Steve Jackson Games

History

Steve Jackson, the Texas designer (not the British co-founder of Games Workshop), made his name at Metagaming Concepts in Austin with the pocket wargame Ogre (1977) and the combat games Melee and Wizard, the core of The Fantasy Trip. After a falling-out with Metagaming's owner, he founded Steve Jackson Games in Austin in 1980. Its first products copied what had worked at Metagaming: cheap, clever microgames in 4-by-7-inch Ziploc bags, later in a small "Pocket Box." Car Wars (1981), a game of armed automobiles, and Illuminati, a card game of rival conspiracies, became hits, and the company soon took over The Space Gamer magazine as well. Jackson also acquired Ogre and its spin-off G.E.V. from Metagaming.

The company's biggest roleplaying project was a single system for every genre. GURPS, the Generic Universal RolePlaying System, grew out of the Fantasy Trip's ideas: four attributes, point-bought characters with advantages and disadvantages, and 3d6 roll-under tests. Its combat rules appeared as Man to Man (1985) and the full game in 1986. Dozens of worldbooks followed, from licensed settings such as Discworld, Conan and Wild Cards to meticulously researched historical volumes; they were admired even by people who never played GURPS.

On March 1, 1990, U.S. Secret Service agents raided the company's offices. They were investigating an employee over a hacking case and believed the manuscript of GURPS Cyberpunk was a handbook for computer crime. They seized computers, disks and the book, read and deleted private email on the company's bulletin board system, and nearly put the firm out of business. No one at the company was charged with a crime. Steve Jackson Games sued and won in federal court, and the case helped inspire the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that July. GURPS Cyberpunk was published in 1990, its cover proudly noting the raid.

In 2001 Jackson designed Munchkin, a card game with art by John Kovalic that parodies dungeon crawling and the players who min-max it. It became the company's best seller, with dozens of spin-offs and expansions. The fourth edition of GURPS arrived in 2004, the company's Pyramid magazine ran until 2019, and a 2012 Kickstarter produced a lavish Ogre Designer's Edition. In December 2017 Jackson used a provision of U.S. copyright law letting authors terminate old grants after 35 years to reclaim The Fantasy Trip; a 2018 Kickstarter funded in a day, and the Legacy Edition reached stores in 2019. Phil Reed served as CEO from 2014 to 2023, followed briefly by Meredith Placko; Jackson remains the owner.

Notable work

Ogre, Car Wars, Illuminati, GURPS, Munchkin and the revived Fantasy Trip. Both GURPS and Munchkin have been inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame.

Legacy

GURPS made the universal RPG system a serious idea, and its worldbooks set a standard for research that many designers still cite. Munchkin brought roleplaying in-jokes about loot, rules lawyers and backstabbing parties to mass-market shelves. And the 1990 raid, fought by a small Texas game company, became a founding case of digital civil liberties, an odd but real way in which a fantasy-and-science-fiction publisher changed the internet.