRPG）都十分着迷，但他发现自己逐渐感到不满，因为游戏不允许他去做他认为完全合理且技术上可行的事情。为什么不能让他做自己想做的事呢？随着他的不满逐渐演变成彻底的恼怒，他意识到要想获得自己想要的游戏体验，唯一的办法就是自己投身于游戏开发之中。

Before he could start creating the worlds of Might & Magic, Caneghem would first have to master assembly, the programming language which was being predominantly used for the Apple II computer. At the time, there were no ready-made game development tools like Unity or Unreal. If a designer wanted to create a new game, they had to build absolutely everything from scratch. “The first year of development was just teaching myself how to code. Every day I had to learn how to make the simplest things. One day it would be about drawing a dot on the screen, or reading something from the hard drive, or making a sound come out of the speaker, or getting things to load and display, or read the keyboard. I could think of design ideas ten times faster than I could figure out how to code them, so it took me a lot longer than I expected.”

在开始创作《魔法门》的世界之前，坎内根首先得精通汇编语言——它是当时主要用于苹果II型电脑的编程语言。当时，并没有像 Unity 或 Unreal 这样现成的游戏开发工具。如果一个设计师想要创作一款新游戏，就得从零开始构建一切。“开发的第一年，我光是在自学如何编程。每天我都要学习如何完成最简单的事情。某一天可能是要在屏幕上画一个点，或者从硬盘读取一些内容，或者让声音从扬声器中传出，或者让东西加载并显示出来，或者读取键盘输入。我构思设计想法的速度比想出如何编程的速度要快十倍，所以这花费的时间比我预期的要长得多。”

At times he would grow frustrated with the limitations of the machine, and about the amount of time it was taking for development, but he also found that the drawbacks could be liberating. "It kind of set some good boundaries. I knew that, okay, this is what I've got to play with. Sometimes it makes your job easier because I can't do everything. But this is what I can do. I can work with this right here."

有时他会因机器的种种局限性而感到沮丧，也会因开发游戏所耗费的时间而感到不满，但他也发现这些缺点反而能带来自由感。“这在某种程度上设定了一些良好的界限。因为我知道，好吧，这就是我可以发挥的空间。有时候这会让工作变得更容易，因为我无法做所有的事情。但这就是我能做的。我可以就对它进行操作。”

When it came to creating the actual content of the game itself, Caneghem was in more familiar territory. The mechanics of pen-and-paper role-playing games were already well known not only to himself but also to his potential future audience. "I always had D&D to look to for inspiration about how characters and equipment should work. I knew that it would be an adventure, and you'd play it out on a map, just like in a regular role-playing game. And there would be stories and kings and background and lore, and you'd find text blurbs everywhere that would tell you what was going on."

在实际创作游戏内容方面，坎内根已是驾轻就熟。纸笔角色扮演游戏的运作机制不仅他本人熟知，他潜在的未来受众也都很熟悉。“我一直以《龙与地下城》为灵感来源，思考角色和装备应该如何运营。我知道会有一场冒险，你会在地图上展开游戏，就像常规的角色扮演游戏一样。还会有故事、有国王、背景和传说，到处都会有文字说明来告诉你正在发生的事情。”

For three years, he'd work on Might & Magic alone in his apartment, ultimately creating everything that would go into the game. "It was a lot like being a book author. You were one hundred percent in control of the words in your story, and there was something very satisfying in that."

三年来，他独自一人在公寓里致力于《魔法门》这款游戏的创作，最终完成了游戏的所有内容。“这很像是一名图书作者的工作。完全掌控着自己故事中的文字，这种感觉非常令人满足。”

With the game complete, the next challenge was to find a way to get it into the hands of players, but once again Caneghem was swimming in unfamiliar waters. His studies at UCLA had prepared him for a career in math, not in business, and he had no experience with packaging, marketing, or advertising anything, and certainly not an oddball product like a computer game. He worked his way through a chain of experts, learning the ropes of hiring artists, creating the game box, having it printed, having the disks duplicated and at last having everything packed together and shrink-wrapped. When he needed to create an ad, he turned to an agency in Santa Monica owned by family friends, and they kindly explained how it all worked and helped him with the creation and placement of a Might & Magic ad in the December 1986 issue of Computer Gaming World.

