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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 8599198" data-attributes="member: 114">I’d like to suggest some amendments to this long post, I remember a whole bunch of this stuff from the time (Plus I have a useful first hand link… but to that later!) SPI was the big deal in the 1970’s wargame field because they published a LOT of games. Really good wargames. Avalon Hill where the only real competitor at the time and they were… unadventurous to say the least. SPI did a massive range of historical, modern and more experimental games (I have and enjoyed playing Outreach, Battle for the Stars, Starsoldier, War in the Ice, Freedom in the Galaxy and many others). They took a foray into RPGs in a big way with Universe (their sci-fi RPG) and Dragonquest (their fantasy RPG). They had quite an interesting d10 based system they used for both of these. Dallas was never a big part of their collapse from everything that I heard at the time. It may be that more information has surfaced since that time, but back then the news was a) they were in debtb) Gary Gygax bought up all their debtc) because they had refused to publish his game some years earlier he crushed themI hated Gygax for years for that, although more (first hand!) information has appeared over time that shows that SPI had run into problems with marketing, with inflation, poor cost control generally; when TSR bought them they were stunned at the liabilities they carried. SPI was still huge, publishing 2-3 brilliant tabletop wargames every month, and then Gygax destroyed them. Anyhow, a really full account is written up by Greg Costikyan here, and he should know <a href="http://www.costik.com/spisins.html" target="_blank">SPI Died for Your Sins</a> It’s a long read but a good one, and worth taking a look. Cheers</blockquote>

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