Steve Jackson

There was one raid that especially outraged him.

It was about a little company in Austin, Texas called Steve Jackson Games.

They sold role-playing and dice games, most of which were meant to be played in person.

The Secret Service raided their offices.

They seized everything, convinced that Steve Jackson's new game, called Cyberpunk, was some kind of hacking manual.

It was just another role-playing game, and they didn't know what they were doing.

They were just in the dark, and they had heard that there were witches at Steve Jackson games, and they were confiscating all the brooms.

Anyway, I knew about all these things, and as I told Mitch about them, he became more and more distressed.

movie called The Ouija Board, you know, with his famous Coco the Clown.

That may be the first board game movie, potentially, right? But just a couple years before this, we had Tag the Assassination Game, which was not around a board game, but around a college game that was called Assassin that Steve Jackson Games put in a book called Killer.

And...

You know, Killer was a pretty popular game.

I had that book.

But, you know, the movie tagged the assassination game into some degree gotcha, which came out the same year as Clue.

We're really based on that college game, not so much the Steve Jackson game, Killer.

So, now, Tag the Assassination Game is interesting, though.

That was pretty much it.

It wasn't until... 78 that I discovered Dungeons and Dragons, along with the whole like Steve Jackson line and metagaming, all these things that nobody remembers.

But Avalon Hill games, I call them little cardboard square games.

You know, I played a lot of those.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but then I got an Apple IIc and did a lot of work on that.

The K-Pro, I did a lot of work.

I went to work for Steve Jackson Games, a little board game company.

in Austin, where I live, and did a lot of writing there, worked on a cartoon role-playing game called Tune, worked on GURPS, worked on a bunch of stuff on my K-Pro, and then got the 2C and I wrote a novel, The Hollow Earth Affair, And one thing after another, a Choose Your Own Adventure book with the Fantastic Four and a bunch of modules and, you know, articles for Dragon Magazine and stuff like that.

Yes.

And the person who created and published zombie dice, Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson games.

I learned recently that he is, he's not fully retiring, but he is stepping down as head of the company, giving that position is actually kind of creating two positions.

They're going to be held by two different people.

I like that a lot.

And thank you to him for bringing so much joy to my table over the years because, again, these games are so much fun and accessible.

That's what I think when I think of Steve Jackson games.

They're accessible games.

We've got a couple items here.

One of the biggest items over the weekend was, Was, you know, Steve Jackson games.

I'm sure you've heard of this, you know, very made very many famous games, including what we talked about last week, Munchkin.

Right.

And so Steve Jackson himself of

Steve Jackson games.

Yes.

Is stepping down as the CEO, and they promoted up Sabrina Gonzalez.

And, uh, What happened was one of my friends went home and told his dad, like, oh, we played this game.

And his dad was like, oh, yeah, I played that game in college, right? And pulled out a bunch of different RPGs, including an RPG called The Fantasy Trip, which was from not at the time Steve Jackson Games, but Steve Jackson was the lead designer and stuff.

And now Steve Jackson Games owns it, and they've put out a new version of it.

And so my friend... grabbed those books and started to run for us, right? And it was a little bit simpler and easier for us to wrap our minds around than D&D at the time.

And basically the same, you know, sort of genre.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know the, I have, I have the big box set that they, that Steve Jackson did.

And this is kind of for people who've been around in the industry for a long time.

But you may have heard of Steve Jackson games.

If you don't know who Steve Jackson is or who his company is, the game you probably know the most for is going to be Munchkin.

That was probably their biggest selling title ever held.

Be most companies biggest selling title ever.

but steve jackson after 46 years of running his company is stepping down as ceo and replacing himself with a woman named sabrina gonzalez so she will be the new day-to-day person already making a few moves from what i've seen bringing some people in for some different uh rpg games and stuff that uh steve jackson games will be selling but yeah i mostly put this in here because steve jackson whether you know him or not he was an og of the game industry With games like Ogre and Illuminati and some of these older things that people may not even know the words we're saying right now on some of these games.

We're

back in the 1900s.

You take this one.

Steve Jackson Games has always been...

I've always been impressed that they make a...

They make blog posts and are very transparent about how much money comes in, how much money goes out.

They're one of the few companies that everything, they just release it all.

And their newest blog post, September 11th, 2026, Steve Jackson is stepping down as the CEO of Steve Jackson Games.

So this is a big move for Steve.

I guess this is a runway retirement, stepping down move, less day-to-day, less responsibility.