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Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist, humanitarian, and member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He is the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and its 1993 film adaptation, Schindler's List, which reflected his life as an opportunist initially motivated by profit who came to show extraordinary initiative, tenacity, courage, and dedication in saving his Jewish employees' lives.

Schindler grew up in Zwittau, Moravia, and worked in several trades until he joined the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939. Before the beginning of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he collected information on railways and troop movements for the German government. He was arrested for espionage by the Czechoslovak government but was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement that year. He continued to collect information for the Nazis, working in Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. In 1939, he acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, which employed, at its peak in 1944, about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. His Abwehr connections helped him protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. As time went on, he had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.

By July 1944, Germany was losing the war; the SS began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and deporting the remaining prisoners westward. Many were murdered in Auschwitz and the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Schindler convinced SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, commandant of the nearby Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brněnec/Brünnlitz in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, thus sparing his workers from almost certain death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Using names provided by Jewish Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg, Göth's secretary Mietek Pemper compiled and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled to Brünnlitz in October 1944. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent his workers' execution until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, by which time he had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black market purchases of supplies for his workers.

Schindler moved to West Germany after the war, where he was supported by assistance payments from Jewish relief organisations. After receiving a partial reimbursement for his wartime expenses, he moved with his wife Emilie to Argentina, where they took up farming. When he went bankrupt in 1958, Schindler left his wife and returned to Germany, where he failed at several business ventures and relied on financial support from Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews")—the people whose lives he had saved during the war. He died on 9 October 1974 in Hildesheim, Germany, and was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, possibly the only former member of the Nazi Party to be honoured in this way. He and his wife Emilie were named Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government in 1993.

Early life and education
Schindler was born on 28 April 1908, into a Sudeten German family in Zwittau, Moravia, Austria-Hungary. His father was Johann "Hans" Schindler, the owner of a farm machinery business, and his mother was Franziska "Fanny" Schindler (née Luser). His sister, Elfriede, was born in 1915. After attending primary and secondary school, Schindler enrolled in a technical school, from which he was expelled in 1924 for forging his report card. He later graduated, but did not take the Abitur exams that would have enabled him to go to college or university. Instead, he took courses in Brno in several trades, including chauffeuring and machinery, and worked for his father for three years. A motorcycle fan since his youth, he bought a 250-cc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycle and competed recreationally in mountain races for the next few years.

On 6 March 1928, Schindler married Emilie Pelzl, daughter of a prosperous Sudeten German farmer from Maletein. They moved in with Oskar's parents and occupied the upstairs rooms, where they lived for seven years.

Soon after his marriage, Schindler quit working for his father and took a series of jobs, including a position at Moravian Electrotechnic and the management of a driving school. After an 18-month stint in the Czech army, where he rose to the rank of lance corporal in the Tenth Infantry Regiment of the 31st Army, he returned to Moravian Electrotechnic, which went bankrupt shortly afterward. His father's farm machinery business closed around the same time, leaving Schindler unemployed for a year. He took a job with Jaroslav Šimek Bank of Prague in 1931, where he worked until 1938.

Schindler was arrested several times in 1931 and 1932 for public drunkenness. Also around this time, he had an affair with Aurelie Schlegel, a school friend. They had a daughter, Emily, in 1933, and a son, Oskar Jr, in 1935. Schindler later claimed the boy was not his son. Schindler's father, an alcoholic, abandoned his wife in 1935. She died a few months later after a long illness.

Spy for the Abwehr
Schindler joined the separatist Sudeten German Party in 1935. Although a citizen of Czechoslovakia, Schindler became a spy for the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. He was assigned to Abwehrstelle II Commando VIII, based in Breslau. He later told Czech police that he did it because he needed the money; by this time Schindler had a drinking problem and was chronically in debt.

His tasks for the Abwehr included collecting information on railways, military installations and troop movements, as well as recruiting other spies within Czechoslovakia in advance of Nazi Germany's planned invasion. He was arrested by the Czech government for espionage on 18 July 1938 and immediately imprisoned, but released as a political prisoner under the terms of the Munich Agreement, the instrument under which the Czech Sudetenland was annexed by Germany on 1 October. Schindler applied for membership in the Nazi Party on 1 November and was accepted the following year.

After some time off to recover in Zwittau, Schindler was promoted to second in command of his Abwehr unit and relocated with his wife to Ostrava (Ostrau), on the Czech-Polish border, in January 1939. He was involved in espionage in the months leading up to Hitler's seizure of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March. Emilie helped him with paperwork, processing and hiding secret documents in their apartment for the Abwehr office. As Schindler frequently travelled to Poland on business, he and his 25 agents were in a position to collect information about Polish military activities and railways for the planned invasion of Poland. One assignment called for his unit to monitor and provide information about the railway line and tunnel in the Jablunkov Pass, deemed critical for the movement of German troops. Schindler continued to work for the Abwehr until as late as fall 1940, when he was sent to Turkey to investigate corruption among the Abwehr officers assigned to the German embassy there.

Emalia
Schindler first arrived in Kraków (Krakau) in October 1939, on Abwehr business, and took an apartment the following month. Emilie maintained the apartment in Ostrava and visited Oskar in Kraków at least once a week. In November 1939, he contacted interior decorator Mila Pfefferberg to decorate his new apartment. Her son, Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, soon became one of his contacts for black market trading. They eventually became lifelong friends.

The same month, Schindler was introduced to Itzhak Stern, an accountant for Schindler's fellow Abwehr agent Josef "Sepp" Aue, who had taken over Stern's formerly Jewish-owned place of employment as a Treuhänder (trustee). Property belonging to Polish Jews, including their possessions, places of business, and homes, were seized by the Germans beginning immediately after the invasion, and Jewish citizens were stripped of their civil rights. Schindler showed Stern the balance sheet of a company he was thinking of acquiring, an enamelware factory called Rekord Ltd owned by a consortium of Jewish businessmen that had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year. Stern advised him that rather than running the company as a trusteeship under the auspices of the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office for the East), he should buy or lease the business, as that would give him more freedom from the Nazis' dictates, including freedom to hire more Jews.

With the financial backing of several Jewish investors, including one of the owners, Abraham Bankier, Schindler signed an informal lease agreement on the factory on 13 November 1939 and formalised the arrangement on 15 January 1940. He renamed it Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (German Enamelware Factory) or DEF, and it soon became known by the nickname "Emalia". He initially acquired a staff of seven Jewish workers (including Bankier, who helped him manage the company) and 250 non-Jewish Poles. At its peak in 1944, the business employed around 1,750 workers, a thousand of whom were Jews. Schindler also helped run Schlomo Wiener Ltd, a wholesale outfit that sold his enamelware, and was leaseholder of Prokosziner Glashütte, a glass factory.

Schindler's ties with the Abwehr and his connections in the Wehrmacht and its Armaments Inspectorate enabled him to obtain contracts to produce enamel cookware for the military. These connections also later helped him protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death. As time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe. Bankier, a key black market connection, obtained goods for bribes as well as extra materials for use in the factory. Schindler himself enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and pursued extramarital relationships with his secretary, Viktoria Klonowska, and Eva Kisch Scheuer, a merchant specialising in enamelware from DEF. Emilie Schindler visited for a few months in 1940 and moved to Kraków to live with Oskar in 1941.

Initially, Schindler was mostly interested in the business's money-making potential, and hired Jews because they were cheaper than Poles—the wages were set by the occupying Nazi regime. Later he began shielding his workers without regard for cost. The status of his factory as a business essential to the war effort became a decisive factor in enabling him to protect his Jewish workers. Whenever Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) were threatened with deportation, he claimed exemptions for them. He claimed wives, children, and even people with disabilities were necessary mechanics and metalworkers. On one occasion, the Gestapo came to Schindler demanding that he hand over a family that possessed forged identity papers. "Three hours after they walked in," Schindler said, "two drunk Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incriminating documents they had demanded."

