For most of my gaming career, Steve Jackson Games has been a strong independent producer of role-playing games. They’ve always maintained a portfolio of interesting products like Car Wars and Illuminati. Their main RPG product has always been GURPS. The Generic Universal Role-Playing Game is the Swiss Army knife of RPGs. Designed to be modular, it is easy to adapt to any setting or genre you could want.

I’ve never been a die-hard GURPS fan. I always appreciated it for its utility though. Their supplements have always been top-notch and full of creative ideas. I use them to help brainstorm even if the system I want to use is totally different. Who couldn’t find a use for a book on Dinosaurs? Who isn’t fascinated by the myriad worlds of Alternate Earths? Who doesn’t want to explore Space? or Time? GURPS’s greatest strength is its willingness to go where no other RPG is willing to go. Places like Discworld, Cthulhu Punk, and even Bunnies and Burrows.

I will admit, there are only three games I’ve actually used GURPS for. I subjected my friends to “The Prisoner” and was amazed at how my players managed to recreate the first episode of the series without having ever seen it. I collected a large amount of GURPS Traveller to supplement my knowledge of the Traveller universe. My friends have also usually used GURPS for Super Heroes games, liking it as a lighter RPG compared to Champions.

So with my friends talking about another Supers game on the horizon, I went looking to see what is new in the world of GURPS. They released a new edition in 2004. It looks like it is nicely streamlined but still fairly close to the “original”. Ok, I mean the 3rd Edition because the first two editions came and went fairly quickly. 3rd Edition was the definitive version of GURPS for 15 years. So I’m a little saddened that after a flurry of releases in the first few years of the new edition it has died down to one or two books per year. I am happy that they are slowly putting their back catalog online as purchasable PDFs. I really hope that someday they make a deal with a print on demand company and make some of the really hard to get titles back in print.

Looking at Steve Jackson’s Annual Reports (2005-2010) Munchkin has entirely taken over the companies revenue stream over the last 6 years. Don’t get me wrong, Munchkin is a fun game. I just think it is a sad state of the RPG industry that when so many classic games are making comebacks (Earthdawn, Traveller, Shadowrun, etc.), GURPS is falling behind. It is true they are releasing a lot of smaller PDF titles, which is smart for them. I understand that a company has to stay agile and respond to their markets. They’ve stayed alive when many other game companies have come and gone. I am glad their Munchkin success is keeping them alive in this crowded marketplace. Maybe the problem is they’ve already covered a lot of ground. In this even more crowded RPG marketplace it is hard for generic to stand above the crowd.

In a way I feel it is partly my fault. Ok, not me personally, but me and the other gamers who once purchased GURPS books and haven’t been around in a while. Maybe I’ll submit a proposal for one of those PDF products; I have some ideas for a Space Atlas entry. I would also love to see Car Wars return in an easier to play game, but that’s probably just a dream. I do hope that whatever happens GURPS is still around in some form for another 15 years.

Tags: gurps, rpg

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.