游戏完成后，接下来的挑战就是想办法将它交付给玩家手中，但坎内根再次陷入了陌生的领域。他在加州大学洛杉矶分校的学习使他做好了数学方面工作的准备，而非商业工作。他没有任何包装、营销或广告方面的经验，更不用说是对电脑游戏这样的独特产品了。他通过一系列专家的指导，学习了招聘美工、设计游戏盒、印刷盒子、复制光盘以及最后将所有东西包装覆膜的流程。当他需要制作广告时，他求助于圣莫尼卡一家由亲朋好友拥有的广告公司，他们友好地解释了整个过程，并帮助他创作并投放了《魔法门》的广告，该广告出现在 1986 年 12 月的《电脑游戏世界》杂志上。

Caneghem was the sole member of his original salesforce, taking orders directly from the 800 line he'd advertised in Computer Gaming World. "The phone for the 800 line was in my living room, and I was the one taking the calls. I'd write down the credit card number, fold up a box with copies of Might & Magic, and the UPS guy would pick up five or ten boxes at a time. Soon the retail stores began calling and they'd say, "Hey, people are asking about this game. We don't have it. Will you send twenty units to this one particular store?' After that, the distributors started calling, and I was selling quite a few directly to stores like Best Buy and Software Etc."

坎内根是其最初销售团队中唯一的成员，他直接根据在《电脑游戏世界》杂志上刊登的广告内容接收订单。“ 800 电话（被叫集中付费电话）的电话机就放在我的客厅里，我本人负责接听电话。我会记下信用卡号码，然后把装有《魔法门》游戏副本的盒子包起来， UPS 的快递人员会一次取走五到十个这样的盒子。很快，零售店也开始打电话来，他们会说：‘嘿，人们都在询问这款游戏，可我们没有这款产品。你们能给某某商店寄送二十套吗？’从那以后，分销商也开始打电话来，我就直接向像百思买和 software etc. 等平台销售了大量产品。”

As the buzz began to spread about Might & Magic, publishers began to take notice of the homegrown RPG, but Caneghem was unimpressed by the lowball offers coming his way. "I'd approached some of the big publishers like Sierra On-Line and MicroProse and EA even before I'd finished the game, but every one of them gave me the same line: 'If you were an established developer, you might make as much as a dollar or two a game!' Even after I opened the 800 line, I was getting the same spiel from people, the same terrible deal."

随着关于《魔法门》的传闻开始流传开来，出版商们开始关注起这款本土的 RPG 游戏，但坎内根对那些低额的报价并不感兴趣。“甚至在我还没完成游戏之前，就曾与一些大型出版商，比如雪乐山在线公司、微趣公司和艺电公司联系过，但它们给我的答复都是一样的：‘如果你是知名的开发商，每份游戏的收入就可以达到一到两美元！’即便在我开通了 800 电话服务之后，它们还是给我同样的说辞，同样糟糕的交易条件。

After a month of selling the game out of his home, he at last was contacted by a publisher that he felt saw the game's real potential, and was willing to strike a mutually beneficial deal. "The vice president of Activision phoned from the airport in Chicago and said they'd like to discuss their new affiliate label program with me. Great! I had no idea what that was, but they flew me up to San Francisco to talk about it." The proposed deal was a significant improvement over those that had been offered before. Activision had a large salesforce and was capable of getting placements in stores all across the country, but they had more shelf space than they had games, and they wanted to fill some of them with Might & Magic. All they wanted was a twenty percent cut of the game's profits, and they would handle all the distribution while Caneghem was still responsible for the boxes, the advertising, and the customer service. "It was fantastic from a financial point of view. They made their first order for fifty thousand units."

在自己售卖这款游戏一个月之后，他终于接到了一家出版商的联系。他觉得这家出版商看到了这款游戏的真正潜力，并愿意与他达成一项互利的交易。“动视公司的副总裁从芝加哥的机场打来电话，说他们想和我讨论一下他们的新附属品牌计划。太好了！我当时完全不明白那是什么，但他们还是把我带到旧金山，跟我详细讨论了这件事。”这份交易提议比之前提出的那些要好得多。动视公司拥有庞大的销售团队，能够在全国各地的商店中安排商品陈列，但他们拥有的货架空间多于游戏数量，所以他们想用《魔法门》来填满一些货架。他们只希望能获得游戏利润的 20% 分成，并且他们会负责所有的分销工作，只是坎内根则仍需负责包装、广告和客户服务。“从财务角度来看，这简直太棒了。他们下了第一批 5 万份的订单。”

ABOVE: The Might & Magic ad, placed in placed in issue #33, December 1986, of Computer Gaming World, arguably the most influential US computer gaming magazine of its time.