On 1 August 1940, Governor-General Hans Frank issued a decree requiring all Kraków Jews to leave the city within two weeks. Only those who had jobs directly related to the German war effort would be allowed to stay. Of the 60,000 to 80,000 Jews then living in the city, only 15,000 remained by March 1941. These Jews were then forced to leave their traditional neighbourhood of Kazimierz and relocate to the walled Kraków Ghetto, established in the industrial Podgórze district. Schindler's workers travelled on foot to and from the ghetto each day to their jobs at the factory. Enlargements to the facility in the four years Schindler was in charge included the addition of an outpatient clinic, co-op, kitchen, and dining room for the workers, in addition to expansion of the factory and its related office space.

Płaszów
In fall 1941, the Nazis began transporting Jews out of the ghetto. Most of them were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp and murdered. On 13 March 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and those still fit for work were sent to the new concentration camp at Płaszów. Several thousand not deemed fit for work were sent to extermination camps and murdered; hundreds more were murdered on the streets by the Nazis as they cleared out the ghetto. Aware of the plans because of his Wehrmacht contacts, Schindler had his workers stay at the factory overnight to protect them from harm. He witnessed the ghetto's liquidation and was appalled. From that point, says Schindlerjude Sol Urbach, Schindler "changed his mind about the Nazis. He decided to get out and to save as many Jews as he could."

The Płaszów concentration camp opened in March 1943 on the former site of two Jewish cemeteries on Jerozilimska Street, about 2.5 km from the DEF factory. In charge of the camp was SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, a sadist who shot inmates at random. Płaszów's inmates lived in constant fear for their lives. Emilie Schindler called Göth "the most despicable man I have ever met."

Göth's plan was that all the factories, including Schindler's, should be moved inside the camp gates. But with a combination of diplomacy, flattery, and bribery, Schindler not only prevented his factory from being moved, but convinced Göth to allow him to build (at Schindler's own expense) a subcamp at Emalia to house his workers and 450 Jews from other nearby factories. There they were safe from the threat of random execution, well fed and housed, and permitted to undertake religious observances.

Schindler was arrested twice on suspicion of black market activities and once for breaking the Nuremberg Laws by kissing a Jewish girl, an action forbidden by the Race and Resettlement Act. The first arrest, in late 1941, led to him being kept overnight. His secretary arranged for his release through Schindler's influential contacts in the Nazi Party. His second arrest, on 29 April 1942, was the result of his kissing a Jewish girl on the cheek at his birthday party at the factory the previous day. He remained in jail five days before his influential Nazi contacts could obtain his release. In October 1944, he was arrested again, accused of black marketeering and bribing Göth and others to improve the conditions of the Jewish workers. He was held for most of a week and released. Göth had been arrested on 13 September 1944 for corruption and other abuses of power, and Schindler's arrest was part of the ongoing investigation into Göth's activities. Göth was never convicted on those charges.

In 1943, Schindler was contacted by Zionist leaders in Budapest via members of the Jewish resistance movement. He travelled to Budapest several times to report in person on Nazi mistreatment of the Jews. He brought back funding provided by the Jewish Agency for Israel and turned it over to the Jewish underground.

Brünnlitz
As the Red Army drew nearer in July 1944, the SS began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the remaining prisoners westward to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Göth's personal secretary, Mietek Pemper, alerted Schindler to the Nazis' plans to close all factories not directly involved in the war effort, including Schindler's. Pemper suggested to Schindler that production be switched from cookware to anti-tank grenades in an effort to save the Jewish workers' lives. Using bribery and his powers of persuasion, Schindler convinced Göth and the officials in Berlin to allow him to move his factory and his workers to Brünnlitz (Czech: Brněnec), in the Sudetenland, thus sparing them from certain death in the gas chambers. Using names provided by Jewish Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg, Pemper compiled and typed the list of 1,200 Jews—1,000 of Schindler's workers and 200 inmates from Julius Madritsch's textiles factory—who were sent to Brünnlitz in October 1944.

On 15 October 1944 a train carrying 700 men on Schindler's list was initially sent to the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen, where the men spent about a week before being rerouted to the factory in Brünnlitz. Three hundred female Schindlerjuden were similarly sent to Auschwitz, where they were in imminent danger of being sent to the gas chambers. Schindler's usual connections and bribes failed to win their release. Finally, after he sent his secretary, Hilde Albrecht, with bribes of black market goods, food and diamonds, the women were sent to Brünnlitz after several harrowing weeks in Auschwitz.

In addition to workers, Schindler moved 250 wagonloads of machinery and raw materials to the new factory. Few if any useful artillery shells were produced at the plant. When officials from the Armaments Ministry questioned the factory's low output, Schindler bought finished goods on the black market and resold them as his own. The rations provided by the SS were insufficient to meet the workers' needs, so Schindler spent most of his time in Kraków, obtaining food, armaments, and other materials. His wife Emilie remained in Brünnlitz, surreptitiously obtaining additional rations and caring for the workers' health and other basic needs. Schindler also arranged for the transfer of as many as 3,000 Jewish women out of Auschwitz to small textiles plants in the Sudetenland in an effort to increase their chances of surviving the war.

In January 1945, a trainload of 250 Jews who had been rejected as workers at a German mine in Goleschau in occupied Poland arrived at Brünnlitz. The boxcars were frozen shut when they arrived, and Emilie Schindler waited while an engineer from the factory opened them with a soldering iron. Twelve people were dead in the cars, and the remainder were too ill and feeble to work. Emilie took the survivors into the factory and cared for them in a makeshift hospital until the end of the war. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the slaughter of his workers as the Red Army approached. On 7 May 1945, he and his workers gathered on the factory floor to listen to British prime minister Winston Churchill announce over the radio that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe was over.

After the war
As a member of the Nazi Party and the Abwehr intelligence service, Schindler was in danger of being arrested as a war criminal. Bankier, Stern, and several others prepared a statement he could present to the Americans attesting to his role in saving Jewish lives.

After the liquidation of the Płaszów camp, the Schindlerjuden decided to give Schindler a memento. The original investors in the enamel factory canvassed the workers for ideas. Knowing there were several jewelers among their group, a man named Simon Yeret, formerly a prosperous timber merchant, offered a gold bridge from his own mouth. The bridge was removed and its metal melted with a few scavenged silver coins.

A jeweler named Jozef Gross cut a section of lead pipe and created a master signet ring out of which the gold version would be cast. Gross shaved two cuttlebones flat and squeezed the lead master between them until an impression had been pressed into the mold. This was filled with the gold from Yeret's bridge. Gross then filed and polished the gold ring. He engraved a paraphrase from the Talmud in Hebrew on the ring that said, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Despite his mixed feelings about Schindler's character, Gross kept the cuttlebone mold and lead master for the rest of his life. They are currently housed at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. The whereabouts of the actual ring have long been unknown, nor is it clear what Schindler did with it after the war.

Escape to the American lines
To escape capture by the Soviets, Schindler and his wife departed westward in their vehicle, a two-seater Horch, initially with several fleeing German soldiers riding on the running boards. A truck containing Schindler's mistress Marta, several Jewish workers, and a load of black market trade goods followed. Soviet troops confiscated the Horch at the city of České Budějovice, which the Soviets had already captured. The Schindlers were unable to recover a diamond Oskar had hidden under the seat. They continued by train and on foot until they reached the American lines at the town of Lenora, and then travelled to Passau, where an American Jewish officer arranged for them to travel to Switzerland by train. They moved to Bavaria in Germany in late 1945.

By the end of the war, Schindler had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black market purchases of supplies for his workers. Virtually destitute, he moved briefly to Regensburg and later Munich, but did not prosper in postwar Germany. He was reduced to receiving assistance from Jewish organisations. In 1948 he presented a claim for reimbursement of his wartime expenses to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and received $15,000. He estimated his expenditures at over $1,056,000, including the costs of camp construction, bribes, and expenditures for black market goods, including food.

