In high school, he played board wargames published by Avalon Hill, then switched to tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons and Traveller in the mid-1970s.
[5][6] His first game was a historical board wargame created by Ed Smith for Avalon Hill, released as Trireme in 1971.
[20] Hendrick and David Helber designed The Tavern (1983), a set of dungeon floor plans intended to be published by Heritage, but wound up being the sole product published by the Genesis Gaming Products division of World Wide Wargames after Heritage went out of business.
[21] Just as console videogames hit the market in 1983, Jennell Jaquays hired Hendrick to work at Coleco Industries.
[29][1] The MS-DOS videogame took three years and $3 million to develop — a large amount of money at the time[30] — and the result was a unique and ground-breaking program that was plagued by glitches and bugs.
As Andy Chalk noted in PC Gamer, "It wasn't a hit, largely because it was wracked with bugs at release, but featured remarkably deep systems and attention to detail, and genuinely unique, 'realistic' game world: a mythologized version of the 15th-century Holy Roman Empire, in which the creatures and dangers that people of the era believed were real actually are.
Todd Howard cited the game as an influence on Bethesda Softworks' popular fantasy role-playing series The Elder Scrolls.
[35] In 1995 Al Giovetti of The Computer Show [36] interviewed Hendrick and two other Microprose employees about the creation and play of Darklands [37] just two years after its release.