I Wanted to BELIEVE!! (sob)

In the "Serves me right for believing the Internet" category, I geeked out yesterday about a possible purchase of West End Game (WEG) by another company that would hopefully lead to a re-juvenation of their properties (most importantly to me, Torg).

Come to find out that was not the case.

Turns out the post (dubiously dated 1/1/2010 as Mike pointed out), was reporting something that actually appeared to happen back in 2003. So I don't know the provenance of that link above.

Even more damning (and by that, I really mean "damn-damn-damn!"), is this link here, from a Feb 9 interview with Eric Gibson (owner of WEG) posted at a more reputable source wherein we have the following quotes:

"West End Games is currently in a holding pattern right now and my motivations are elsewhere at this point. I am in school right now and that occupies most of my attention at this point."

"School has kept me so busy right now and I don’t have enough time to sleep, let alone get everything else I need to get done completed. I do not have the time I used to have to visit message forums and answer questions. I would love to be able to answer the fan’s questions, but right now my attention is on other matters."

(sigh)

Since my mother told me not to say anything if I couldn't say anything nice, I'll just say this:

...

Game Industry Stuff

My buddy Bill gave me a tidbit of industry news was too good not to go all "OMGPonies!" over.

RPG News: West End Games Sold | Echoes #16

I'll skip to (for me) the really cool part:

“Plans include...the continued development of Torg 2.0"

Oh yeah. Gimme some sugar, baby.

Historically West End Games' "games" represents for me some of the watershed moments in my gaming resume':

• Stars Wars RPG (1st edition, thank you very much)
• Ghostbusters (one of the most publicly-underrated mechanics in gaming and I believe one of the influences that lead to the FATE system we all know and love)
• Torg (How to REALLY do cross-genre role-playing and make everyone happy. Not since the D&D "blue box" had a box game ever blown my mind the way TORG 1.0 did.)

Without the above list, early Champions, and R. Talsorian's original Cyberpunk (the "2013" version), I wouldn't be the person I am today.

Ahhh, memories. I ran a 2 year TORG campaign off-and-on where the players (all in their early 20's by this time) actually played themselves as PCs and all had their "history" together (talk about a great reason why the party was together and all trusted each other!) As DM, the backstory was that "I" had died during the attacks and that's why I wasn't in the campaign.

(At least until they met a doppelganger "me" as a recurring NPC from the "Nippon Tech" realm and turned out to be not quite the same person as they remembered from their "Core Earth"!)

Good times.

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Addendum from Mike:

I talk about "industry stuff"? Well, I will today with this addendum, just to make this post FATE-relevant (although the prospect of Torg's return is worth posting about, FATE or no).

Evil Hat's struck a deal with Alliance to distribute the Dresden Files RPG. "So what?" you ask. I'll tell you what: Alliance is the leading (I believe) comic and game distributor in the country. This means you should be able to walk into your FLGS and just find the thing on the shelf along with everything else they get from Alliance (which is, like, everything). And if it's not on the shelf, they can easily get it through their usual channels. No special orders through IPR necessary.

That's kinda huge news for Evil Hat (and for us FATE fans). So is this:

In addition to the Dresden Files RPG, Alliance will also be offering Evil Hat’s backlist of products – including the award-winning Spirit of the Century RPG

Now that's pretty awesome -- maybe even more awesome. How awesome? Go look at Evil Hat's catalogue. That awesome.

So are these covers to DFRPG:

And I say all of this never having read a word of Jim Butcher.