In 1949, Schindler emigrated to Argentina, where he tried raising chickens and then nutria (coypu), a small animal raised for its fur. When the business went bankrupt in 1958, he left his wife and returned to Germany, where he had a series of unsuccessful business ventures, including a cement factory. He declared bankruptcy in 1963 and suffered a heart attack the next year, which led to a monthlong hospital stay. Remaining in contact with many of the Jews he had met during the war, including Stern and Pfefferberg, Schindler survived on donations sent by Schindlerjuden from all over the world.

For his work during the war, on 8 May 1962, Yad Vashem invited Schindler to a ceremony in which a carob tree was planted in his honour on the Avenue of the Righteous. Schindler received awards for his efforts, including the German Order of Merit in 1966.

Schindler died of liver failure on 9 October 1974. He is buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, possibly the only member of the Nazi Party to be honoured in this way.

On 24 June 1993, he and his wife were named Righteous Among the Nations, an award the State of Israel bestows on non-Jews who took an active role in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Schindler, along with Karl Plagge, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, Helmut Kleinicke, and Hans Walz are among the few Nazi Party members to be given this award.

Writer Herbert Steinhouse, who interviewed Schindler in 1948, wrote: "Schindler's exceptional deeds stemmed from just that elementary sense of decency and humanity that our sophisticated age seldom sincerely believes in. A repentant opportunist saw the light and rebelled against the sadism and vile criminality all around him." In a 1983 television documentary, Schindler is quoted as saying: "I felt that the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them; there was no choice."

In the former Czechoslovakia, his reputation is mixed, as he is negatively remembered for his service in the Abwehr and for his support of German separatism in the Sudetenland. Efforts to convert the factory site in Brněnec to a museum have failed for lack of financial support.

Films and book
In 1951, Poldek Pfefferberg approached director Fritz Lang and asked him to consider making a film about Schindler. Also on Pfefferberg's initiative, in 1964 Schindler received a $20,000 advance from MGM for a proposed film treatment titled To the Last Hour. Neither film was made, and Schindler quickly spent the money he received from MGM. He was also approached in the 1960s by MCA of Germany and Walt Disney Productions in Vienna, but again nothing came of these projects.

In 1980, Australian author Thomas Keneally by chance visited Pfefferberg's luggage store in Beverly Hills while en route home from a film festival in Europe, and Pfefferberg told him Schindler's story. He gave Keneally copies of some materials he had on file, and Keneally soon decided to make a fictionalised treatment of the story. After extensive research and interviews with surviving Schindlerjuden, he wrote his historical novel Schindler's Ark (published in the United States as Schindler's List), which was released in 1982.

The novel was adapted as the 1993 movie Schindler's List by director Steven Spielberg. Although Spielberg had acquired the film rights ten years earlier, he did not feel he was emotionally or professionally ready to tackle it, and offered the project to several other directors. Later, after reading a script for the project prepared by Steven Zaillian for Martin Scorsese, he decided to trade him Cape Fear for the opportunity to do the Schindler biopic. In the film, the character Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kingsley) is a composite of Stern, Bankier and Pemper. Liam Neeson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Schindler, and the film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

Other film treatments include a 1983 British television documentary produced by Jon Blair for Thames Television, Schindler: His Story as Told by the Actual People He Saved (released in the US in 1994 as Schindler: The Real Story), and a 1998 A&E Biography special, Oskar Schindler: The Man Behind the List.

Schindler's suitcase
In 1997, a suitcase belonging to Schindler containing historic photographs and documents was discovered in the attic of the apartment of Ami and Heinrich Staehr in Hildesheim. Schindler had stayed with the couple for a few days shortly before his death in 1974. Staehr's son Chris took the suitcase to Stuttgart, where the documents were examined in detail in 1999 by Wolfgang Borgmann, science editor of the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Borgmann wrote a series of seven articles that appeared in the paper from 16 to 26 October 1999 and were eventually published in book form as Schindlers Koffer: Berichte aus dem Leben eines Lebensretters; eine Dokumentation der Stuttgarter Zeitung (Schindler's Suitcase: Reports from the Life of a Lifesaver). The documents and suitcase were sent to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in Israel for safekeeping in December 1999.

Copies of the list
In early April 2009, a carbon copy of one version of the list was discovered at the State Library of New South Wales by workers combing through boxes of materials collected by Keneally. The 13-page document, yellow and fragile, was filed among research notes and original newspaper clippings. The document was given to Keneally in 1980 by Pfefferberg when he was persuading him to write Schindler's story. This version of the list contains 801 names and is dated 18 April 1945; Pfefferberg is listed as worker number 173. Several authentic versions of the list exist, because the names were retyped several times as conditions changed in the hectic days at the end of the war.

One of four existing copies of the list was offered at a ten-day auction starting on 19 July 2013 on eBay at a reserve price of $3 million. It received no bids.

Other memorabilia
In August 2013, a one-page letter signed by Schindler on 22 August 1944 sold in an online auction for $59,135. The letter noted Schindler's permission for a factory supervisor to move machinery to Czechoslovakia. The same unknown auction buyer had previously purchased 1943 construction documents for Schindler's Kraków factory for $63,426.

title: Oskar Schindler


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John Carmack

John D. Carmack II (born August 21, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.

In 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR as their CTO. In 2019, he reduced his role to Consulting CTO so he could allocate more time toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies.

Early life
Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack. He grew up in the Kansas City metropolitan area, where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri.

Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up game Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.

As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school with other children to steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole and instead opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. Carmack was arrested and sent for psychiatric evaluation. He was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer.

Career
Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana, hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple II GS publication), introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (no relation). Later, Softdisk would place this team in charge of a new, but short-lived, bi-monthly game subscription product called Gamer's Edge for the IBM PC (DOS) platform. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, a series that was published by Apogee Software, under the shareware distribution model, from 1991 onwards. Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software.

Carmack has pioneered or popularized the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh" for Commander Keen, ray casting for Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D, binary space partitioning which Doom became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake, Carmack's Reverse (formally known as z-fail stencil shadows) which he devised for Doom 3, and MegaTexture technology, first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Quake 3 popularized the fast inverse square root algorithm.

Carmack's engines have also been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. In 2007, when Carmack was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on his cellphone, and decided he was going to make a "good" mobile game.

On August 7, 2013, Carmack joined Oculus VR as their CTO. On November 22, 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR. Carmack's reason for leaving was that id's parent company ZeniMax Media did not want to support Oculus Rift. Carmack's role at both companies later became central to a ZeniMax lawsuit against Oculus' parent company, Facebook, claiming that Oculus stole ZeniMax's virtual reality intellectual property. The trial jury absolved Carmack of liability, though Oculus and other corporate officers were held liable for trademark, copyright, and contract violations.

In February 2017, Carmack sued ZeniMax, claiming the company had refused to pay him the remaining $22.5 million (~$ in ) owed to him from their purchase of id Software. In October 2018, Carmack stated that he and ZeniMax had reached an agreement and that "Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me", ending the suit.

On November 13, 2019, Carmack stepped down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). On August 19, 2022, Carmack announced that he has raised $20M for Keen Technologies, his new AGI company. On December 16, 2022, Carmack left Oculus to focus on Keen.

Workstyle
Carmack has maintained a sixty-hour work week, working a 10-hour day, six days a week, throughout his career. He has spoken publicly about the importance of long hours of uninterrupted focus in his work. Not only does high intensity allow him to make progress more quickly, but long hours are also critical to maintaining a focused mindset over time. Despite working such a demanding schedule, he has never experienced burnout.

Carmack is also known for taking week-long programming retreats. These retreats involve a solitary, uninterrupted period away from his normal routine often sequestered in a random city and hotel. The goal of these retreats is to allow Carmack to operate at full cognitive capacity, tackling a specific, difficult problem or learning a new skill. The solitude and physical isolation of these retreats offer the perfect environment for deep focus and reflection, making them an essential part of Carmack's creative process.

Carmack was vocal about his frustration with the bureaucratic inefficiencies he encountered during his time at Meta. In his departure memo, he stated, "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort," he wrote. "I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it."

Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation. He compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent" where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes. According to Carmack, this principle is proven by his own experience, and he has observed this in many of the smartest people in the world. He states, "Little tiny steps using local information winds up leading to all the best answers."

Armadillo Aerospace

Around 2000, Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth. Reviewing how much money he was spending on customizing Ferraris, he began by giving financial support to a few local amateur engineers. Carmack funded the company, called Armadillo Aerospace, out of his own pocket, for "something north of a million dollars a year." The company of hobbyists made steady progress toward their goals of suborbital space flight and eventual orbital vehicles. In October 2008, Armadillo Aerospace competed in a NASA contest known as the Lunar Lander Challenge, winning first place in the Level 1 competition along with $350,000 (~$ in ). In September 2009, they completed Level 2 and were awarded $500,000 (~$ in ). The company went into "hibernation mode" in 2013.

According to Carmack, the work in the Aerospace industry is "simple" compared to the work he does in video games.

Open-source software
Carmack is an advocate of open-source software, and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to software patents, equating them to robbery. He has also contributed to open-source projects, such as starting the initial port of the X Window System to Mac OS X Server and working to improve the OpenGL drivers for Linux through the Utah GLX project.

Carmack released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom source code in 1997, first under a custom license and then under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 1999. When the source code to Quake was leaked and circulated among the Quake community underground in 1997 after licensee Crack dot Com was hacked, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software named Greg Alexander used it to port Quake to Linux using SVGALib. As this was more feature rich than Dave Taylor's earlier X11 port, he sent the patches to Carmack. Instead of pursuing legal action, id Software used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port maintained by new hire Zoid Kirsch, who later ported Quakeworld and Quake II to Linux as well.

id Software has since publicly released the source code to Quake in 1999, Quake 2 in 2001, Quake 3 in 2005 and lastly Doom 3 in 2011 (and later the BFG Edition in 2012). The source code for Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D (as well as Carmack's earlier Catacomb) was released in June 2014 by Flat Rock Software with Carmack's blessing. He has since expressed regret on using the copyleft GPL over the more permissive BSD license.

The release of id Tech 4 occurred despite patent concerns from Creative Labs over Carmack's reverse, while the original Doom source release shipped without music due to complications with the Cygnus Studios developed DMX library (which lead to the Linux version being selected for release). Carmack has since advised developers to be careful when utilizing middleware, noting how it can limit the possibilities of later releasing source code. Tim Sweeney has implied this issue has hindered potential releases of older Unreal Engine source code.

On the other hand, despite his technical admiration for the system, Carmack has several times over the years voiced a sceptical opinion about Linux as a gaming platform. In 2013, he argued for emulation as the "proper technical direction for gaming on Linux", and in 2014 he voiced the opinion that Linux might be the biggest problem for the success of the Steam Machine.

Carmack contributes to charities and gaming communities. Some of the recipients of Carmack's charitable contributions include his former high school, promoters of open-source software, opponents of software patents, and game enthusiasts.

Personal life
Carmack was so successful at id that by mid-1994 he had purchased two Ferraris: a 328 and a Ferrari Testarossa. In 1997, he gave away one of his Ferraris (a 328 model) as a prize to Dennis Fong, the winner of the Quake tournament "Red Annihilation".

He met his now ex-wife Katherine Anna Kang, at the 1997 QuakeCon when she visited id's offices. As a bet, Kang challenged Carmack to sponsor the first All Female Quake Tournament if she was able to produce a significant number of participants. Carmack predicted a maximum of 25 participants, but there were 1,500. Carmack and Kang married on January 1, 2000, and planned a ceremony in Hawaii. Steve Jobs requested that they would postpone the ceremony so Carmack could attend the MacWorld Expo on January 5, 2000. Carmack declined and suggested making a video instead. Carmack and Kang had a son Christopher Ryan in August 2004. Their second son was born in November 2009.

Carmack is divorced as of 2022. On May 26, 2022, he announced his divorce and how he met his partner Trista through the VR Beat Saber games he would host via Twitter.

As a game developer, Carmack differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding commitment to a final release date for any game he was developing. Instead, when asked for a release date on a new game, Carmack would usually reply that the game would be released "when it's done". Employees at Apogee, in their past years the publishers of games by id Software, adopted this business practice as well. In 2019, as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, Carmack stated that his beliefs have changed over time: "I largely recant from that now." On Rage 6-year development time he says: "I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to ship it 2 years earlier". Carmack also reflected on the internal development of Quake in this regard and described it as "traumatic" and says id Software could have split the game into two parts and shipped it earlier.

Carmack has a blog last updated in 2006 (previously a .plan, which could be accessed by making a finger request for ), an active Twitter account, and also occasionally posts comments to Slashdot.

Carmack supported the 2012 presidential campaign of Libertarian Ron Paul, and is an atheist. During a conversation with Joe Rogan, Carmack revealed that he had trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Judo for several years as a hobby.

During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. Carmack had been such a regular customer that they continued to charge him 1995 prices.

On occasion he has commended the efforts of similarly focused programmers – first Ken Silverman, who wrote the Build engine for 3D Realms, and later with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, who wrote the Unreal Engine.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: John Carmack


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Talk:Plesiochronous digital hierarchy/Archive 1

Re spelling of plesiochronous - lots of references on the Internet spell it the same way, so I'd say you have spelt it correctly. Graham Chapman

Thanks for the excellent article. It's amazing how many darn protocols there are in data communications these days!

I added the "Mbps" and "Kbps" abbreviations for two reasons:  they are both commonly used in data communications documentation in my experience, confusing megabytes/second and megabits per second when talking about data communications is potentially disastrous because there is an order of magnitude difference.

My fast/wide Ultra SCSI link between controller and disk array is 40 megabytes/second - if it were megabits then my applications would grind to a halt! Using the term "megs" risks confusion between bits and bytes in an area where it is necessary to be precise.

With some protocols, such as Ethernet, communications people commonly talk always in megabits/second, whereas with SCSI they commonly talk in megabytes/second. Often they are two separate groups of people who don't mix a lot, but it is dangerous to assume that the standard used within your group is generally applicable. Graham Chapman


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Snakes and ladders

Snakes and ladders is a board game for two or more players regarded today as a worldwide classic. The game originated in ancient India as Moksha Patam, and was brought to the United Kingdom in the 1890s. It is played on a game board with numbered, gridded squares. A number of "ladders" and "snakes" are pictured on the board, each connecting two specific board squares. The object of the game is to navigate one's game piece, according to die rolls, from the start (bottom square) to the finish (top square), helped by climbing ladders but hindered by falling down snakes.

The game is a simple race based on sheer luck, and it is popular with young children. The historic version had its roots in morality lessons, on which a player's progression up the board represented a life journey complicated by virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes). The game is also sold under other names, such as the morality-themed Chutes and Ladders which was published by the Milton Bradley Company starting in 1943.

Equipment
The size of the grid varies, but is most commonly 8×8, 10×10 or 12×12 squares. Boards have snakes and ladders starting and ending on different squares; both factors affect the duration of play. Each player is represented by a distinct game piece token. A single die is rolled to determine random movement of a player's token in the traditional form of play; two dice may be used for a shorter game.

History
Snakes and ladders originated as part of a family of Indian dice board games that included gyan chauper and pachisi (known in English as Ludo and Parcheesi). It made its way to England and was sold as "Snakes and Ladders", then the basic concept was introduced in the United States as Chutes and Ladders.

The game was popular in ancient India by the name Moksha Patam. It was also associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire. It emphasized destiny, as opposed to games such as pachisi, which focused on life as a mixture of skill (free will) and luck. The underlying ideals of the game inspired a version introduced in Victorian England in 1892. The game has also been interpreted and used as a tool for teaching the effects of good deeds versus bad. The board was covered with symbolic images used in ancient India, the top featuring gods, angels, and majestic beings, while the rest of the board was covered with pictures of animals, flowers and people. The ladders represented virtues such as generosity, faith, and humility, while the snakes represented vices such as lust, anger, murder, and theft. The morality lesson of the game was that a person can attain liberation (Moksha) through doing good, whereas by doing evil one will be reborn as lower forms of life. The number of ladders was fewer than the number of snakes as a reminder that a path of good is much more difficult to tread than a path of sins. Presumably, reaching the last square (number 100) represented the attainment of Moksha (spiritual liberation).

