During an April 1984 interview at the Origins Game Fair, Crawford stated that he was "working on a game for the Macintosh entitled ARMS RACE based on the philosophy that 'H-bombs don't kill people, geopolitics kills people.'" By May the initial concept was fleshed out; the game would take place on top of a world map that could show various details, events would be presented as newspaper stories following an algorithmic concept he developed after considering the headlines in "National Enquirer", and these events and their outcomes would be expressed in terms of "prestige points".