The BattleTech franchise is set to have a big year in 2018. Two new games are scheduled to release on PC: Piranha Games’ MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech. And the original tabletop game, published today by Catalyst Game Labs, has two new boxed sets of its own on the way.
To celebrate BattleTech’s 33rd anniversary, and get fans ready for its 34th year, Polygon sat down with the game’s original creators, L. Ross Babcock and Jordan Weisman, co-founders of FASA Corporation, to talk about the birth of the franchise.
We also spent time chatting with Randall Bills, the lead developer of the BattleTech line at Catalyst, to learn more about how he came to shepherd and evolve the tabletop game.
It all began in 1984, with two nerdy entrepreneurs wandering the floor of the Hobby Industry Association trade show in Anaheim, California.
Found art
“It was a strange show,” recalled Babcock over the phone in September. “I mean, here we were, a few dozen gaming companies amidst hundreds of arts and crafts kind of folks selling foam balls and decoupage — anything you might see today in a Joann Fabrics or a Michael’s craft store. That was the kind of stuff that was put out there.”
“There really was no such thing as game shops in those days,” said Weisman, who we interviewed on the floor of the 50th annual Gen Con in Indianapolis. “We would go and show our games to try to get general hobby shops to sell them.”
Babcock and Weisman’s Chicago-based FASA was already well known in gaming circles. It had made a name for itself with its line of adventures for the Traveller pen-and-paper science fiction role-playing system. The two men were there in Anaheim pitching their latest products: Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, a tabletop RPG based on the classic television series, and Behind Enemy Lines, another tabletop RPG set during World War II. Both had been released just a few years before in 1982.
FASA wasn’t the only vendor at the convention. There were also more than a few distributors and importers there as well, and several of them were trying to unload a bumper crop of Japanese plastic model kits. That’s where Weisman came across a selection of surplus models based on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the Japanese cartoon that had come out just a few years before. None of them were even in boxes, just all sprawled out across a table in unlabeled plastic bags.
Babcock remembered Weisman scampering back to the FASA booth to tell him what he’d found.
“‘Giant, walking robots!’ he said. They were glue-together models, about three inches tall, perfect for looking impressive on a tabletop.”
The kits would easily fit inside a game box, and the price was right. Soon, Babcock and Weisman cut a deal with the importer to purchase about a dozen varieties of those plastic model kits. Weisman quickly went to work building up the lore around them.
“It was a very fast development,” Weisman said. “‘We should do it for Christmas,’ we thought. ‘Let's hurry up. Let's go, go, go!’ So I knocked out a bunch of fiction.
“I really wanted to put the world in a retrograde technological state, just because of the experience that I was living through, that we were all living through at the time. There was this enormous technological curve upward in the early ‘80s and I thought it would be fun to do a story that was on the other side of that curve.”
From Weisman’s inspiration in those first fevered few months BattleTech was born, a universe set in the 31st millennium, with humanity strung out amongst thousands of star systems and locked in a brutal, unending war.
“I'm just a huge history buff,” Weisman said. “I imagined what could be a setting in which humanity did a backward slide, quite considerably, in technology. I wanted it to feel like the fall of Rome, and the slide into the Middle Ages. We lost a huge amount of technology, a huge amount of science, as we slid and as Rome consumed itself. Then the Mongols invaded, and then everything kind of degrades, goes to shit and becomes the Middle Ages. It’s terrible for a long time. So I thought, ‘Hey! That's fun! And it also gives me a good kind of model for the geopolitical situation.’”
Weisman’s Roman empire would be called the Star League, a galaxy-wide political and military force that would bind humanity together for hundreds of years. His feudal lords would be the masters of the six Great Houses: House Davion, House Cameron, House Kurita, House Liao, House Marik and House Steiner. The part of the Mongols would be played by the Clans, a well-equipped group warriors with a long military tradition fixated on taking over the galaxy. Noble knights on both sides of the conflict traded horses for armored BattleMechs and rode them into battle.
That’s how a fighting unit of ‘Mechs, called a “lance,” got its name.
There was already a long tradition of wargaming in the tabletop space, with systems based on everything from Napoleonic warfare to the great tank battles of WWII. But here, Weisman thought, was his chance to create something new. And it would all center around these massive, walking war machines.
“I wanted to treat the machines in the way a World War II tank or aircraft was treated,” Weisman said. “That we talk to them and that we name them because our lives depend on them. We are the ones who are imbuing that personality into them, though, because it makes us feel better.”
Of course, the BattleTech line of tabletop games was originally called by a different name. The first edition was actually published as BattleDroids, and in the early ‘80s that particular turn of phrase caught the eye of one of Hollywood’s biggest names — George Lucas. Some time during that first year of sales, FASA got a letter from the lawyers at LucasFilm.
“They politely said that ‘No, you can't use the word droids in the name,’” Babcock said.
“I politely wrote back,” Weisman said, “to point out that Isaac Asimov had been using the word ‘android’ since something like 1956. ‘I think it's kind of out there already,’ I said. They wrote back to point out that they had a lot more lawyers than we did.”
