What About Us?

Both Paul and Perry have been gaming a long time. Perry started in 1975 and his first foray into the hobby was with Prados' Third Reich (1st/2nd Edition). Wow, talk about frustrating-try learning your first wargame with a manual of 100 pages! Not to mention them being filled with so many broken links, it forced me to be creative--I created my own rules. You see, then, all the big dogs (SPI, AH, Yaquinto, GDW) never responded to my game questions. Pissed me off. They never responded to my many game proposals. This simply led me to start designing games. I was a wargame junky. I had the monster games all spread out, my family all suffered from attention deficit.

Doing a Vietnam game then was taboo--suicide. Yet, I found so many cool battles to design that I did a series of them. Thus, my first design, Operation Pegagus 1968, was published by Task Force Games in 1980. A new magazine then, The Wargamer, published my Assault on Leningrad 1941. Despite the fact that Pegasus would eventually sell 10,000 copies and was then boxed by 1982, I made very little from it. The same was true for Leningrad, which my payment for it was a two year subscription to the magazine! In 1985, Post Hobby of Japan published it. It was at that time I began another design, that would take another 20 years to finally get published, Army Group North 1944 (aka Drive to the Baltic from Critical Hit). The Wargamer had considered it back in 1982 but went elsewhere. Of course since then, many of my designs have been professionally done. Many are pre-DTP status (these are games from 1983-91). Many sold quite well despite their crudeness, like, Last Battles of the Reich Quad. This was a quad where there were four separate games, each had some common elements but all were really a separate game by themselves. Steve Rawling in 1991 began to develop the game for Clash of Arms, but it proved too difficult to make all the games have the same basic rules. Then his attention went to a pre-DTP game called, Rip the Front 1918. He liked it so much that COA decided to publish it under the name, Landships! Rip the Front was only on the first tank to tank encounter, however, the concept was expanded and Steve did an excellent job! My Operation Leopard 1943 game on Leros would've been the first Leros game professionally done in 1985. It was bought by Canadian Simulations (two art students with a dream) and the map they generated was indeed, a work of art. I recall seeing the photos-whoa! Fate is an odd playmate in life. Back then, it stepped in and the art director for the new company was driving home one day and was killed in a head-on crash. Age 23. In a second, their dreams collapsed and so did Leros. The company died. It sold well as a pre-DTP game and my design was quite unique, using two game sequences. I still have it.

As a designer, I pick a topic that is interesting to me. I never pick it because it will make some money.

Paul has been playing wargames since 1969 and designing them since 1980 also. It wasn't until 1999 that he had his first published wargame, Trampling Out the Vintage, by the Microgame Design Group DTP. Currently, he has about 24 games published or accepted for publication!!! Paul is the staff game developer for Against the Odds magazine (www.atomagazine.com), as well as designing and developing games for a variety of others. I have also written seveal reviews of games for Paper Wars over the years.

In addition to gaming, Paul enjoys building models, repairing clocks and taking in plays and opera. I also very much enjoy antique cars, but one only has so much time in life and my 1961 Studebaker Lark was sold (sigh!). This project lasted three years as he rebuilt a car for a lark! The car really took Paul for a ride in many ways, not to mention $$$.