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My days at the end of Avalon Hill
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In 1996 I was hired as a designer at Avalon Hill and this would be one of my first jobs out of college. Originally brought on to develop the new RuneQuest RPG, I juggled many different roles there during my time, and worked on a huge number of those final boardgames AH would produce. While I wasn't the one to "turn out the lights" (that honor would go to producer Bill Levay), I was one of the half dozen employees that was let go on that final day. I still remember how angry and sad we all were that final day -- I was angry enough to post the demise of AH on the website without permission! Despite that, my final words to Eric Dott were "you know, while it lasted, this was the best job I ever had." His own response, and to his credit an authentically emotional one, was "It sure was. It was, wasn't it?" But years have past, and I now look back at those last two years with great fondness. I worked with a great team on a lot of games I'm proud of. Now in my 12th year in the game industry, I look at that time as my apprenticeship with some amazing talent.
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Posted On: 2008-06-27 01:31:16
Edited On: 2008-06-27 00:18:22
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RUNEQUEST SLAYERS
I was originally hired to be the lead designer of a new version of RuneQuest (soon redubbed "RuneQuest Slayers"). A deal had been struck between Avalon Hill and Chaosium, where AH got the rights to the name, Chaosium got the rights to the world of Glorantha, and both companies could use the system.
Mark Hall was brought on quickly afterwards as the development manager of the project, and we agreed that we needed to steer away from the original system since we were nervous Chaosium would launch their own game with an identical one.
Mark and I brought on Christopher Lawrence as a second designer and Jason Behnke as the official RuneQuest artist. Ben Knight was to be the editor of the new game, and we all agreed to refocus the game on runes (absent from previous editions) and bring a grittier, more sword and sorcery feel to the game. This project absorbed most of my time for the next two years, though like everyone else at Avalon Hill, I spent quite a bit of time helping to develop many of the boardgames that would be released, and much of what I learned about boardgames from the masters there would be brought back into the new RuneQuest mechanics.
While it was incredibly painful when Avalon Hill shut down (with RuneQuest Slayers, sitting half-printed on the press!), RuneQuest quite literally marked the start and end of my career at Avalon Hill. |
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1 Comment []
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Posted On: 2008-06-27 00:21:56
Edited on: 2008-06-27 01:03:19
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ISRAEL BRITANNIA
This was my first official playtest at my new job at Avalon Hill. A designer had submitted a Britannia-like game based around the history of Israel. It even had an Ark of the Covenant you could cart around from territory to territory to destroy your foes. After playing the game, Ben Knight asked my opinion before anyone else at the table. I told him I thought it was great, and it was innovative to have you playing all these different nations.
You see, I had never played Britannia or History of the World before, so this mechanic was brand new to me. The guys at the table sighed and mostly ignored me. Needless to say, we passed on the game because it was too niche, but it did cause me to immediately start reading the rules of a bunch of the old AH classics I had never played before. |
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1 Comment []
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Posted On: 2008-06-27 00:27:12
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TITAN: THE ARENA
Titan: The Arena was another one of the first games I had the pleasure of helping to playtest during my tenure at Avalon Hill. We had just hired Mark Hall as one of our development directors, whose previous experience was from Games Workshop, and he pushed the company hard to establish a strong "fantasy brand" for the company. Since Titan was the logical choice, Mark and Don Greenwood quickly converted Grand National Derby into what would be known as Titan: The Arena.
The game formed very quickly, with most of the playtesting revolving around tweaking the powers. Don did a great job inventing those powers and managing everyone's suggestions, and we all knew it was going to be a blast to play from the very beginning.
Kurt Miller poured a lot of time and energy into the art of those cards. Mark and Don insisted that the creatures look "cool and mean." Mark insisted that the game get printed by Carta Mundi for the best quality, which irritated the Dotts as everything back then was printed in-house at Monarch Printing, but Monarch clearly couldn't duplicate the print job offerred elsewhere.
When the game was released, a lot of our customers were really irritated that the game wasn't MORE like Titan. Even as far back as 1997, a lot of Titan fans were hoping for a fancy Titan reprint, and when this turned out to be "just a card game" a lot of those fans expressed their frustration to us at various conventions. Many even refused to play it when they saw it wasn't a true sequel to Titan. Mark Hall had a big Titan boardgame revisit up his sleeve for later when the original went out of print, but that never came to fruition.
I think Titan: The Arena is now known as much for its gameplay as its original, massively confusing rulebook. I don't know what to say (other than Don's style is far removed from today's streamlined Euro rules!). Maybe because we all knew how to play so well, no one spotted how harsh the rules were to anyone but the most hardcore AH gamer. Certainly, no one tried giving the rulebook to a new player. Shortly after release, we tried to make amends, and I helped put an illustrated "example of play" up on the website to address some of the confusion. I remember at the time, posting errata and game help on the web was considered fairly revolutionary! |
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9 Comments []
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Posted On: 2008-06-27 00:23:36
Edited on: 2008-06-27 01:22:10
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Posted On: 2008-06-27 12:14:15
