State of the Art for 1978

Yikes, who remembers this stuff? This was the state of the art in gaming excitement in the mid-1970s. Not these two games in particular, though the top one had a higher claim to that title than the bottom one, but these sorts of games. Paper wargames. Manual simulations. Consims. Heuristic Intensive Manual Simulations (and I am not making that up). Whatever. The top one is the old SPI solitaire classic Deathmaze, which could be played with equipment no more advanced than a coffee cup and a TV tray. The bottom one is the relatively unlamented SPI non-classic Mechwar '77, a tactical armor offering drawn from the lineage of Kampfpanzer and Desert War. I always liked the "T70" counter on the lower right corner; at the time nobody knew what the Soviets were going to call their replacement for the T-62 MBT. At least they tried with "T70", which was better than the "XMBT" thing they tried in Firefight. But to this day I can't decide if I think the T70 is really the T64 or the T72 - or if it really matters. Of course it does - doesn't it?

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What killed this sort of gaming? It's kind of like asking "What brought low the Roman Empire?" It depends on what haunts you in the wee hours of the morning. Many blamed Dungeons & Dragons, as though the mere sight of the game would turn a formerly-virile Eastfronter into a sebaceous sunken-chested "DM" unless he beat a saving roll of 18 or had the Panzergruppe Guderian Charm-Shield. Many blamed computer games, but the truth is that most wargames and most wargame companies were one with the dust of history long before PCs and PC games became even remotely feasible (though it can be fairly said that computer sports games did wipe out the old manual sports games like "Statis-Pro Basketball"). I think, in the end, all of us guys that used to play a lot of wargames and, more importantly, bought a lot of wargames (I still have 100+ of the beggars in storage in my garage) simply woke up during a gaming session and said "You know, these things are expensive and time-consuming, they contribute nothing toward my career prospects, and when's the last time any of us actually saw a girl?" So the next guy over said "What say we adjourn the gaming session in perpetuity and go get lives?" And thus it happened.

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But sometimes it's fun to leaf through them and see what the world looked like to geeks before the computer revolution happened. Lotsa paper, lotsa complicated rules, and lotsa little cerebral bleeds when it was 2 AM and you suddenly couldn't remember what the procedure was for deciding how many warp packs got blown off your pseudo-fighter in Star Fleet Battles.

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But if you're even remotely interested, permit me to recommend http://www.grognard.com/, the best wargaming website that I know of, and one that covers the nostalic games of yesteryear as well as the new releases that occasionally crop up like cold sores on the lower lip of human progress.