Jackson Game, you did not receive
any software disks. What you got was a plastic bag with some cardboard
game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of cards. Most of their
products were books.

However, computers WERE deeply involved in the Steve Jackson Games
business. Like almost all modern publishers, Steve Jackson and his
fifteen employees used computers to write text, to keep accounts, and
to run the business generally. They also used a computer to run their
official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson Games, a board called
Illuminati. On Illuminati, simulation gamers who happened to own
computers and modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory and
practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's news and its product
announcements.

Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small computer with
limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties to large-scale
computer networks. It did, however, have hundreds of users, many of
them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-of-state.

Illuminati was NOT an "underground" board. It did not feature hints on
computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted credit card
numbers, or long-distance access codes. Some of Illuminati's users,
however, were members of the Legion of Doom. And so was one of Steve
Jackson's senior employees--the Mentor. The Mentor wrote for Phrack,
and also ran an underground board, Phoenix Project--but the Mentor was
not a computer professional. The Mentor was the managing editor of
Steve Jackson Games and a professional game designer by trade. These
LoD members did not use Illuminati to help their HACKING activities.
They used it to help their GAME-PLAYING activities--and they were even
more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were to hacking.

"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson himself,
the company's founder and sole owner, had invented. This multi-player
card-game was one of Mr Jackson's best-known, most successful, most
technically innovative products. "Illuminati" was a game of paranoiac
conspiracy in which various antisocial cults warred covertly to
dominate the world. "Illuminati" was hilarious, and great fun to play,
involving flying saucers, the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku
Klux Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the Boy
Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the twisted depths of
Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid ima