Gyan chauper, or jnan chauper, (game of wisdom), the version associated with the Jain philosophy, encompassed the concepts like karma and Moksha.

A version popular in the Muslim world is known as shatranj al-'urafa and exists in various versions in India, Iran, and Turkey. In this version, based on sufi philosophy, the game represents the dervish's quest to leave behind the trappings of worldly life and achieve union with God.

When the game was brought to England, the Indian virtues and vices were replaced by English ones in hopes of better reflecting Victorian doctrines of morality. Squares of Fulfilment, Grace and Success were accessible by ladders of Thrift, Penitence and Industry and snakes of Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence caused one to end up in Illness, Disgrace and Poverty. While the Indian version of the game had snakes outnumbering ladders, the English counterpart was more forgiving as it contained equal numbers of each.

The association of Britain's snakes and ladders with India and gyan chauper began with the returning of colonial families from India during the British Raj. The décor and art of the early English boards of the 20th century reflect this relationship. By the 1940s very few pictorial references to Indian culture remained, due to the economic demands of the war and the collapse of British rule in India. Although the game's sense of morality has lasted through the game's generations, the physical allusions to religious and philosophical thought in the game as presented in Indian models appear to have all but faded. There has even been evidence of a possible Buddhist version of the game existing in India during the Pala-Sena time period.

In Andhra Pradesh, this game is popularly called Vaikunthapali or Paramapada Sopana Patam (the ladder to salvation) in Telugu. In Hindi, this game is called Saanp aur Seedhi, Saanp Seedhi and Mokshapat. In Tamil Nadu the game is called Parama padam and is often played by devotees of Hindu god Vishnu during the Vaikuntha Ekadashi festival in order to stay awake during the night. In Bengali-speaking regions, West Bengal in India and Bangladesh, it is known as Shap Shiri or Shapludu respectively.

In the original game the squares of virtue are: Faith (12), Reliability (51), Generosity (57), Knowledge (76), and Asceticism (78). The squares of vice or evil are: Disobedience (41), Vanity (44), Vulgarity (49), Theft (52), Lying (58), Drunkenness (62), Debt (69), Murder (73), Rage (84), Greed (92), Pride (95), and Lust (99).

Gameplay
Each player starts with a token on the starting square (usually the "1" grid square in the bottom left corner, or simply, at the edge of the board next to the "1" grid square). Players take turns rolling a single die to move their token by the number of squares indicated by the die rolled. Tokens follow a fixed route marked on the gameboard which usually follows a boustrophedon (ox-plow) track from the bottom to the top of the playing area, passing once through every square. If, on completion of a move, a player's token lands on the lower-numbered end of a "ladder", the player moves the token up to the ladder's higher-numbered square. If the player lands on the higher-numbered square of a "snake" (or chute), the player moves the token down to the snake's lower-numbered square.

If a 6 is rolled, the player, after moving, immediately rolls again for another turn; otherwise play passes to the next player in turn. The player who is first to bring their token to the last square of the track is the winner.

Variations
Variants exists where a player must roll the exact number to reach the final square. Depending on the variation, if the die roll is too large, the token either remains in place or goes off the final square and back again. (For example, if a player requiring a 3 to win rolls a 5, the token moves forward three spaces, then back two spaces.) In certain circumstances (such as a player rolling a 5 when a 1 is required to win), a player can end up further away from the final square after their move, than before it.

In the book Winning Ways, the authors propose a variant which they call Adders-and-Ladders which, unlike the original game, involves skill. Instead of tokens for each player, there is a store of indistinguishable tokens shared by all players. The illustration has five tokens (and a five by five board). There is no die to roll; instead, the player chooses any token and moves it one to four spaces. Whoever moves the last token to the Home space (i.e. the last number) wins.

Specific editions
The most widely known edition of snakes and ladders in the United States is Chutes and Ladders, released by Milton Bradley in 1943. The playground setting replaced the snakes, which were thought to be disliked by children at the time. It is played on a 10x10 board, and players advance their pieces according to a spinner rather than a die. The theme of the board design is playground equipment, showing children climbing ladders and descending chutes.

The artwork on the board teaches morality lessons: squares on the bottom of the ladders show a child doing a good or sensible deed, at the top of the ladder there is an image of the child enjoying the reward; squares at the top of the chutes show children engaging in mischievous or foolish behavior, on the bottom of the chute the image shows the children suffering the consequences.

Black children were depicted in the Milton Bradley game for the first time in 1974. There have been many pop culture versions of the game, with graphics featuring such children's television characters as Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. It has been marketed as "The Classic Up and Down Game for Preschoolers". In 1999, Hasbro released Chutes and Ladders for PCs.

In Canada the game has been traditionally sold as "Snakes and Ladders" and produced by the Canada Games Company. Several Canada-specific versions have been produced over the years, including a version with toboggan runs instead of snakes.

An early British version of the game depicts the path of a young boy and girl making their way through a cartoon railroad and train system.

During the early 1990s in South Africa, Chutes and Ladders games made from cardboard were distributed on the back of egg boxes as part of a promotion.

Even though the concept of major virtues against vices and related Eastern spiritualism is not much emphasized in modern incarnations of the game, the central mechanism of snakes and ladders makes it an effective tool for teaching young children about various subjects. In two separate Indonesian schools, the implementation of the game as media in English lessons of fifth graders not only improved the students' vocabulary but also stimulated their interest and excitement about the learning process. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that pre-schoolers from low income backgrounds who played an hour of numerical board games like snakes and ladders matched the performance of their middle-class counterparts by showing improvements in counting and recognizing number shapes. An eco-inspired version of the game was also used to teach students and teachers about climate change and environmental sustainability.

Meyer et al. (2020) explored on the basis of Chutes and Ladders with a free and adaptive game project. This refers on the one hand to systemic game pedagogy. The players and the educators develop the game from ground up and set the rules. The second element of the Monza project is mathematization. Over several years, teachers and learners abstract the game experiences into the language of mathematics.

Mathematics of the game
Any version of snakes and ladders can be represented exactly as an absorbing Markov chain, since from any square the odds of moving to any other square are fixed and independent of any previous game history. The Milton Bradley version of Chutes and Ladders has 100 squares, with 19 chutes and ladders. A player will need an average of 39.2 spins to move from the starting point, which is off the board, to square 100. A two-player game is expected to end in 47.76 moves with a 50.9% chance of winning for the first player. These calculations are based on a variant where throwing a six does not lead to an additional roll; and where the player must roll the exact number to reach square 100 and if they overshoot it their counter does not move.

In popular culture
"All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother."
 * The phrase "back to square one" originated in the game of snakes and ladders, or at least was influenced by it – the earliest attestation of the phrase refers to the game: "Withal he has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."
 * The game is a central metaphor of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The narrator describes the game as follows:
 * Snakes & Lattes is a board game café chain headquartered in Toronto, Canada, named after snakes and ladders.
 * In the Abby Hatcher episode "Game Time with Mo and Bo", Mo and Bo play a snakes and ladders video game on a computer tablet in a hotel. While playing they walk around, unknowingly causing trouble in the hotel. Through Abby's instructions, they use their bodies to simulate snakes and ladders to help those they affected.
 * Snakes and Ladders is a 1980 album by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty.
 * Snakes 'n' Ladders is a 1989 album by Scottish hard rockers Nazareth.
 * A 2001 Egyptian film, Elsellem wel te'ban (The Ladder and the Snake), named after the game, about relationship mishaps of a flirtatious divorced young man falling in love.
 * In SpongeBob SquarePants, the episode "Sailor Mouth" features a board game called Eels and Escalators, clearly based on Snakes and Ladders, but where instead of snakes there are eels. A real-life version was released in November 2021.
 * In Charlie and Lola, in the episode "I've Won, No I've Won, No I've Won", the game is featured as one of the games played by the characters.
 * It is mentioned in the lyrics of the AC/DC song "Sin City".

title: Snakes and ladders


text:
Risk (game)

Risk is a strategy board game of diplomacy, conflict and conquest for two to six players. The standard version is played on a board depicting a political map of the world, divided into 42 territories, which are grouped into six continents. Turns rotate among players who control armies of playing pieces with which they attempt to capture territories from other players, with results determined by dice rolls. Players may form and dissolve alliances during the course of the game. The goal of the game is to occupy every territory on the board and, in doing so, eliminate the other players. The game can be lengthy, requiring several hours to multiple days to finish. European versions are structured so that each player has a limited "secret mission" objective that shortens the game.

