The Daily Illuminator

What's New At Steve Jackson Games

March 31, 1995

March 30, 1995

March 29, 1995

One thing's for sure -- things will never be the same. Magic, INWO and the rest have opened up a Pandora's box that will change this industry forever. Some folks think that this is no different from the roleplaying boom of the late '70s and early '80s, but there's a big difference -- the money involved.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon on the phone talking to a New York hotshot about their new trading card game magazine. Sendai Publishing is one of the largest magazine publishers in the world, with a dozen titles that all have six-figure circulations every month -- and now they want a part of the trading card game magazine pie. How can the Scrye, Shadis, Duelist and Pyramid magazines of the world compete against that big money - big marketing muscle?

And I saw a lot of companies last week that were rolling out a single trading card game as their first release, companies started by people who poured everything they had into this venture -- but what will happen to them when Marvel, Fleer, Topps, Donruss and Sony jump in the pool? It could get very ugly very fast.

The strong will survive; the lucky will find a niche and continue to produce good games. The rest? I don't know ...
-- Scott Haring

March 28, 1995

A quick update -- The INWO Book went to the printer yesterday. It and the INWO Factory Set are on schedule and looking good; GURPS Robots and Pyramid #13 are running behind, but may make it yet (I have more hope for Robots, but we'll see); Derek Pearcy is nearly done with In Nomine, and I'll post more playtest results as they happen.

Today's treat is two cool new links: webmaster Jim Cloos has uploaded all 12 Pyramid Magazine covers on one handy page. And there's a neat gaming magazine published in Denmark called Fonix (Danish for "Phoenix"), and they have a new Fonix Web Page to check out. Of course, it's almost entirely in Danish, but it's interesting anyway ...
-- Scott Haring

March 27, 1995

While a few hardy souls stayed back in the office making sure that important projects like The INWO Book and GURPS Robots came out on time, Steve, Dana, Derek and myself spent the last six days in New Orleans at the annual GAMA Trade Show. We talked to lots of distributors and retailers, a few prospective suppliers and tons of other game companies. We also sampled New Orleans night life in various degrees -- great restaurants, lots of liquor, more than a little debauchery -- and we did some work, too ...

So what was new? Need you ask? Card games. Lots and lots of card games. I personally talked to every company that exhibited at the show, and counted 48 announced releases between now and the end of the year! And about 20 of those are planned for August alone! We'll see how many actually make it ...

More news from New Orleans in subsequent days, including this tidbit: The Origins Awards nominations are out, and four SJ Games products made the list: INWO for Best Card Game, Pyramid for Best Magazine, GURPS Lensman for Best Roleplaying Supplement and Principia Discordia for Best Game Accessory. We are, as always, humbly grateful to everyone who found these products worthy of consideration. More tomorrow.
-- Scott Haring

March 22, 1995

You have less than two weeks to prepare!
-- -JimC

March 21, 1995

March 20, 1995

This is going to be a nice book. Jeff's graphic design is beautiful, lush and complex -- and he made me add 16 pages to the original plan, so his layout wouldn't have to fight with the type for space. (Even so, the sections on Strategy and Deck Building are in teeny type, because I just kept writing.)
-- Steve Jackson

March 17, 1995

Here's another cover for you to salivate over -- Pyramid #12 is back from the printer, along with three GURPS books: GURPS Religion and GURPS Time Travel reprints, and the all-new, all-creepy GURPS CthulhuPunk. Shipping has been very busy today ...

And how did last night's In Nomine playtest go? Not bad, though all we really did was create characters. My dude's an angel named Jalisco, currently living among humans as a hangdog, Raymond Chandler-esque private eye in (where else?) Los Angeles -- The City of Angels. He's beaten down by the struggle, a little depressed, a lot cynical -- but he fights the forces of darkness twice as hard because he doesn't know what else to do. And Rebecca Bross has a cool character, too -- a fey living on the Ethereal plane with two Corporeal vessels, a little girl and a cat ... this could be fun. More later.
-- Scott Haring

March 16, 1995

Speaking of Derek, tonight he'll be hosting the very first official playtest of the absolutely, this-time-we-mean-it final draft of In Nomine! I'll see if I can get him to deliver a progress report this time tomorrow.
-- Scott Haring

March 15, 1995

I just remembered I never followed up on some events mentioned here in the Daily Illuminator ... Steve, Derek, Dana and myself (and about 100 other true fans) had a great time at Neal Stephenson's book signing last weekend. He seemed to enjoy the copy of Pyramid #12 I gave him, and the ones he autographed will go to the writers and artists who worked on the Snow Crash stuff in the issue. On surprising thing (to me, at least) was how young Neal was -- he looked like he was barely out of college. Or maybe I'm just getting old ...

