Making computer games has its drawbacks. But one nice thing about them is that you know when they succeed. They can succeed commercially (i.e. make a profit) and they can succeed critically.

With The Political Machine, it appears we've done both.  Which lets us breathe a sigh of relief because it was a very close thing for us.  I had the idea for the game floating around my head since the 2000 election. And even before that, I had given some thought to doing a game based on politics.  But after the Bush/Gore 2000 election, I knew that we needed to make a game before the next election.

But we almost didn't have time.  We went a bit late on getting the expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations done.  So in January of 2004, we began development of The Political Machine.  We had to finish the game by June in order to have the game out in time for the election season.

That gave us 6 months to come up with a game, write a 3D engine, and put it all together in a single solid package.  I was vaguely aware that there were other games out there but didn't have much time to look at them. The main impression I got was that they were focusing more on being election simulations. I didn't want to make a simulation. I wanted to make a game. Specifically, I wanted to make a strategy game with very well defined game mechanics and rules that would be easy to understand for casual gamers but satisfy hard core political junkies.

In June, we did indeed finish the game and we got it out the door in time. It was pretty solid other than not realizing that our use of True Type Fonts would prevent it from working on those older (but more common than we realized) integrated Intel video adapters (which is one reason why user reviews tend to be a bit lower than the actual review - doesn't take too many ticked off people who can't run the game to lower a user review).

Here's a round-up from slate:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2108292/

and

Here's a look at the games of this genre from Gamespy.

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/559/559987p1.html

The Slate article is by no means definitive since it's one reviewer's point of view.  But it choosing The Political Machine as the best game of the pack definitely made us feel pretty good here. I think it really boils down to whether you're looking for a simulation or a strategy game. If you want to play politics as a strategy game then I think The Political Machine is very strong.  If you want a more in depth simulation, then one of the other games may be your ideal.

How much we can update the game really depends a lot on our publisher. All our updates have to go through them and they have a finite QA budget so we have to make it worth their while to do more updates.  But we do plan to release an update after the election that takes into account the new political realities.