So without further ado, the history of the industry ... one genre at a time, beginning with super heroes. This is part one of two.

Rough Beginnings: 1977-1980

One of the surprising stories of the industry's beginning is how long it took superheroes to catch hold. Dungeons & Dragons was published in January, 1974, and was becoming increasingly popular within a year. There were pretty quickly games in new genres, starting with Boot Hill (western, 1975), En Garde! (swashbuckling, 1975), Starfaring (science-fiction, 1976), and Metamorphosis: Alpha (science fantasy, 1976). Yet it was still another year before the first superhero game came out.

You've probably never have heard of it. It was called Superhero '44 (1977), or later Superhero: 2044 (1977). The later, more professional edition was published by Lou Zocchi, an important force throughout the history of RPGs.

Superhero: 2044 was a somewhat strange choice for a first superhero game because of the fact that it didn't really represent comic books. Instead it was set--as the name implies--in the future. The game was never particularly well loved nor well supported, with just a single supplement ever being published, a big map by Judges Guild called Hazard (1980).

The next superhero RPG was more on target, and that was Jeff Dee and Jack Herman's Villains and Vigilantes (1979), published by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Not only did the authors place their game in a more standard modern 4-color world, but they also did their best to adopt the conventions of that world. Characters, for example, started out as the players, then randomly gained powers thanks to accidents or mutations, just like heroes in the comic books.

V&V could have been the RPG that really broke open the superhero genre for roleplaying. Unfortunately, it had two flaws. First, the designers were young and inexperienced--as was common at FGU at the time, since owner Scott Bizar was publishing freelance submissions. Dee would later comment that he and Herman were the youngest designers in the business and that it showed in their first game. Second, at that time FGU was not supporting most of its RPGs. Bizar, with his wargaming background, felt like games should be complete as published, and not need supplements.

V&V did moderately well, and it was definitely the most popular superhero game pre-1981, but it was ultimately held back by these other issues.

Supergame (1980), another early release, mostly distinguished itself by allowing players to create their own characters from the ground up. Like V&V it was unsupplemented, and thus it wouldn't see any real success until its second edition (1982), by which time it would be riding the coattails of the first hit superhero game, Champions.

The Birth of Champions: 1981-1985

Champions (1981) by newcomer Hero Games had several things going for it, which would ultimately make it the first hit superhero RPG in the industry.

First, it was a second-generation superhero game, ultimately derived from Superhero: 2044 which designer George MacDonald modified until it was no longer recognizable. This alone made it a modern game, but Champions also looked elsewhere for new and innovative game design ideas.

Second, and probably more important, Champions was one of the earliest games centering around point-based character creation. Herein it developed ideas originally seen in Steve Jackson's Melee (1977), but also expanded them by, for the first time ever, supporting the idea of "flaws" which allowed players to create characters with problems, then use the points thus gained to make their characters more powerful.

The purchasing system was also very extensive, allowing you to purchase powers, then modify them in numerous ways, then describe them, which thus supported a very wide variety of comic-book-like powers--ultimately exactly what a super-hero game needed.

Hero Games released Champions with almost-guerrilla marketing at Pacific Origins 1981. The game generated huge buzz, sold well, and Hero Games immediately followed up this success with the publication of two new supplements, Enemies (1981) and The Island of Dr. Destroyer both out by the next big con, on Labor Day.

Actually supporting a superhero line was another first, and thus another factor that pushed Champions to prominence.

How much this broke the super-hero genre open is evidenced by the way in which everyone else started falling over themselves to get superhero games out.

A few older companies revived their superhero lines. FGU put out a second edition of Villains and Vigilantes (1982), then diverted from their earlier business model by heavily supporting it through much of the remaining lifetime of the company (1982-1986). Supergame put out its second edition (1982) and a few supplements (1983-1984) in the same time period.

Companies new to the superhero genre also jumped on board. Chaosium put out the brand-new Superworld (1983), based on their BRP system, but it soon faded from sight; designer Steve Perrin would later do work for Champions. A few smaller companies put out new games over the next couple of years as well, but they would ultimately be overshadowed by the aforementioned games and a few others just on the horizon.