And I owe you a report from the Iron Dragon games I played recently. It's a great game, a real must for all fans of Mayfair's train games. I'll be writing it up as a ``Pyramid Pick'' in issue #13, so you can check out more about it there.
-- Scott Haring

March 14, 1995

March 13, 1995

Richard Meaden (who has done a lot of great Ogre graphics, and most recently the layout and design on Pyramid #12), is visiting our offices. Mostly he's holed up with the Mac, but we're hoping to get in a game tomorrow, and maybe smear some paint on some lead ...

March 12, 1995

The cards will ship from the assembly plant starting on March 24th. Distributors will have to hold them until some date, not yet set, early in April ... we'll announce that as soon as we can.
-- Steve Jackson

March 11, 1995

A couple other things about this issue of Pyramid -- it's our first all-color issue, a trend I plan to make permanent if the print cost numbers will back me up. And for issue #13, we're looking to make the magazine 8 pages thicker -- again, if the print cost numbers add up ... keep watching this space for updates.
-- Scott Haring

March 10, 1995

And we've made some additional improvements to this Web page, as webmaster Jim Cloos spends more time fine-tuning his creations -- like this background screen, and the larger capital letters (called``drop caps'' in the page design biz) at the beginning of each paragraph. Neat, huh? (Unless you're using a plain-text viewer like Lynx, in which case, sorry, never mind.)

Oh, and I'm back at work after 2½ days down with a nasty cold. I no longer feel like death warmed over, and that's a Good Thing.
-- Scott Haring

March 9, 1995

Gamers,
Thanks to those of you who responded to my request for suggestions regarding RPG systems to purchase for the students' nascent gaming club here at the American University in Bulgaria. By the way, out of the several responses, the overwhelming favorite was the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games.

March 8, 1995

March 7, 1995

We did get the first set of color proofs for the INWO Factory Set. These look beautiful. We really ought to make a GIF of one of them and put it up. This would also help deal with the Very Frequently Asked Question ``What do the Factory Set cards look like?''
-- Steve Jackson

March 6, 1995

And several new products showed up over the weekend and got shipped out promptly -- GURPS Voodoo is now on its way to distributors. And we got a new shipment of some neat t-shirts, including the glow-in-the-dark one that celebrates Steve's victory over the forces of government cluelessness. This is the sort of things we'd love to let you order right over the Web, as soon as we get all the details figured out ... stay tuned.
-- Scott Haring

March 4, 1995

``Funny thing happened with the project today. I had asked one of the artists to render a realistic man for me, so I could test the walk code. He mis-interpreted ``realistic'', so now I have a completely nude, anatomically correct guy walking around the screen. I'm glad I stopped him before he made the woman. I don't want an X rating on this game. :)

March 3, 1995

Our Brush With Greatness
or,
Celebrity Isn't What It's Cracked Up To Be

We figured the Secret Service knew better than to include GURPS Cyberpunk in a list of "hacker" manifestos after we smacked them around in court over the whole sorry affair of five years ago -- check out the Secret Service Raid page for all the gory details. But I guess not.

And we sure thought a news organization with the reputation of "60 Minutes" would know better than to just take the government's word for anything. But I guess not.

Oh, yeah. Steve said Mike Wallace said that he didn't really know much about the Secret Service training film, and that we should be talking to the producer of the segment. If he or she returns Steve's calls, we'll let you know.

-- Scott Haring

March 2, 1995

Today, the last of the cards for the INWO Factory Set will go to the printer. It's on schedule for an April release. And it's going to look nice. For one thing, we found out that we could add gold ink to the cards ... It would have been garish to do ALL of them, so we're just adding some tasteful enhancements to the Illuminati cards. Wait and see.
-- Steve Jackson

March 1, 1995

Which brings me to our own little exercise in panic today. Illuminati Online crashed, and crashed hard. Nose down in a cornfield kind of crashed. And then, some of our PC-DOS machines that were tied into IO began to go down (oddly enough, the Macs were unaffected). E-mail was down; I couldn't check my newsgroups; I couldn't surf the Web! What ever was I going to do?

A year ago I had barely heard of the Internet; today I found myself lost without it. As Samuel Morse sent over that very first telegraph connection, ``What hath God wrought?''
-- Scott Haring