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Human Head's Paper Gaming Secrets
Although some of you probably know Human Head as the videogame developers behind Rune, as well as the forthcoming Unreal-engined Dead Man's Hand and an as-yet unannounced Doom 3 engine title, but thanks to OgreCave for pointing out the company is diversifying back into board and paper-gaming with Human Head Games. This intriguing step includes "The Redhurst Academy of Magic, a new setting sourcebook designed for use in d20 System world settings and compatible with the new 3.5 edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules", as well as a new boardgame title, which OgreCave reveal as being "Gothica: Dracula's Revenge, a two-player game set a few years after Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, where Dracula and his forces face off against Van Helsing and his allies in the streets of London." What other videogame companies would you like to see doing board/paper games?
Back in the 80s and early 90s, it was primarily pen-and-paper and board games that made the leap to the computer game arena (and not the other way around). These include the obvious Dungeons&Dragons games, but also one or two Games Workshop titles and a couple of offerings by Steve Jackson games-- Ogre and Car Wars ("Autoduel").
Later on we started to see conversions go the other way (as a previous poster pointed out).
In this millenium, Steve Jackson games created a board game based on the FPS *genre* (not a specific computer game). The game is called "Frag" and has a number of expansions. There's more on Frag in an article I wrote for Shift.com last year and of course, at Steve Jackson Games' Frag page.
Longtime game designer Matt Forbeck is running Human Head's paper game studio. Matt co-founded Pinnacle Entertainment (publisher of Deadlands: The Weird West and his own superhero RPG Brave New World) and has also written tons of good stuff for a dozen other publishers. I'm confident he'll do an excellent job with this new venture. (Matt is prolific in another way, too -- he's the father of quadruplets!)