上图：这则《魔法门》的广告刊登在 1986 年 12 月、第 33 期的《电脑游戏世界》杂志上，该杂志是当时美国最具影响力的电脑游戏杂志之一。

Filling Activision's staggering order meant that Caneghem could no longer go it alone. He needed as many hands as he could get on deck at his fledgling company, New World Computing. From among his old group of tabletop gaming friends and fellow Apple II enthusiasts, he found a small but devoted army who were eager to turn their love of gaming into a steady job.

接到动视公司那笔巨额订单后，坎内根再也无法独自应付了。他需要尽可能多地为他新创立的公司—— NWC 公司招募员工。在他那些曾经一起玩桌游、也是苹果II电脑爱好者的老朋友们当中，他找到了一小群忠诚的成员，他们热衷于将对游戏的热爱转化为一份稳定的工作。

Mark Caldwell was employee number one, and over time would play a very important role not only in the development of the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise, but in the day-to-day management of Caneghem's company. He vividly remembered how the Activision deal affected the birth of New World. "Our very first check was for like $964,000, and we literally put it on the copy machine. We made photocopies of it. We were putting it on the wall for the two of us." Around the same time, Caneghem and Caldwell would be joined by Ronald Spitzer, another gaming buddy who would become the chief financial officer.

马克·考德威尔是公司的第一位员工，随着时间的推移，他不仅在《魔法门之英雄无敌》系列游戏的开发过程中发挥了至关重要的作用，还在坎内根公司的日常管理中扮演了重要角色。他清楚地记得与动视公司的合作如何促成了 NWC 公司的诞生：“我们最初的那笔支票金额约为 964000 美元，我们直接把它按在了复印机上。我们复印了好多份，贴在墙上供我们两人观看。”差不多在同一时期，坎内根和考德威尔还迎来了罗纳德·斯皮策的加入，他也是他们的游戏伙伴，后来还成为了公司的首席财务官。

ABOVE: Mark Caldwell (left) and Jon Van Caneghem (right) go over a production agenda at New World Computing.

上图：马克·考德威尔（左）和乔·万·坎内根（右）在 NWC 公司讨论生产计划。

The scale of the work that needed to be done could no longer be handled out of Caneghem's apartment, so the hunt began for more suitable facilities. "When it became clear we were gonna do some business, we started looking for office space between our apartments and found a place on Calvert Street in Van Nuys, right between a Sherwin Williams paint store and a little office mall kind of a place," Caldwell recalled. "When you walked in, there was a little reception area, a conference room, two offices, and a big area that started off as the warehouse and eventually became QA. We eventually expanded into the place next door, which actually became the new warehouse. But we played a lot of games in there." Caneghem remembered their first location as being less than ideal. "The warehouse in Van Nuys was in a terrible neighborhood, a definite I don't want to be here outside at night type of thing." His reaction was hardly surprising. Even in the daytime, Van Nuys could be sketchy. Many of the apartments and businesses in the surrounding neighborhood had bars in their windows, or were surrounded by walls topped with concertina wire. Until the arrival of New World, the area had the dubious reputation as the porn production capital of the world.

需要完成的工作量已经超出了坎内根公寓的承载能力，因此他们开始寻找更合适的办公场所。“当我们确定要开展一些业务时，就开始在我们的公寓之间寻找办公空间，最终在范努斯市的卡尔弗特街找到了一处位置，就在一家宣伟油漆店和一栋小办公楼模样的地方之间。”考德威尔回忆道，“走进去时就是一个小型接待区，然后有一间会议室、两间办公室，还有一个起初用作仓库、后来改作质检室的大房间。我们后来又扩展到了隔壁的那块地方，实际上那成了新的仓库，不过我们在那里也玩了不少游戏。”坎内根记得他们最初的办公地点并不理想。“范努斯的仓库位于一个糟糕的街区，那种我肯定不会在晚上出门逛逛的地方。”他的反应并不令人意外。即使在白天，范努斯也可能有些不安全。周边街区的许多公寓和商铺窗户上都有封条，或者环绕着装有铁丝网的围墙。在 NWC 公司到来之前，这片地区曾有着“世界色情片制作中心”的不光彩名声。

Once all the pieces for Might & Magic began to arrive, it was up to the hard-working team at New World to get the orders ready to ship. Pizzas and beer kept the operation floating while they stuffed manuals and disks into boxes before handing everything off to Caldwell, considered to be the company's resident shrinkwrapping expert. "I ended up forklifting everything. I'd run down to United Sales, rent the fork, drive the forklift down Van Nuys Boulevard—cause it was only a couple of blocks away—offload all the trucks that would show up, then drive it back down and drop it off again."