Risk was invented in 1957 by Albert Lamorisse, a French filmmaker, and it became one of the most popular board games in history, inspiring other popular games such as Axis & Allies and Settlers of Catan. The simple rules but complex interactions make it appealing to people of all ages. It is still in production by Hasbro with numerous editions and variants with popular media themes and different rules, including PC software versions, video games, and mobile apps.

History
Risk was invented by French film director Albert Lamorisse and originally released in 1957 as La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in France. It was bought by Parker Brothers and released in 1959 with some modifications to the rules as Risk: The Continental Game, then as Risk: The Game of Global Domination.

The first new version of Risk was released in 1986. Called Castle Risk, it featured a map depicting 18th-century European castles instead of a map of the world, and it was a financial disappointment. In 1993, the rules for Secret Mission Risk, which had been the standard in Europe, were added to the United States edition. After a limited special-edition release in 1999, in France, called Risk: Édition Napoléon in commemoration of 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic era (1799–1815), a new edition called Risk: 2210 A.D. was published in 2001 by Hasbro's Avalon Hill division. The game was futuristic-themed, featuring moon territories, ocean territories and commander units and offered a number of expansions. Starting in 2002, Risk versions themed around media franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Transformers were released, sometimes with as many as six editions per year. A collector's edition of classic Risk in a bookshelf-format wooden box was issued in 2005 as part of the Parker Brothers Vintage Game series, distributed through Target Stores. In 2008, Winning Moves, a Hasbro licensee, introduced 1959 Risk, a reproduction of the original Parker Brothers version with original artwork, wooden playing pieces and rules. Many themed versions are currently being published, and new themes continue to be introduced.

In the first editions, the playing pieces were wooden cubes (one set each of black, blue, green, pink, red and yellow) representing one troop each and a few rounded triangular prisms representing ten troops each, but in later versions of the game these pieces were molded of plastic to reduce costs. In the 1980s, these were changed to pieces shaped into the Roman numerals I, III, V, and X. The 1993 edition introduced plastic infantry tokens (representing a single unit), cavalry (representing five units), and artillery (representing ten units). The 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition contained the same troop pieces but made of metal rather than plastic. In the 2005 "bookcase" edition, playing pieces are once again wooden cubes.

Equipment and design

Equipment includes a large tabletop board depicting a political map of the world, divided into forty-two territories, which are grouped into six continents by color. In addition to shared boundaries between territories which define routes of attack/defense, numerous special trans-oceanic or trans-sea routes are also marked; for example, the route between North Africa and Brazil. The oceans and seas are not part of the playing field.

Each Risk game comes with a number of sets (either 5 or 6) of different colored tokens denoting troops. A few different or larger tokens represent multiple (usually 5 or 10) troops. These token types are purely a convention for ease of representing a specific army size. If a player runs out of army pieces during the game, pieces of another color or other symbolic tokens (coins, pieces from other games, etc.) may be substituted to help keep track of armies.

Also included is a deck of Risk cards, comprising forty-two territory cards, two wild cards, and twelve or twenty-eight mission cards. The territory cards correspond to the 42 territories on the playing board. Each of the territory cards also depicts a symbol of an infantry, cavalry, or artillery piece. One of these cards is awarded to a player at the end of each turn if the player has successfully conquered at least one territory during that turn. No more than one card may be awarded per turn. If a player collects either three cards with the same symbol, or one of each, or any two plus a wild card, they may be traded in for reinforcements at the beginning of a player's turn. These cards can also be used for game set-up. The two wild cards depict infantry, cavalry and artillery pieces. Because these cards have all three symbols, they can match with any two other cards to form a set. The mission cards each specifying some secret mission (something less than 'conquer the world') are used in the Secret Mission Risk rule variant.

Standard equipment also includes five or six dice in two colors: three red dice for the attacker, and two or three white or blue dice for the defender. There is also a Golden Cavalry piece used to mark the progressive turn-in value of matched sets of territory cards.

In 2022, the iconic Risk logo undertook a rebranding conducted by Toronto-based creative and design agency Quake.

Territories
The following is a typical layout of the Risk game board, with a table of the corresponding continent and territory names. Each territory on the typical Risk game board represents a real-life geographical or political region. As such, the territory borders are drawn to resemble the geography of those regions. This provides an interior space on which to place the army units, adds an element of realism to the game, and also adds complexity. Most of the territories represent a combination of countries or states; some that have names of single countries or states, such as Argentina, do not represent the boundaries of the real-life entity. Antarctica, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and the Philippines are not represented.

The numbers in parentheses represent the number of additional armies granted during the reinforcement stage of a player's turn who controls all of the territories in that continent. Some versions of the board use alternative names for some territories. These names are in parentheses. Not all variations occur concurrently.

 * North America (5)
 * 1) Alaska
 * 2) Alberta (Western Canada)
 * 3) Central America
 * 4) Eastern United States
 * 5) Greenland
 * 6) Northwest Territory
 * 7) Ontario (Central Canada)
 * 8) Quebec (Eastern Canada)
 * 9) Western United States
 * South America (2)
 * 1) Argentina
 * 2) Brazil
 * 3) Peru
 * 4) Venezuela

 * Europe (5)
 * 1) Great Britain (Great Britain & Ireland)
 * 2) Iceland
 * 3) Northern Europe
 * 4) Scandinavia
 * 5) Southern Europe
 * 6) Ukraine (Eastern Europe, Russia)
 * 7) Western Europe
 * Africa (3)
 * 1) Congo (Central Africa)
 * 2) East Africa
 * 3) Egypt
 * 4) Madagascar
 * 5) North Africa
 * 6) South Africa

 * Asia (7)
 * 1) Afghanistan
 * 2) China
 * 3) India (Hindustan)
 * 4) Irkutsk
 * 5) Japan
 * 6) Kamchatka
 * 7) Middle East
 * 8) Mongolia
 * 9) Siam (Southeast Asia)
 * 10) Siberia
 * 11) Ural
 * 12) Yakutsk
 * Australia (2)
 * 1) Eastern Australia
 * 2) Indonesia
 * 3) New Guinea
 * 4) Western Australia

Notes

Gameplay
Setup consists of determining order of play, issuing armies to players, and allocating the territories on the board among players, who place one or more armies on each one they own.

At the beginning of a player's turn, they receive reinforcement armies proportional to the number of territories held, bonus armies for holding whole continents, and additional armies for turning in matched sets of territory cards obtained by conquering new territories. The player may then attack, move their armies, or pass.

On a player's turn, after they have placed their reinforcements, they may choose to attack territories adjacent to theirs which are occupied by enemy armies. A territory is adjacent if it is connected visibly by land, or by a "sea-lane". Attacks are decided by dice rolls, with the attacker or defender losing a specified number of armies per roll. When attacking, a battle may continue until the attacker decides to stop attacking, the attacker has no more armies with which to attack, or the defender has lost their last army at the defending territory, at which point the attacker takes over the territory by moving armies onto it and draws a territory card for that turn.

