My Life As A Gamer - The Early Days
May. 18th, 2009 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theron(Before I got this account, I'd thought once or twice about putting together a dedicated gaming blog. Of course, most of the thinking about it had more to do with "Gee, it would be kind of neat to have a site where I just talked about gaming," and less about what I'd actually be producing. And while I have some ideas for content, they need to ferment a little longer before I let them out. So, for now, I'm going to start off with sort of a narrative gaming CV; the whens and wherefores of how I got to where I am today.)
It all started in eighth grade. The spring of 1977, at Garner Middle School. One day at lunch, I found a couple of my acquaintances playing what my dim recollection tells me was a tactical wargame representing the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was NOT Avalon Hill's "The Arab-Israeli Wars," which was still several years off. What I can remember of the map tells me it was something from SPI. Already a history buff, and having actually read H. G. Wells' Little Wars, I was hooked, and completely taken with the idea of wargaming.
(It's worth noting that the 1977 version of Theron was a good deal more militant than the 2009 model. Or even the 1989 model for that matter. At the time, military history was my passion and I had every intention of joining the military as soon as I got out of high school.)
I saved up my lawn mowing money, and a few weeks after school let out for the summer, I'd bought a copy of Avalon Hill's Battle of the Bulge. I then proceeded to play it wrong with my younger brother for about a week or two before I finally spotted the rule that said each counter could only be moved once per turn. After that, the games took longer, but also bore more resemblance to history.
High school saw me join JROTC and discover the Wargame Club, which opened me up to more opponents than my sibling, and a much wider assortment of games. In the course of my freshman year, I played Tobruk, Luftwaffe, Air Force/Dauntless, War at Sea, Wurzburg, and countless others. Our sponsor had a run of Avalon Hill's The General magazine that went back years, and he'd let us check them out to read at home. We could play an hour before school and during lunch, and for three hours after school on Fridays. Gamer heaven, really.
Among the many games sweeping through the club in the spring of '78 were two "micro games" from an Austin-based company called Metagaming. The first, Melee, was a tactical game of man-to-man combat with ancient weapons and armor. The beauty of Melee was that it was FAST. Anywhere from two to eight people could play, and you could fight out an entire battle in under half an hour, a huge thing if you were playing before school or at lunch. Furthermore, it allowed you to individualize your warrior and improve him through victories in the arena (Experience Points!). Melee also contained, almost as an afterthought, rules for fantasy races, like elves, orcs, and dwarves. Having discovered Tolkien only a year before (and at the time, still working my way through The Lord of the Rings), this was easily the coolest thing since individually wrapped single slice cheese.
The other game was a sequel to Melee called Wizard. Wizard jumped into the fantasy genre with both feet, by giving the players the opportunity to play dueling wizards, with a set of rules that still strikes me with its elegance. Equipped with less than perfect knowledge of your opponent's capabilities, Wizard required more than just a good grasp of tactics and dice probabilities; it brought bluffing into the mix. Did your opponent just summon a real wolf that could tear your throat out, or is it an illusion that could only harm you if you believed it to be real? Or was it just an image, designed to distract your efforts? With further rules for a number of mythical beasts, including dragons, Wizard allowed us to play out all manner of semi-RPG moments.
Then, we found Death Test. This was an accessory for Melee and Wizard, a programmed adventure (the old "If you want to go left, turn to 43, if you want to go straight go to 55" type of thing) that led a group of warriors and/or wizards through a devious underground maze. Sounds familiar? Over the next few months, we tore through Death Test, until we had it memorized. Then, we made up our own. Everything was falling in place for my next big step...
It all started in eighth grade. The spring of 1977, at Garner Middle School. One day at lunch, I found a couple of my acquaintances playing what my dim recollection tells me was a tactical wargame representing the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was NOT Avalon Hill's "The Arab-Israeli Wars," which was still several years off. What I can remember of the map tells me it was something from SPI. Already a history buff, and having actually read H. G. Wells' Little Wars, I was hooked, and completely taken with the idea of wargaming.
(It's worth noting that the 1977 version of Theron was a good deal more militant than the 2009 model. Or even the 1989 model for that matter. At the time, military history was my passion and I had every intention of joining the military as soon as I got out of high school.)
I saved up my lawn mowing money, and a few weeks after school let out for the summer, I'd bought a copy of Avalon Hill's Battle of the Bulge. I then proceeded to play it wrong with my younger brother for about a week or two before I finally spotted the rule that said each counter could only be moved once per turn. After that, the games took longer, but also bore more resemblance to history.
High school saw me join JROTC and discover the Wargame Club, which opened me up to more opponents than my sibling, and a much wider assortment of games. In the course of my freshman year, I played Tobruk, Luftwaffe, Air Force/Dauntless, War at Sea, Wurzburg, and countless others. Our sponsor had a run of Avalon Hill's The General magazine that went back years, and he'd let us check them out to read at home. We could play an hour before school and during lunch, and for three hours after school on Fridays. Gamer heaven, really.
Among the many games sweeping through the club in the spring of '78 were two "micro games" from an Austin-based company called Metagaming. The first, Melee, was a tactical game of man-to-man combat with ancient weapons and armor. The beauty of Melee was that it was FAST. Anywhere from two to eight people could play, and you could fight out an entire battle in under half an hour, a huge thing if you were playing before school or at lunch. Furthermore, it allowed you to individualize your warrior and improve him through victories in the arena (Experience Points!). Melee also contained, almost as an afterthought, rules for fantasy races, like elves, orcs, and dwarves. Having discovered Tolkien only a year before (and at the time, still working my way through The Lord of the Rings), this was easily the coolest thing since individually wrapped single slice cheese.
The other game was a sequel to Melee called Wizard. Wizard jumped into the fantasy genre with both feet, by giving the players the opportunity to play dueling wizards, with a set of rules that still strikes me with its elegance. Equipped with less than perfect knowledge of your opponent's capabilities, Wizard required more than just a good grasp of tactics and dice probabilities; it brought bluffing into the mix. Did your opponent just summon a real wolf that could tear your throat out, or is it an illusion that could only harm you if you believed it to be real? Or was it just an image, designed to distract your efforts? With further rules for a number of mythical beasts, including dragons, Wizard allowed us to play out all manner of semi-RPG moments.
Then, we found Death Test. This was an accessory for Melee and Wizard, a programmed adventure (the old "If you want to go left, turn to 43, if you want to go straight go to 55" type of thing) that led a group of warriors and/or wizards through a devious underground maze. Sounds familiar? Over the next few months, we tore through Death Test, until we had it memorized. Then, we made up our own. Everything was falling in place for my next big step...