[geeks] Geeky Solaris question

[Mike Hebel]

>>    All of the old Avalon Hill classics (most of their old stuff
>>was pretty
>>good, most of their new stuff was marginal) belong to Hasbro now, too.

I loved these games!  I can't count the hours I spent playing Kingmaker with
friends.  I have about a half-dozen of these games that I'm going to
probably keep until I croak.

>>Anything that they can't sell a certain quota of just disappears
>>into a black
>>hole.  If you call them up, they probably wouldn't even know they own the
>>rights for a lot of those games.

More evidence of Corporate Bloodsucking for Fun & Profit.  They buy up a
company for one thing (WOTC == Magic The Gathering) and then drop everything
else into the bottom of a locked filing cabinet marked do not open under
penalty of death behind a door marked do not enter - tigers inside.  More
good ideas are lost this way IMHO than any other.

>>I have a closet full of Avalon
>>Hill, SPI (who
>>also published Strategy & Tactics), a few TSR, and a host of
>>smaller companies,
>>never seem to get to play much anymore, though.

By all that's good hold onto them!  People like you and me that keep these
things in a dusty old closet or basement are probably going to be the only
reason these games show up in people's hands later on.  (I'm being a little
melodramatic - "Won't somebody think of the gamers?!" - sorry. ;-)

As for RPG games I tend to go for home-spun modifications of certain
off-beat games.  Bureau 13 - Stalking The Night Fantastic, the pre-cursor to
Gamma World - Metamorphosis Alpha (a friend of mine has been running this
since the late 70's and has kept the universe cohesive and consistent - with
changes!), other games by Tri-Tac Systems.  Not that we do much paper RPG
any more but still fun when we do it.

>>    When did WOTC go under?

I didn't know they officially ceased to exist - I thought they were still a
company just under the corporate flag of Hasbro.

Mike Hebel