After doing well at his suburban Los Angeles high school despite the lure of wargames - he graduated 19th in a class of 572 - he proceeded to Claremont Men’s College in 1975 to pursue a degree in Economics. The same could be said of the company he would later found.īut it was awfully hard in those early days for Joel or anyone in his family to imagine how he could turn his passion into a living wage, especially given that he wasn’t and would never be so much a start-from-scratch designer as an avid, gifted player.
Encouraged to find a more social outlet for his “hobby,” he raided his high school’s chess club to form a wargaming club with himself as founder, president, and, it seems safe to say, most passionate member by a country mile. He tried to recreate every single game of the 1969 football season for every single team - hundreds of individual matches - using Strat-O-Matic Football, finally stopping out of sheer exhaustion with just twenty or so matches left to play. While other boys played sports, or merely watched them, Joel was determined to simulate them. Instead of playing with cars or model trains, Joel re-fought the major battles of World War II and the American Civil War on his bedroom floor, having simultaneous and almost equally pitched real-world battles with the family dog, who wanted to play too. Robert Billings, who regarded gaming only as an occasional pleasant diversion, soon had cause to wonder whether that introduction has been a wise move young Joel got obsessed right from the first. His father taught him to play the old Avalon Hill wargame classic Tactics II in 1965, when he was just 7 years old.
Joel Billings is about as close to a literal lifelong gamer as it’s possible to be. I’m a game player, mostly, that’s about it.
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