Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jackson Interview
heartless_ writes "Gamergod.com has an interview with Steve Jackson, the man behind the table-top company of the same name. SJ Games publishes, among other things, GURPS, Munchkin, Frag, Chez Geek, and Pyramid Magazine. The interview goes into Steve's opinions on the MMOG market, as well as possible involvement in the MMORPG market with his company." From the article: "GG: Does the idea of a 3D MMORPG strike you as a project you want to be a part of, and if so, in what capacity do you see yourself? SJ: (a) Heck, yes. (b)Top-end design and community work / play-test, until I learn the tools to get involved with level design. GG: Given that your claim to fame has been open ended systems, what genre of MMORPG would you most likely use to break into the industry? SJ: To nobody's surprise, I'd like it to be as open-ended as the theme allows. I think that will help get, and REALLY help keep, players."
Steve Jackson has been designing brilliant games since before most of you were born.
The first wargame I bought, back in 1979, was Metagaming's 'Ogre', designed by Jackson. it's an amazing game, moreso for the price of $2.95 back then.
He designed Ogre and it's add-ons and sequels, 'Melee' and it's successor, 'GURPs', 'Car Wars', and a number of other great table-top games.
When he started Steve Jackson Games in the early '80s and started publishing "The Space Gamer" magazine, he introduced many to the concepts of game design. The Space Gamer published an early article by Lord British, describing how 3-D graphics could be created on Apple II hardware.
Steve Jackson probably understands playability and balance like few others, and any MMORPG that he would be involved with would be of serious interest.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Car Wars was such a great tabletop game. It's always dissapointed me that its transition into computer games died so early. By all rights it should have been a massive series of hit games.
Autoduel was released by Origin Systems way back in the Apple II days, and despite a bunch of bugs, was great fun. That was the only computer game that really carried the feeling of the Car Wars universe. Deadly highways where you could fight with deadly armaments or run using evasive munitions (oil, mines, spikes, etc..). Arena combat where you could get your tires shot out and your car totally disabled and you could still jump out and try to run for the exit on foot.
The whole courier, bounty, pirate system in Autoduel is the same theme that makes Elite/Privateer and other space games so great.
I really think Autoduel could have been what GTA is today if they had kept releasing games with that same open ended formula that Autoduel helped pioneer.
I wonder if Auto Assault will come close, and I wonder if SJ will be kicking himself as hard as I'd like to kick him if it does do well.
As a fan of Steve Jackson Games, I can say that they need to do more advertising. I didn't even learn about Chez Geek until 2003. It was some random friday night, and having viewed one of my friend's IM profile, I saw he had added a link to dorktower.com so I was reading the comics. As I was doing so, one of my drunk fraternity mates stumbled by my room drunk and saw what I was reading and exclaimed "Hey, those are the Chez Geek guys!!" and I was like "Chez what now?" and he told me about this awesome card game. Now I'm the other of Chez Geek and 4 different expansion packs, as well as several other different SJ games. Apeaking as a member of SJ games target audience (AKA, ubernerds who've never had a date that didn't grow on a tree), they need to expand their advertising a bit more to reach us.