GDW & MegaT (Was: Re: The GEnie gateway...)

Peter L. Berghold wrote:
> [I wrote:]
> *| GDW seems to have more or less pulled out of the MegaT business to concentrate
> *| on 2300AD, Twilight and that Jules Verne animal.
> *|
> *| Anyone with inside contacts who volunteers to ask?
> *|
> *|
> OMIGOD!   You mean _not only have they cut OT loose_ support wise, they have
> stopped supporting MT!?!?!   When did this come about?

What follows is purely circumstantial evidence and hearsay:

When Traveller 2300 was introduced there was an interview with Mark W Miller
in the Digest, where he said that T2300 was the next step after Traveller, and
that Traveller was good when it was introduced (ie 70's sometime) but that it
now were obsolete.

All the old supplements went out of print *before* there were any definite talk
about MegaT.

JTAS died the silent death and became a part of Challenge (a shrinking part).

Folks I know in the games-shop business claimed that GDW had dropped Traveller.

In several places (among others TD18 Q&A) it says that DGP wrote the scripts
for (parts of, and maybe the whole layout) the MegaT books.

My games-shop source has confirmed this.

It is DGP that runs the GEnie (?) Traveller area. (i think)

GDW's release schedule for first quarter 90 has only one (1) MegaT item in it,
according to "Hobbyhuset" (Importer of GDW stuff in Sweden).

DGP seems to have lots of stuff planned for release soon (MT Aliens Vol1 etc)

My interpretation of this is that GDW was going to scrap Traveller in favour
of Traveller 2300, but Traveller:2300 flopped, (Old Traveller's didn't like it:
"WHAT? no Vilani on Barnard's?? No Jumpdrive???" and new customers thought it
was just "old" traveller in a new dress because of the name).
So GDW changed it's name from Traveller:2300 to 2300AD and DGP stepped in
to take responsibility for Traveller. The transition was marked by the
publishing of MegaTraveller, where all the DGP rules improvements (like tasks)
was incorporated in the core rules.
Some things are still published by the GDW for MegaT but the bulk of the work
seems to lay on DGP.

And the MCr10 question is:
Was this good or bad?

I think it was good. When GDW didn't have the time and/or interest to
modernize traveller they had the decency to let the people who had time and
interest do it. I can think of a lot of RPG-companies that never would have
done that. (TSR as an infamous example)
DGP is also smaller than GDW and is more specialized for MegaT. This means that
they are more attentive to customer feedback and opinions.

> Maybe getting permission for creating player aids for Traveller isn't going
> to be so hard after all... <smirk>

I don't know. But since we almost exclusively discuss traveller here on the TML,
I think that DGP is the ones to approach, not GDW, with the question about a
feed to GEnie.

In the choise between a GEnie feed and an Newsgroup-TML feed I vote for the
GEnie feed. TML is a semi-closed/open group in which datafiles etc. has an
controlled propagation. The same file in News is all over the world in less than
a day, totally without control.
There is now way that anyone is going to allow a GEnie<->TML feed if TML
has a feed to News.

Disclaimer: I have no connections with DGP or GDW. everything above is hearsay.
- --
Bertil K K Jonell @ Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg
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