等道《魔法门》游戏的所有部件都运抵，就轮到 NWC 辛勤的团队负责准备订单发货事宜了。在他们将手册和光盘装箱的过程中，披萨和啤酒为整个运营提供了必要的动力。最后所有东西都交到了考德威尔——公司专门负责封膜的专家手上：“最后我不得不用叉车把所有东西都搬起来。我跑到联合销售公司去租了一台叉车，开到范努斯大道上——因为那里距离这里只有几个街区——把货卸到陆续开来的所有货车上，然后再开回去，把车给还掉。”

"Initially I'd been borrowing a forklift from a company that was in our same complex there. As a thank-you, I brought them a copy of Might & Magic one time and tried to drop it off with the receptionist. A guy comes over and he's shaking his head no, and the receptionist hands it back saying, T'm so sorry, we can't accept this gift. We're religious, and we don't believe in this. Computer games are evil."

“起初，我是从我们所在大楼里的一家公司那里借的叉车。作为感谢，有一次我给他们送了一份《魔法门》的游戏，正打算交给接待员。这时有个男人走过来，摇摇头表示拒绝，而接待员则把它交还给我，说道：“非常抱歉，我们不能接受这份礼物。我们是信教的，不相信这些东西。电脑游戏是邪恶的。”

ABOVE: From the official Might & Magic I Cluebook by Mark Caldwell and Jon Van Caneghem. Illustration by Kenneth Mayfield.

上图：出自马克·考德威尔和乔·万·坎内根所著、肯尼斯·梅菲尔德绘制插图的《魔法门1官方线索手册》。

As the sales of Might & Magic continued to skyrocket, Activision prevailed upon the young company to port their popular CRPG to the Commodore 64, IBM, and Macintosh platforms. Caneghem was more than happy to do it because the deal enabled New World to grow, but his company had not been founded simply to fill orders or to continue to shell out new versions of the same game. "There was a lot of demand from players. We needed a new game if we're gonna keep this going, so the obvious choice was to make a sequel." It would have been relatively easy to make a new game that was simply a retread of the original, but Caneghem understood that players would be expecting more. "We'd learned a lot with some of the programmers we brought on, and figured out new things we could do graphically that we didn't know how to do before. We could do better graphics, better sounds, better ways to store things, we could create bigger adventures... all sorts of stuff. And we not only had more hands to write code, but I was bringing aboard real artists, and writers, and sound people. It stopped being a one-person experience and became more like making a movie with different people handling different specializations.”

随着《魔法门》的销量持续飙升，动视公司说服了这家年轻的公司，将他们这款广受欢迎的电脑角色扮演游戏移植到康懋懋达 64、IBM 和麦金塔电脑上。坎内根非常乐意这么做，因为这份交易能让 NWC 进一步发展，并非仅仅为了满足订单需求或继续推出同一款游戏的移植版本。“玩家的需求非常旺盛。如果我们要继续下去，就需要推出一款新游戏，所以显而易见的选择就是制作续作。”原本很容易就能制作一款只是对原作进行简单重复的新游戏，但坎内根明白，玩家会期望更多。“我们从新招聘的程序员那里学到了很多东西，并且在绘图方面也发现了一些以前不知道如何做到的新事情。我们可以有更好的图形效果、更好的音效、更好的数据存储方式，还能创造更宏大的冒险……各种各样的东西。而且我们不仅有了更多的人来编写代码，我还招来了真正的美术、写手和音效师。这不再是一个单人项目，而更像是制作一部电影，由不同的人负责不同的专业领域。”

Among those fresh faces who would help bring Might & Magic II to life was Nicholas Beliaeff. He was a buddy of both Caneghem and CFO Ronald Spitzer, having gotten to know them both over tabletop battles of Diplomacy and Axis & Allies. After learning that Beliaeff had played Might & Magic I all the way through and was free over the summer following his first year in university, Spitzer invited him to join New World in customer service. He became employee number six. Beliaeff rolled his eyes at the memory. "So embryonic.”

