Ode to Our First
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2006

In the spring of 1993, I worked for a rapidly-dying wargame publisher. I’ve seen postings on the Internet speculating on the events surrounding that corporate near-death (to my knowledge, they never technically went away as an entity); none of them come close to the bizarre truth.

It had been quite the learning experience, all of it negative. But as game editor there, I’d assembled a good stable of talent. Brian Knipple had designed several games for me, and wanted to keep publishing them under a new company. I had the artists and game designers from the old company, and the printing and distribution connections. Brian funded the start-up costs with a second mortgage on his home. And away we went. My wife, Carole, was very supportive — she had worked many convention booths for that other company and carried enormous anger toward its management as a result. Still does.

I still had a day job in those days, teaching history. It was a very part-time operation. Brian had desperately wanted to publish his gigantic game on the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, an early version of the game now on our Classic Wargame proposal list. It’s a good thing we didn’t; there was still a lot of learning to do.

Sicily was part of an even greater obsession: Brian had mapped out most of the Italian peninsula at the same scale, two kilometers per hex. I still have the sketch map. The game called “Avalanche” used just one of the dozen or so maps stretching from Reggio to Roma. It could most easily be separated from the rest, Brian said, because the Allied units came ashore there in an amphibious invasion and there was little interaction with the other parts of this gigantic game of all Italy.

And here came a serious mistake on my part. Brian had designed the game as part of a much larger whole, and its map had been laid out with that in mind. That layout meant that the map was missing the major Allied goal of the campaign: the city of Naples. I really should have asked him to re-make the game with two maps, laid out at a right angle to the original (the map that is in the game today).

Mark Simonitch did the map art. I knew him through that other company, but I’m not sure now if he ever actually did any work there. That map, together with that for MacArthur’s Return that printed at the same time, was one of the very last pieces of ruby-film layout printed in the United States. And if you look very closely, you’ll see why: The closer to the right edge of the map, the more the black layer is out of register with the rest of the map (so the red roads don’t cross the blue rivers exactly at the black bridges). This was a product of warping from the heat while the original was in transit from California to Alabama. Because the technology was almost dead, it couldn’t be fixed at the printer — it would have to go back to California for a complete re-make, which would add weeks to delivery. I let it print complete with the warping; most gamers have never noticed. This is also why the game’s web page has so little actual game artwork on it; we no longer have it available.

The box art was by a guy I’d also recruited for that other place. He’d done some maps there and wanted to do covers as well. By day, he did graphic design for the in-house ad agency at a major producer of frozen turkeys. And when he turned in his cover sketch, all of the people looked like . . . turkeys. They had sharp beak-like noses, Reagan-like wattles on their necks, and their hair came into a cock’s comb. I had him go with photographs instead. We paid about three times what we currently pay for boxes (12 years later) to have them made at a place in Virginia.

The game pieces are kind of bland, though they look worse than they should have — the printer shifted the colors and none of them look the way they were designed. But by the time they arrived, there weren’t a whole lot of choices. They were the last items in, and lacking our own facility and with no place to assemble 10,000 games in my garage we had the games assembled at EBSCO Media, who had handled most of the printing. They started making games as soon as the last parts came in – by the time I knew the game pieces were miscolored, they’d been put into thousands of boxes. If I wanted to make the vendor replace them, first I’d have to pay EBSCO’s minions to remove them from the boxes by hand. At $0.35 per box. They weren’t that bad looking, I convinced myself.

I laid out the black and white components myself, and it truly shows. They are among the ugliest works we’ve put in print.

Once assembled and shrink-wrapped, most of the games went into EBSCO’s warehouse while others came to my house. There, they filled every flat surface while I stacked them in the attic. I then collected orders and packed them; the long-suffering Carole took them to UPS. They came a dozen per box, and soon I had to add a new skill: shrink-wrapping. Because EBSCO had only run the first several hundred through their heat tunnel; the rest had been packed with the wrap hanging loose. Of course they’d be glad to complete the job. If I could pack every game back in its shipping carton and have them all ready for a single pick-up.

Instead, I learned how to use a heat gun.

Selling them was yet another learning experience. We’d put together a small mailing list, and I designed a flyer for them. Brian was charged with printing them, labeling them, stamping them and mailing them out. But he decided the flyer needed more information and typed out some extra lines of text, printed them on a dot-matrix printer and taped them on. The Frankenstein look is charming today.

Most distributor buyers had a great deal of sympathy for me because of my experience at that other place; they knew the story all too well. Initial orders were very good, numbers I’d gladly take today. And then Magic struck.

I actually knew about Magic: The Gathering before most of the game industry did. Peter Adkison stood alone manning his booth at the last Origins I did for that other company. He was doing even worse with his weird little “collectible card game” than we were with our “wargames in plain white envelopes.” Carole, feeling sorry for him, flounced over in her little black dress with the high hemline and low neckline (a foreshadowing of our RPG sales tactics some years later) and bought a set. Peter would become a great friend of Avalanche Press; we’re still in business because of his former company’s assistance in the year 2000. But his silly little game turned the industry upside down.

Magic took a full year to truly take off, but once it did, it poured more money through the game industry in weeks than our little niche had seen in its entire existence up to that point.

Retailers no longer had to sell; they had to fend off hordes of children and parents waving money at them. Distributors did not need to distribute, they now had to sweat allocations (what percentage of your order will you receive?). And if you were a new wargame manufacturer holding a stack of purchase orders, you now had a matching set of cancellations as every possible dollar was diverted to this hot new product.

For we had placed our print orders before Magic’s arrival as the Greatest Hit Ever, but we actually got the product afterwards. We were screwed.

Since we announced last week that Invasion of Italy would receive a Viking Funeral next Monday, I’ve gotten quite a few e-mails asking how we could do this to our very first game. It’s a great game, they say, with good game play and very competitive scenarios. Doesn’t sentimental value require its survival?

Absolutely not. I’ve stared at the massive, brown-edged stacks of this game for a dozen years now. I had good hair when we printed this thing! I’ve worked solid 20-hour shifts shrink-wrapping them to get an order ready for UPS. I’ve sold them with every tactic imaginable. I’ve listened to every complaint about the game itself, ranging from the little gray bits of dust that fall on the table when you punch out the counters to its price to some valued customer accusing us of committing fraud by not shipping sale-priced copies for free (usually those guys aren’t really customers, but Liz says I can’t use the phrase I originally typed there). Always accompanied by a detailed recitation of my shortcomings of parentage and intellect.

I’m tired of this game.

There are less than 50 of them left as of this writing; the Funeral sale has moved several hundred out the warehouse door. Each product we have takes up a dedicated “footprint” in the warehouse: those 40-odd games occupy a space better needed by several hundred copies of Road to Berlin or Bismarck.

At the current rate of final sales, we won’t actually burn any. And that’s a real shame.

Click here to save one of the last copies from the flames!