Rather than fight a losing battle, FASA changed the name to BattleTech and ordered up a second edition. Babcock says the name change barely slowed them down.
“That's when it all started,” he said.
Showmanship
One does not simply walk into a convention center filled with hundreds of tabletop games and sell through 5,000 copies of a brand new product. Even in today’s red hot tabletop market, that’s a recipe for disaster. So when Babcock and Weisman first brought BattleDroids to a convention, they had to have a plan to get players’ attention. In the beginning, that meant live demonstrations on the show floor with the designers themselves busking in the aisles, lining up crowds of potential customers.
To get their attention, Weisman decided to put on a show.
“We would do all the conventions,” Weisman said. “Not just Gen Con, but all the smaller regional game cons all around the country. We would go from con to con, demoing the game. I wanted those demos to be kind of aspirational, in the way that Uncle Gomez's train set on The Addams Family was aspirational.
“Gomez would build these great train sets and then smash them into each other and they would explode. You always wanted to do that but never could because, you know, model trains are expensive. For BattleDroids, and later for BattleTech, we would do these big terrain tables. We'd have all the plastic models and they'd all be beautifully built. Then, when they took damage, we would take a power drill to them or a melt them with a soldering iron.
“Those were the demo games we ran. They'd get good crowds going because everyone was saying, ‘Those maniacs are pulling apart these beautiful figures with a pair of pliers!’ So that was our first marketing campaign, just going around, doing those demo games and burning up our products for fun.”
The game sold well and within short order a second production run of 10,000 units was produced, Babcock said. This included the new BattleTech name as well as the original, three-inch tall plastic models. But later editions of the game changed dramatically.
“The only reason we could afford to do that early run of games with the big, Japanese-made models was because they were remaindering them all and selling them through an importer,” Weisman said. “There wasn't anyway we could afford to produce those for the game. So we moved to cardboard counters and then eventually into spin-cast metal figures.”
And Weisman had bigger goals for the franchise. With the wargame already well established, he went to work building another game system on top of it. While strategy-minded gamers were bashing each other to bits on a hex map, FASA began courting the narrative-minded players in the Dungeons & Dragons crowd as well as fans of its previous work on Traveller.
“One of the things that I tried to do with the game was create a hybrid,” Weisman said. “At the time, there were role-playing games and there were board games. What BattleTech tried to be was a board game that thought it was a role-playing game. We really immersed everything in the fiction. So you had these scenario packs that were actually short stories or character studies.”
The game’s lore would eventually give birth to the original MechWarrior system, an RPG set in the world of BattleTech where players could live out their fantasy of participating in the political machinations of the Inner Sphere. The success of that line would lead to other merchandising opportunities such as novels, toys, a cartoon series and even video games.
You are cordially invited
FASA’s penchant for creating in-person spectacles at fan conventions didn’t stop with the release of the original tabletop wargame. One of the most famous marketing stunts ever pulled to support a tabletop game involved a kind of radio play that Weisman wrote and helped perform live on stage at Gen Con 21, in 1988.
“I always wanted to make sure that the novels, the board game, the computer games and eventually the animated show were all in sync,” Weisman said. “That we were telling the same story at the same time. Now, to do that, they have very different gestation periods. Board games typically take about a year, while an RPG supplement or a miniature figure could take a great deal less than that. Video games in those days were like five-year developments. But it would typically be about two years to get a novel out.
“The novels that came out on the way to that Gen Con brought us to this point of a union between two of the big houses, House Davion and House Steiner. This powerful couple were going to get married and it was going end a galactic feud. We set the marriage date to be Saturday of Gen Con, the busiest day of the show.”
FASA even went so far as to produce wedding invitations, which it handed out at the door to convention goers. More than 30 years later, one fan even brought his along with him to this year’s Gen Con. Weisman snapped a picture, proudly showing it off on his phone during our interview.
“Everybody shows up on Saturday, and we have a little podium set up at our booth,” Weisman said. “We set up and a big microphone with a public address system, and the premise was that the wedding was taking place in real time across the galaxy and our announcer was reading in transmissions to the audience here as they were coming in live. And as the wedding ceremony starts, we roll out this massive sheet cake. There were maybe about 1,000 people there.
“So we’ve got all these people eating sheet cake and the announcer is talking through the events. Here's the ceremony and it looks like this, and then there's the banquet afterwards and all the leaders of the Great Houses were all in attendance. ... The bride gets up and she has some present for her husband. And then it’s the groom’s turn.”
It was at that point, Weisman said, that the groom gave his bride the gift of the neighboring empire. His invasion fleet was already on its way, dropping from orbit on dozens of worlds with guns blazing.
“Everyone in the audience looks underneath the cake,” Weisman said. “There, on the plate, are all of the planets that are being invaded as they sit there.”
An epic tournament ensued, with players in the audience being plucked out of their seats to fight in-fiction battles that would become fodder for the next round of novels and gaming supplements.
Local boy does good
A series of books, called the Warrior Trilogy by author Michael Stackpole, told the story of what happened after the Davion-Steiner wedding. One of the avid BattleTech fans that was swept up by it was a young Randall Bills.
