brainwagon

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve been a geek for a long time. Twenty five years ago, my geekdom took the form of “gaming geek”. In high school this meant a mild spate of RPG games, but mostly wargames from Avalon Hill and a fair number of games from Steve Jackson. I loved Steve Jackson games because they were cheap and fun. I played Ogre, Car Wars, Illuminati the classic Tom Wham games Snit’s Revenge and The Awful Green Things from OuterSpace. Good stuff, Maynard. Lately some of us at Pixar have gotten into lunch time games of Munchkin, keeping the spirit alive.

That’s why it is so cool to read Cory Doctorow’s posting claiming that Steve Jackson Games’ electronic publishing venture is brilliant. SJ Games now has an electronic publishing arm that sells games and game related materials as PDF files which are not copyprotected by DRM. And you know what? If you lose the files in a disk crash Steve Jackson Games will let you redownload the ones you bought for free. Take that, iTunes music store.

They have four samples you can download, including GURPS Lite, a streamlined version of their popular roleplaying system. Break open a can of Zygwortz, pat Ook on the head, and enjoy.