Alan Emrich

Alan Emrich is best known as a writer about and designer of video games, who coined the term "4X", contributed to the design of Master of Orion and Master of Orion 3, and wrote strategy guides for video games. Before the rise of video games, Emrich wrote about and designed board games and organized conventions about them. He currently runs a small game publishing company and lectures in game design and project management. In 2001 Emrich received the Blomgren / Hamilton Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement from ConsimWorld.COM.

Emrich coined the term "4X" ("eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate") in his 1993 review of Master of Orion in Computer Gaming World, describing strategy games that involve exploration, expansion, and exploitation of territory, and extermination of opponents. The design of Master of Orion includes several suggestions he and Tom Hughes made.

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 wished to explain.

Emrich wrote or co-wrote the following strategy guides:

He has severely criticized recent strategy guides for:

The faults, he says, are mainly caused by the game publishers' and guide publishers' haste to get their products on to the market.

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 some board and card games.

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