4 ms·

A friend of mine has an as-yet-unfinished documentary about the early history of RPGs, based on interview footage he shot in early 2000s (including interviews w

by beat 11y ago

A friend of mine has an as-yet-unfinished documentary about the early history of RPGs, based on interview footage he shot in early 2000s (including interviews with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson). My favorite moment in the rough cut starts with Frank Chadwick of GDW talking about how the anti-RPG frenzy didn't affect them (at the time, GDW mostly made a science fiction RPG called Traveller). Cut to Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games - an incredibly animated person - having an absolute freakout while explaining how the Secret Service raided his business and seized all his inventory, computers, everything. Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", declared it a "manual for computer terrorism", and the Secret Service flipped out. They nearly put SJG out of business. No charges were ever filed, as SJG didn't do anything even remotely illegal or dangerous. This event was one of the things that led to the founding of EFF. So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. That's not just moms and journalists freaking out. That was the full authority of the US government.

anigbrowl 11y ago
That's a rather different situation from thinking that gamers are going to summon demons and stuff like that. cyber attacks have turned out to be a real thing, even though assuming SJG was a front for terrorism was nonsense. On the other hand, I have yet to hear of anyone successfully calling up spirits from the vasty deep.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  This is a good point. The Steve Jackson raids were ridiculous, but given that the perpetrators didn't even know what a role-playing game was, I doubt they drew a connection between Cyberpunk and D&D.
drhayes9 11y ago
Bruce Sterling wrote about the raid as part of his book "The Hacker Crackdown". As far as I know, the sting against SJG "Cyberpunk" was part of Operation Sundevil, a larger-scale federal effort to suppress this vaguely public 911 document that a phone phreak got his hands on. Here's a link to the text: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html The author of the SJG book, Loyd Blankenship, was involved in the transmission and storage of the 911 documents that the Secret Service was all fired up about. He ran the Steve Jackson Illuminati BBS. My favorite part of the Hacker Crackdown book is when Sterling talks about how Steve Jackson couldn't convince the investigators that what he'd written was a game. They kept insisting it was real. EDIT: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil "The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error." Whoops! My bad.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", Nitpick, but the work in question was "GURPS Cyberpunk", and its not a game in itself but a genre supplement for GURPS, SJG's generic RPG. > So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. The SJG raid had pretty much nothing to do with the larger, moralistic anti-D&D frenzy (even though that frenzy did also target other parts of the RPG industry), and was more related to completely separate anti-hacker panic, the bureaucratic turf war between the FBI and Secret Service over computer crime and the Secret Service's desire to show results on that front (coupled with a near-complete lack of knowledge about what it was doing in that field), and the fact that the freelancer who was writing GURPS Cyberpunk was a highly-visible hacker with an arrest record. Other than the fact that it happened to effect a company in the same industry, it was a completely separate thing.

by beat 11y ago

anigbrowl 11y ago

That's a rather different situation from thinking that gamers are going to summon demons and stuff like that. cyber attacks have turned out to be a real thing, even though assuming SJG was a front for terrorism was nonsense. On the other hand, I have yet to hear of anyone successfully calling up spirits from the vasty deep.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
This is a good point. The Steve Jackson raids were ridiculous, but given that the perpetrators didn't even know what a role-playing game was, I doubt they drew a connection between Cyberpunk and D&D.

drhayes9 11y ago

Bruce Sterling wrote about the raid as part of his book "The Hacker Crackdown". As far as I know, the sting against SJG "Cyberpunk" was part of Operation Sundevil, a larger-scale federal effort to suppress this vaguely public 911 document that a phone phreak got his hands on. Here's a link to the text: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html The author of the SJG book, Loyd Blankenship, was involved in the transmission and storage of the 911 documents that the Secret Service was all fired up about. He ran the Steve Jackson Illuminati BBS. My favorite part of the Hacker Crackdown book is when Sterling talks about how Steve Jackson couldn't convince the investigators that what he'd written was a game. They kept insisting it was real. EDIT: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil "The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error." Whoops! My bad.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", Nitpick, but the work in question was "GURPS Cyberpunk", and its not a game in itself but a genre supplement for GURPS, SJG's generic RPG. > So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. The SJG raid had pretty much nothing to do with the larger, moralistic anti-D&D frenzy (even though that frenzy did also target other parts of the RPG industry), and was more related to completely separate anti-hacker panic, the bureaucratic turf war between the FBI and Secret Service over computer crime and the Secret Service's desire to show results on that front (coupled with a near-complete lack of knowledge about what it was doing in that field), and the fact that the freelancer who was writing GURPS Cyberpunk was a highly-visible hacker with an arrest record. Other than the fact that it happened to effect a company in the same industry, it was a completely separate thing.