At the end of a player's turn, they may move armies from one of their territories to another "connected" territory.

A player is eliminated from the game when they have lost their last territory. The player that defeated them receive the defeated player's territory cards, if any. The victor is the last player remaining when all other players have been eliminated.

There are special rules for two-player games: the territories are divided between the two players and a neutral army during setup. In play, the neutral army only plays defense when attacked, never attacks or moves armies, and doesn't have a turn like an active player. If the neutral army is eliminated, the game continues under normal rules.

Some editions have rules variants regarding how armies or territories are allocated during setup or how armies may be moved at the end of a turn. There are also variations in the tokens representing armies that don't affect play. European editions assign each player a secret mission, and the game goes until one player completes their mission rather than conquers the world. Different editions have differing numbers of such missions. The Italian edition uses a different number of dice in battle. Themed variants have different map configurations and substantially different rules.

The rules of some editions describe a variant called Capital Risk, where each player has a capital in one of the initially occupied territories. The player to capture all capitals wins. Any armies and territories that belong to the losing nation are turned over to the victor. Capital Risk often leads to much shorter games. Other rules variants for "Risk experts" are also listed.

Gaming clubs may also have "house rules" or competition-adjusted rules.

Basic strategy
The official rulebook recommends three basic strategy points for play under the standard rules:
 * 1) Players should control entire continents to get the bonus reinforcement armies.
 * 2) Players should watch their borders for buildups of armies that could imply an upcoming attack.
 * 3) Players should build up armies on their own borders for better defense.

Holding continents is the most common way to increase reinforcements. Players often attempt to gain control of Australia early in the game, since Australia is the only continent that can be successfully defended by heavily fortifying one country (either Siam or Indonesia). Generally, continents with fewer access routes are easier to defend as they possess fewer territories that can be attacked by other players. South America has 2 access points, North America and Africa each have 3, Europe has 4, and Asia has 5.

Generally, it is thought advisable to hold Risk cards until they can be turned in for maximum reinforcements. This is especially true earlier on in gameplay, because extra armies make a greater difference in the beginning of the game. Eliminating a weak player who holds a large number of Risk cards is also a good strategy, since players who eliminate their opponents get possession of their opponents' Risk cards. In this case, trading in Risk cards earlier may help acquire the necessary troops. If the conquering player has six or more Risk cards after taking the cards of another player, the cards must be immediately turned in for reinforcements until the player has fewer than five cards and then may continue attacking.

"Turtling" is a defensive strategy where a player who feels vulnerable tries to become too expensive to be removed while remaining a threat to harass other players. The objective of this strategy is to avoid early defeat. A player using this strategy might remain in the game all the way to later stages and then mount an attack on the weakest player and start a chain elimination to remove one player after another to win the game. The player who uses this strategy is called a "turtle". The term was popularised in real-time strategy games where a player creates a defensive perimeter or a turtle shell around the base of operations. Solutions to counteract this strategy using cooperation have been proposed.

Alliances
The rules of Risk neither endorse nor prohibit alliances or truces. Thus players often form unofficial treaties for various reasons, such as safeguarding themselves from attacks on one border while they concentrate their forces elsewhere, or eliminating a player who has grown too strong. Because these agreements are not enforceable by the rules, these agreements are often broken. Alliance making/breaking can be one of the most important elements of the game, and it adds human interaction to a decidedly probabilistic game. Some players allow trading of Risk cards, but only during their turn. This optional rule can make alliances more powerful.

Attack and defense
Capturing a territory depends on the number of attacking and defending armies and the associated probabilities. In a battle to completion, a player who has more armies (even just one more) has a significant advantage, whether on attack or defense (the number of attacking armies does not include the minimum one army that must be left behind in the territory).

Defenders always win ties when dice are rolled. This gives the defending player the advantage in "one-on-one" fights, but the attacker's ability to use more dice offsets this advantage. It is always advantageous to roll the maximum number of dice, unless an attacker wishes to avoid moving men into a 'dead-end' territory, in which case they may choose to roll fewer than three. Thus when rolling three dice against two, three against one, or two against one, the attacker has a slight advantage, otherwise the defender has an advantage.

There are online tools available to compute the outcome of whole campaigns (i.e. the attacking of several territories in a row).

RisiKo! is a variant of the game released in Italy, in which the defender is allowed to roll up to three dice to defend. This variation dramatically shifts the balance of power towards defense.

Awards and commendations

 * Risk was inducted into Games magazine's Hall of Fame in 1984.
 * Risk was inducted into Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1995.
 * Risk was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2021.

Official licensed Risk games
In addition to the original version of 1959, and a 40th Anniversary Edition with metal pieces, a number of official variants of Risk have been released over the years. In recent years, Hasbro has predominantly based its Risk variants on popular films. In chronological order, the variations of Risk that have been released are:
 * Castle Risk (1986) – A version focusing only on Europe in which each player has a castle, and the player's goal is to protect the castle from attack. Castle Risk was the first version of Risk released after 27 years of production to depart from standard play. Although it was unsuccessful, it introduced many concepts integrated into later versions of Risk.
 * Risk: 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition (1999)
 * Risk: Édition Napoléon (1999) – Adds generals, fortresses, and naval units.
 * Risk: Édition Napoléon: Extension Empire Ottoman (2000) – Adds a sixth player to Risk: Édition Napoléon.
 * Risk: 2210 A.D. (2001) – An award-winning futuristic version, produced by Avalon Hill, another division of Hasbro. The game features moon territories, ocean territories and commander units and offers a number of official and unofficial expansions.
 * Risk: The Lord of the Rings (2002) – 2–4 player version based on northern Middle-earth.
 * Risk: The Lord of the Rings: Gondor & Mordor Expansion Set (2003) – Extension to Risk: The Lord of the Rings, also includes a 2-player Siege of Minas Tirith mini-game.
 * Risk: The Lord of the Rings: Trilogy Edition (2003) – Combines the first two The Lord of the Rings versions, but does not include the Siege of Minas Tirith mini-game.
 * Risk Godstorm (2004) – A version based on the mythological pantheons of various ancient civilizations; produced by Avalon Hill.
 * Risk: Star Wars: Clone Wars Edition (2005) – Set in the Star Wars universe during the Clone Wars. The player can fight on the side of the Separatists or the Republic, using either the classic Risk rules or the Clone Wars variations where altruism pays off.
 * Risk Express (2006) – Designed by Reiner Knizia as part of Hasbro's Express line of games (although not as part of the US-released series). Roll different combinations of infantry, cavalry, artillery & generals to capture the territory cards.
 * Risk: Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition (2006) – Set during the Galactic Civil War, players play as the Galactic Empire, the Rebel Alliance, or the Hutts. This version is unique in that each of the factions has a different set of goals and victory conditions.
 * Risk Junior: Narnia (2006) – Based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, players can play as either the forces of Aslan or as the forces of the White Witch.
 * Risk: The Transformers Edition (2007) – Based on the Transformers film, players can either play on the side of the Autobots or the Decepticons on a Cybertron stylised map.
 * Risk: Black OPS (2008) – Limited edition released in early 2008. Print run was limited to a 1000 copies. Most of the copies were given to people in the board game industry to test out new rules for up coming editions.
 * Risk: Balance of Power (2008) – Based on a European map.
 * Risk 1959 (2008) – Winning Moves Games USA released a reproduction of the original game of Risk from 1959. It includes all the original graphics, wood pieces, and individual plastic storage boxes.
 * Risk: Reinvention (2009) – Also called Risk Factor or Risk Revised Edition. This is the commercial released version of Black Ops. It features capitals, cities, missions, and very thin pieces shaped like arrows. It is also available with different components (wooden map, wooden cube pieces, etc.) as Risk Onyx Edition.
 * Risk: Halo Wars Collector's Edition (2009) – Includes UNSC, Covenant, and The Flood. It has 42 territories and 6 sectors.
 * Risk: Factions (2010) – a licensed video game version of the game developed by Electronic Arts, and distributed on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. Includes a "classic" mode which allows games played using standard original rules, and a "Factions" variation on the rules.
 * Risk: Metal Gear Solid (2011)
 * Risk: Legacy (2011/12) – The game that introduced the legacy game mechanic, in which permanent changes to the game board and cards occur with each finished game.
 * Risk: Halo Legendary (2012)
 * Risk: Starcraft (2012) – Four play modes with three different races. Each race has two unique hero units.
 * Risk: Star Wars Saga Edition (2013) UK Exclusive
 * Risk: Mass Effect Galaxy at War Edition (2013)
 * Risk: The Walking Dead Survival Edition (2013)
 * Risk: Battlefield Rogue (2013)
 * Risk: Plants Vs Zombies (2013)
 * Risk: Doctor Who (2013)
 * Risk: Game of Thrones (2015)
 * Risk: Star Wars Edition Game Standard (2015) – Recreates the Battle of Endor from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Battles take place across three environments: inside the Emperor's Throne Room; the space outside the Death Star; and the forest moon of Endor,
 * Risk: Star Wars Edition Game Black Series (2015) – Same as Risk: Star Wars Edition Game Standard but includes different packaging, embossed playing cards, translucent dice, and miniatures for the Death Star, Super Star Destroyer, Millennium Falcon, and Imperial stormtroopers.
 * Risk: Marvel Cinematic Universe (2015)
 * Risk: Transformers Decepticon Invasion of Earth (2015) UK Exclusive
 * Risk: Captain America Civil War (2016)
 * Risk: Star Trek 50th Anniversary Edition (2016)
 * Risk (2016)
 * Risk: Rustic Edition (2016)
 * Risk: Europe (2016)
 * Risk: Rick and Morty (2018)
 * Risk: Vikings Edition (2018)
 * Risk: Call Of Duty: Black Ops Zombies Edition (2019) GameStop Exclusive
 * Risk: Assassin's Creed (2019)
 * Risk: The Elder Scrolls (2019)
 * Risk: Office Politics (2019)
 * Risk: Junior (2019)
 * Risk: The Battle for Medieval England (2019)
 * Risk: Warhammer 40,000 (2020)
 * Risk: Risk Game with Dragon; for Use with Amazon Alexa; with Special Dragon Token; Amazon Exclusive (2020)
 * Risk: Asterix – Collector's Edition (2020)
 * Risk Shadow Forces; sequel to Risk: Legacy (2022)
 * Risk Strike (2023)