在那些能够助力实现《魔法门2》项目的新面孔中，就有尼古拉斯·贝利亚夫。他是坎内根和首席财务官罗纳德·斯皮策的好友，两人都是通过《强权外交》和《轴心国与同盟国》这类桌游结识他的。得知贝利亚夫已经完整地玩完了《魔法门1》，而且在大学第一年结束的暑假有空之后，斯皮策邀请他加入 NWC 公司的客服部门。他成为了公司的第六名员工。贝利亚夫回忆起这件事时微微皱了皱眉：“太稚嫩了。”

Barely a month into his stint handling customer service calls, Beliaeff recalled the exact point at which he received his field promotion to the creative team. "One day Jon comes in and he's got this giant stack of old-school printer paper. It's like a phone book, a few inches thick. And he's having all these problems with monster tables and item tables. Just math and balance stuff, and he knows I do a lot of math, and he's like, 'Oh, this is a problem,' and I'm telling him 'Oh, that's easy. You just do XYZ.' So, he walked over to my desk—which was like a folding table with an Apple II on it—he takes the stack and drops it on my desk and goes ‘You're a designer now!”

贝利亚夫回忆起了他接到通知升职到创意团队的确切时刻，那是在负责处理客服电话工作不到一个月的时间里。“那天乔走了进来，手里大摞老式的打印纸。那简直就像一本电话簿，厚达十厘米。他遇到了很多关于怪物表格和物品表格的问题。都是些数字和平衡的问题，他知道我擅长数学，他就说‘哦，这是个问题’，而我告诉他‘哦，这很简单。你只需做XXX就行’。于是，他走到我的办公桌前——那是一张折叠桌，上面放着一台苹果II电脑——他把那摞纸放在我的办公桌上，然后说‘你现在是设计师了！’”

Vince De Quattro was another early part of the New World Computing team, an artist who had come to Caneghem's attention through Caneghem's first wife Michaela. "I had been the staff illustrator for the Daily Trojan while I was in school, and my fraternity brother's girlfriend, Amanda, referred me to Michaela when they were looking for an illustrator for the instruction booklet for Might & Magic I." After completing the manual, he'd been kept aboard to handle both the advertising and promotional artwork for the sequel as well as the in-game art. "I had this drawing pad from my undergraduate days in Fine Arts at USC. I would sketch in that for traditional flat work, and then razor out the final inked work to be sent to the printer and layout team. All of the digital work was completed via tablet and pen in DPaint II."

文斯·德·夸特罗也是 NWC 公司团队的早期成员之一，他是一位画师，通过坎内根的第一任妻子米凯拉而被坎格姆注意到的。“我在上学期间曾是《特洛伊人日报》（南加州大学校报）的插画师，我好兄弟的女友阿曼达在《魔法门1》为指南手册寻找插画师时，把我介绍给了米凯拉。”完成这份手册后，他便留在了这里，负责为续作制作广告和宣传相关的插画，以及游戏内的插画。“我有一本从我在南加州大学艺术学院读美术本科时就在用的绘图本。我会在那上面进行传统的平面草图绘制，然后用钢笔勾勒出来。最终作品将被送交印刷和排版团队。所有的数字画稿都是通过绘图板和笔在 DPaint II 软件中完成的。

De Quattro truly enjoyed his time working at New World in the late 1980s. "Jon had put together a great team of coders and support staff, and we all got along well. We were young, just out of college, and the money was good. We'd host company lunches at the studio and play dice games, video games, or basketball in the parking lot. It seemed like the long summers in Encino would never end."

德·夸特罗确实非常享受 20 世纪 80 年代末在 NWC 公司工作的那段时光：“乔组建了一支出色的程序员和后勤人员团队，我们相处得非常融洽。我们都很年轻，刚从大学毕业，而且薪水也不错。我们会在工作室举办公司聚餐，还会在停车场玩骰骰子游戏、电子游戏或者打篮球。似乎在恩西诺市，漫长的夏日永远不会结束。”

While the team members were all enjoying their jobs, it wasn't always easy for Caneghem. He knew that delegation and using specialists were key to taking the franchise to the next level, but making the transition from a one-man band to the leader of a team wasn't without its difficulties. "It's tough to suddenly be at a higher level, and it's a whole other set of skills. For the first one, I was doing everything. I had a good grasp on how long something would take to code or get working or to test. Once you start adding three, four, or five people on the team, or ten or more, though, that prediction was completely chaotic. And it spirals out of control very quickly. The hardest lesson was to keep the dev team moving forward. You had all the inter-disciplines. Will they have to finish this before they can do that? I'd never experienced that before because I did everything myself. Now you have this assembly line of people, and you gotta keep them all busy, and it never added up, never added up. I'd be thinking This should take five people a month, but it would take ten people three months, you know, like so much waste, so much downtime where people weren't progressing."

