Flying Buffalo

History

Flying Buffalo began in an Army barracks. In January 1970 Rick Loomis, a soldier stationed in Hawaii, invented Nuclear Destruction, a game of global war played by mail, and began moderating games for strangers. Within a year he had more than 200 players, and he asked a fellow soldier, Steve MacGregor, to write a program to process the turns; they rented time on a computer near Fort Shafter under the name Flying Buffalo, taken from two coins, the Flying Eagle cent and the Buffalo nickel. After leaving the Army in 1972, Loomis incorporated the company, moved to Arizona and spent his savings on a Raytheon 704 minicomputer, which he said cost $15,000 and had 4,000 words of memory. The venture created the professional Play-by-Mail Games industry in America. The same year Loomis acquired the card game Nuclear War, which became a perennial seller.

In 1975 a Phoenix librarian, Ken St. Andre, who had found the new Dungeons & Dragons rules baffling, wrote his own fantasy game and printed 100 copies. Loomis took 40 of them to the Origins convention in July 1975 and sold out. Flying Buffalo then published Tunnels & Trolls, often called the second commercial roleplaying game after D&D. It used only ordinary six-sided dice, resolved combat with one roll per side, and gave its spells joke names such as "Take That You Fiend!" Its accessibility made it popular, and its fifth edition (1979) was translated widely, reaching Japan before D&D did.

Flying Buffalo's most original idea was the solo adventure. Beginning with Loomis's Buffalo Castle (1976), it published programmed adventures in which one player read numbered paragraphs and chose where to go, with dice for combat and no referee. The format prefigured Fighting Fantasy and the Gamebooks & Interactive Books boom by several years. The company also published the Catalyst series of generic fantasy supplements, the long-running play-by-mail game Starweb (from 1976), a magazine, and later the Mage's Blood and Old Bones shared-world anthology (1992).

It never grew large. In 1980 it reported more than 3,000 play-by-mail players worldwide; its staff peaked at 21 in 1983; and it ran a game shop in Tempe until 1985. But it lasted. After TSR, Inc. was dissolved in 1997, Flying Buffalo was the oldest pen-and-paper roleplaying publisher still in business. A Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls, crowdfunded in the 2010s, revived the game for a new generation.

Loomis died on August 23, 2019, a day before his 73rd birthday. In July 2021 Webbed Sphere bought Flying Buffalo; the play-by-mail games continued separately as Rick Loomis PBM Games. In May 2023 Rebellion Unplugged, the tabletop arm of the British video game company Rebellion, acquired all of Flying Buffalo's RPG products, and in March 2026 it crowdfunded a new edition, Tunnels & Trolls: A New Age, announced for 2027.

Notable work

Nuclear Destruction, Starweb and other play-by-mail games; the card game Nuclear War; Tunnels & Trolls and its solo adventures; and the Catalyst supplements such as Grimtooth's Traps.

Legacy

Flying Buffalo was a pioneer twice over. Its computer-moderated mail games were early ancestors of online multiplayer play, and its Tunnels & Trolls showed that D&D could be answered with something simpler and funnier. Its solo adventures, the first published programmed fantasy adventures for an RPG, pointed the way to Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure-style books. Few companies in the hobby can claim to have been first at so many things.