Variant forms of the games
Many of the official versions of Risk listed above have their own rules which may differ slightly or even significantly from the original game of Risk.

Variants set on world maps

 * Risk Legacy. There are five factions, each with different pieces and rules. This game is the actual originator of the term Legacy game, which means that rules/mechanics are added and changed, previous games permanently affect all future games, and cards are permanently modified and destroyed.

Variants on regional or country maps

 * Risk Europe differs markedly from the original game, in that each territory generates a specific income for the player, and the player can purchase new units based on the amount of revenue received. Also, each unit succeeds in its attack if the player hits a specific number or lower during the attack. Also, a new type of unit known as siege weapons is provided to players. Also, players have different types of units, each with their own types of tactics and attacks. All of these game mechanics are notably similar to the basic game-play format of Axis and Allies.
 * Risk: The Battle for Medieval England is published in conjunction with English Heritage. It includes cards for special powers and special missions. The game board is a map of England. The object is to become the King of England. If no player wins by a certain point in the game, then all players must retreat.

Variants from existing works of science fiction or fantasy

 * Risk: Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition.When playing by the Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition rules, each of the three factions has its own victory condition. The Empire must eliminate all Rebel forces. The Rebel Alliance must find and destroy the Emperor, who will be hidden under one of the Imperial Bases. The Hutts must take control of 10 out of the 13 designated resource planets on the board. The moment one of these victory conditions has been met by the respective faction, the game is over and that faction has won.
 * Risk: Star Trek 50th Anniversary. has a number of rules, cards and units that differ from the original game. the game has "Q cards " in which Q may assign missions to the player. Also, there are location cards providing a specific value for each location. Also, there are cards representing specific crew members, which each have a specific command value.

Variants based on concepts from science fiction or fantasy

 * Risk 2210 A.D. has numerous rules which differ from the original game. The board includes water and moon territories. Game units include commanders (land, naval, space, nuclear, diplomat). Players earn and spend "energy" to obtain commanders, cards, and space stations and to activate some command cards. Players can roll an 8-sided die in some instances. Armies are not acquired through card trading. The game is only 5 years (turns) long; the winner is the player with highest score at the end of the last year. Players bid energy to determine turn order rather than following the same order determined by a dice from the beginning of the game.

Risk clones by other companies and developers
Many variants have been published by other groups or companies, that are based on the original concept of the game of Risk and that contain much of the functionality of the original, but are not licensed by Hasbro, such as the video games Global Domination and Lux. Known as Risk clones, such variants have names not containing the term "Risk" to avoid legal issues. Some of these clones are available commercially, of which many have been released through the iTunes App Store, especially for the iPad. Several other Risk clones are distributed freely over the Internet, such as Dice Wars. Games such as Nintendo Wars can be seen as a complex evolution which still holds some elements from Risk. NarcoGuerra is a newsgame based on the basic Risk rules, played out over a map of Mexico with the intent of educating people on the Mexican Drug War. An example of a board game inspired by Risk is the Argentine TEG.

In addition to Risk clones, third-party products have been created which slightly modify traditional gameplay. Among the most popular third-party editions are virtual dice-rolling simulators. These can act as virtual replacements to traditional dice or be used to automatically simulate the results of large battles between territories—significantly speeding up gameplay.

Video games
Several video game versions of Risk have been released as Risk, starting with the Commodore 64 edition in 1988 and the Macintosh edition in 1989. Various other editions have been released for PC, Amiga, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo Switch. In 1996 Hasbro Interactive released a PC version of Risk that included a new variation on the game called Ultimate Risk, which did not use dice but rather implemented the use of forts, generals, and complex battle strategies. Risk II for PC and Mac was released as a 2000 video game which includes classic Risk as well as board and gameplay variations. In 2010, Pogo.com added a licensed version of Risk to its library of online games. An Xbox Live Arcade version of Risk called Risk: Factions was released on June 23, 2010. It includes classic Risk as well as a factions mode where players can play as Zombies, Robots, Cats, Soldiers, or Yetis.

As of August 6, 2014, Hasbro and Ubisoft produced a new game for Risk on PS4 and Xbox One, as well as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game, developed by Zoë Mode and published by Ubisoft, was released in February 2015. A standalone game, Risk: Urban Assault, was released in August 2016. It was subsequently ported to the Nintendo Switch, releasing on October 30, 2018.

A licensed iOS app, Risk: The Official Game, developed for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad by Electronic Arts, was released on July 16, 2010. Although the iPad version (Risk HD) has to be bought separately from the iPhone version (Risk), local link up allows games to take place across versions. A maximum of six players can participate. If only one iOS device is available, the "pass and play" mode allows several players to take part in a multi-player game.

Another licensed video game version, RISK: Global Domination, was released in 2015 for iOS, Android and Windows. Developed by SMG Studio, this version includes device sharing, cross-platform online multiplayer, and single player versus computer modes.

Television series adaptation
On January 11, 2021, it was reported that a television series adaptation of the game is in development from House of Cards creator, Beau Willimon.

Reception
Games magazine included Risk in their "Top 100 Games of 1980", praising it as "a classic" as established by its "attractive playing equipment, seesawing battles, and limitless opportunities for changing rules and making up new variations of the game".

Games magazine included Risk in their "Top 100 Games of 1981", noting that an advantage of the game is that "it's easy to make up new variations, tailored to your tastes".

Games magazine included Risk in their "Top 100 Games of 1982", noting that "Even the most peace-loving tend to grow aggressive in this game of global conquest".

Reviews

 * Family Games: The 100 Best

title: Risk (game)