虽然团队成员们都乐在其中，但坎内根却并非总是如此轻松愉快。他知道授权和使用专业人员对于将特许经营业务提升到新的水平至关重要，但从单人团队到团队领导的转变并非一帆风顺。“突然升到更高的层级是很艰难的，而且需要掌握全新的技能。对于第一种情况，我什么都亲力亲为过。我清楚每项工作需要多长时间才能编写完成、运行起来或者测试通过。但一旦团队成员增加到四五人，或者十人甚至更多，这种预测就会变得完全混乱不堪。而且情况会迅速失控。最困难的工作就是维持开发团队稳步推进。你在心里打好了所有的规划，“他们不是得先完成这项任务才能继续进行下一步吗？”我以前从未遇到过这种情况，因为我都是自己完成所有工作的。现在我有了这样一整个流水线的人员，而且得让所有人都忙个不停，但这一切却总是无法协调一致，总~是~无法协调一致。我会想：这项工作本应该由五个人一个月完成，但实际上是需要十个人三个月才能完成，你知道的，简直就是浪费，有那么多的闲置时间，人们也没有取得任何进展。”

As the development on the sequel continued to slip further and further behind schedule, and as the sales of Might & Magic I began to wane, everyone in the company began to feel the pinch as resources began to dry up. "We really had to get Might & Magic II out there so we could eat," Beliaeff chuckles. "On payday, back when you would get physical checks, we would do two things. First, we'd asked who in the company had the most need, and they would go to the bank first 'cause sometimes it cleared and sometimes it didn't. The other thing was—and I don't know who started it, maybe Mark Caldwell—but you'd take the check and throw it on the ground to see if it bounced. So, it was all the startup stuff.”

随着续作的开发进度不断严重滞后，《魔法门1》的销量也开始下滑，公司里的每个人都开始感受到压力，因为资源正开始枯竭。“我们真的必须把《魔法门2》推出去，这样才能吃得饱饭。”贝利亚夫笑着说，“那时发工资的时候，你会收到纸质的支票，所以我们会做两件事。首先，我们会询问公司里谁的需求最为迫切，然后以他们为优先去银行取钱，因为有时钱能取出来，有时却取不出来。另一件事是——我不知道是谁起的头，可能是马克·考德威尔——就是拿起你的支票甩在地上，看它是不是会弹起来。尽是这类创业初期的事情。”

Caneghem keenly recalled the pressure to get Might & Magic II done. "The project almost killed me. The marketing for Christmas was already out there, but it wasn't looking like we were going to get there, and New World was running out of money. We had to get the sequel finished, so I locked myself in a hotel room for three weeks with the disks and the source code. People would just bring me food while I coded nonstop. I don't know how many hours a day it was. I would just sleep and code as the time was running out and the market window was happening. It was awful, but I did it. I think the last day or two Mark and I were up like forty-eight hours straight, and we had to drive to San Diego to the disk duplicator—Allenbach I think it was called— to hand it off so they could spin up the duplication in time for us to meet our deadline. I don't know how we got there, but we got it duplicated, and then I realized I had pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. I'd worked myself into oblivion."

坎内根清晰地记得当时那种急于完成《魔法门2》的强烈压力：“这个项目差点要了我的命。圣诞节的营销活动已经开始，但看起来我们似乎不会去那里了， NWC 的钱都快花光了，我们得把这部续作完成。于是，我拿着那些光盘和源代码，把自己关在酒店房间里整整三个星期。人们会给我送来食物，而我则不停地进行编程工作。具体每天工作多少小时，我并不清楚，我除了睡觉就是编程。随着时间的流逝，市场时机也在临近，那种感觉糟透了，但我还是坚持了下来。我记得最后的两天里，马克和我连续工作了整整 48 个小时，然后我们还得开车去圣地亚哥的磁盘复制中心——我记得那里叫阿伦巴赫——把光盘送过去，以便他们能够及时启动刻盘，赶上我们的截止日期。我不知道我们是如何到达那里的，但刻盘刚刚开始，我就意识到自己得了肺炎，结果就进了医院。我把自己累得几乎失去意识了。”