“It was the first big launch of the BattleTech universe into its dynamic forward movement,” Bills told Polygon. “At the time, FASA had a periodical called Battle Technology Magazine. They asked fans to write in and tell them where they were in the BattleTech universe, who they were and what they were fighting for.
“Of course, my friends and I built our own units. I had the Devil's Brigade which was my mercenary unit. I remember my MechWarrior was piloting a Banshee 3S, which was pretty advanced for the time. I had this elaborate backstory of how I got ahold of this prototype ‘Mech using little tidbits in all of these wonderful novels and sourcebooks. So I wrote that up and sent it in.”
A year later, he was walking the halls at his local convention in Phoenix, Arizona and found his profile in the BattleTech magazine, right there on the shelf.
“I almost had tears in my eyes,” Bills said. “This idea that I had made some stuff up in this universe that I love and it was published and there would be other people reading it and enjoying it and like, at that one moment, that’s when I decided that I want to do this.”
Seven or eight years later, Bills found himself again at his local gaming convention. This time he’d brought along his homebrew boardgame, a modification of FASA’s epic strategy game called The Succession Wars.
“Bryan Nystul was FASA’s BattleTech line developer at the time,” Bills said. “I had made this whole game and I was going to be playing it the first time with my friends and I jokingly asked Bryan, ‘Hey, do you want to come play with us?’ And he said yes. I immediately started freaking out.”
Even though the mod was broken, Nystul spent the entire night playing it and joking around back in their hotel room. That fateful night led to another chance meeting with the rest of the FASA team at next year’s Gen Con and, eventually, a trip down to its headquarters in Chicago.
Eventually, Bills said, Nystul prevailed on the rest of his team to give him a shot at actually designing a game in the BattleTech universe.
“It was crap pay,” Bills said, “But I flew out for the interview and they finally offered me the job. For just a minute, I almost said no. I’d have to move my family to Chicago in the middle of winter, 1800 miles in a diesel car. And we knew no one there.
“Finally, my sainted wife, Tara, said to me, ‘I don't know you if you don't take this job. You are not the husband I married.’ She's the best person ever.”
More than 20 years later, as the BattleTech line has changed hands from one company to another, Bills has been there to keep it alive.
The next iteration of the tabletop game, from Catalyst Game Labs under license from The Topps Company, is called BattleTech: A Game Of Armored Combat. That starter set, along with BattleTech: Beginner’s Box Set, is currently in development and will feature a quick-start set of rules and a set of newly sculpted plastic miniatures.
Final pricing has not yet been made available, but Bills said that both will be ready for sale in spring 2018. Until then, fans can pick from Catalyst’s extensive line of sourcebooks, including the BattleTech BattleMech Manual, a consolidated set of all the rules needed to play the game. That, plus a boxed lance of ‘Mechs, and Bills said you’ll ready to go.
“There are times when I think back to that pimply-faced 14-year old picking up his first BattleTech game and thinking about all of these experiences I've been able to have and all the great fans out there that help keep this going.
“It’s the community. I get to meet all of them, and it's one of the reasons I love Gen Con so much. It is such a slog to get here. It is so painful and it burns most of the industry out after while because it's so hard year after year after year. It's like coming home to family here.”
The future
While Catalyst, Harebrained Schemes and Piranha Games are still making games in the BattleTech universe, the team at FASA is not. But, L. Ross Babcock is still in charge and his company is still around, and it’s still making tabletop games.
At Gen Con this year, just a few rows over from Catalyst and Harebrained, I found Babcock ambling around his booth promoting new lines of miniatures and game systems. There’s 1879, a steampunk version of the old West heavily inspired by the Shadowrun series, and Demon World, with its line of 15 mm fantasy miniatures. All of them are currently available at the FASA website.
But FASA itself sold off the BattleTech license years ago. I asked Babcock about his feelings with the game’s resurgence just over the horizon.
“I don't want to say bittersweet,” he said, “but there's a little bit of a tinge of that.
“A couple years ago, Jordan and I were at Gen Con and we sort of walked the halls a little bit. As we walked around, we couldn't help but notice things that we had a lot to do with in our earlier days that had been sold off or had been put onto other folks, whether it was the BattleTech cockpits or Catalyst's games or, you know, all of the different things that we had touched in our earlier careers. That's very satisfying to see.
“When people realize who I am, they'll always come up to me with a story about how they played FASA games when they were growing up and how much it meant to them at the time. One of our guiding rules at the original FASA was we wanted to create games that we wanted to play. We figured if we did that, we would have a chance in the marketplace. It turns out, for a lot of people, our games meant a whole lot more than just entertainment for them. It was a release. It was an escape for them. It wasn't just about rolling dice. It meant a lot more to some people out there.”
BattleTech, from Harebrained Schemes, is being published by Paradox Interactive. Weisman said it will be available for fans some time in 2018. You can read more about it in our feature story.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, from Piranha Games, is scheduled to release in late 2018. We recently toured the developer’s studios in Vancouver, British Columbia. You can read that story, and see the first playable level from that game, in our feature story.
