gination. For the uninitiated,
any public discussion of the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns,
utterly menacing or completely insane.

And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored
hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle on the
American highways of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on the
Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking discussions of
the effects of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers and napalm. It
sounded like hacker anarchy files run amuck.

Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by supplying
people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas. The more far-out,
the better.

Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not generally
had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to exist. Wargames and
role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much favored by
professional military strategists. Once little-known, these games are
now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North
America, Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby
outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's and
Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.

Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games company of the
middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed about a million dollars. Jackson
himself had a good reputation in his industry as a talented and
innovative designer of rather unconventional games, but his company was
something less than a titan of the field--certainly not like the
multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."
SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story brick office-suite,
cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. It
bustled with semi-organized activity and was littered with glossy
promotional brochures and dog-eared science-fiction novels. Attached
to the offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high
with cardboard boxes of games and books. Despite the weird imaginings
that went on within it, the SJG headquarters was quite a quotidian,
everyday sort of place. It looked like what it was: a publishers'
digs.

Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, popular games. But
the mainstay of the Jackson organization was their Generic Universal
Role-Playing System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered
solid and well-designed, an asset for players. But perhaps the most
p