In the meantime Hero Games continued along as the top superhero RPG producer for the next couple of years. V&V competed with them in total product publication, but ultimately not in market share. Hero continued to polish their game with a few new editions of the rules (1982, 1984) and a series of supplements for adventures, enemies, and organizations.

However by late 1985 the Hero Games staffers increasingly came to realize that they weren't businessmen, and that the company would do much better if someone else did their marketing and publishing. In 1986 they would thus sign a deal with ICE wherein Hero Games would prepare the products and ICE would publish them, a decision that was probably helped along by the fact that the market was growing increasingly competitive, as we'll see momentarily.

Licensed Heroes: 1984-1986

As Champions increased in popularity, another idea was starting to move through the RPG industry: licensing properties. SPI kicked it off with Dallas (1980), but it was when Chaosium put out the definitive horror license, Call of Cthulhu (1981), and ICE started putting out Middle-earth fantasy supplements (1982) that it became clear that this was an area of growing importance for the industry.

In the early 1980s, Marvel comics were hot, thanks in particular to The Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, which was then enjoying such ground-breaking story lines as "The Dark Phoenix Saga" (1980) and "Days of Future Past" (1981). Thus it's no surprise that a roleplaying license for the Marvel superheroes became increasingly sought after. At least four different companies were negotiating for it, including: FGU, Games Workshop, Mayfair Games, and TSR. Eventually, TSR got it.

Their release of Marvel Super Heroes (1984), by Jeff Grubb and Steve Winter, was the first attempt to create a simplified super-hero roleplaying game that would better draw in comic fans who had never played roleplaying games before. Marvel Super Heroes did this with numberless character stats and a chart-based universal task resolution table. The result generally met the goal of simplicity, though within two years TSR decided that they needed to put out a more advanced version of the game for gamers, resulting in the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set (1986).

Though none of the simplified super-hero systems have ever attracted a notable portion of the comic book audience, Marvel Super Heroes nonetheless did well for TSR. It was their most supported line ever, other than the D&D games, with almost fifty books published over the product line's lifetime. It ultimately eclipsed old games like Champions and Villains and Vigilantes, but at least Champions continued to sell strongly, perhaps due to the different focuses: Champions was more about individual creativity while Marvel Super Heroes was about using the creations of a comic company.

Meanwhile, every other contender for the Marvel license did some RPG work on their own.

Mayfair was the most successful, getting the "second best" license for DC Heroes (1985). Their game wasn't as simple as Mavel Super Heroes, but it was remarkably elegant, centering on a brilliant way to measure task difficulties: everything from character stats to weights to distances was measured in Attribute Points, or AP, which were all exactly equivalent. 14 APs of flight could fly 14 APs of distance in a phase, while 6 APs of strength could pick up a 6 AP weight. The AP scale was also exponential, allowing for dramatically different power levels. Like Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes was well supported.

Finally, Games Workshop had acquired a game called Golden Heroes, previously published independently in Britain. They'd been hoping to publish a new edition with Marvel's heroes, but after that fell through, they published it as was in a new edition (1984). Unfortunately it didn't have enough to distinguish it, being neither the first mover nor a notable license in the genre. It ended publication just a year after its introduction, in 1985, as GW was slowly moving into miniatures.

FGU, the last negotiator for the Marvel license, still had their own Villains and Vigilantes line. They did manage a license a few years later for a small press comic-book called The DNAgents. They published one supplement, The DNAgents Sourcebook (1986), just before FGU closed down, making Villains and Vigilantes the first major casualty among the superhero RPGs. Legal wrangling has since kept any edition of Villains and Vigilantes off the market.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1980s another trend was sweeping the comic book world: the black and white comic invasion. Everyone suddenly started publishing their own b&w comics, and comic book stores started carrying them all, hoping for the latest hit. This whole trend was led by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984), the license for which was snapped up by Palladium Games before the rest of the industry even knew who the turtles were.

Palladium was just then publishing a new superhero RPG called Heroes Unlimited (1984). It was based on the Palladium Role-Playing System--as all the Palladium games increasingly were--but like Golden Heroes it was another game released without a real audience.

Contrariwise the compatible game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1985) did an excellent job of selling to the new TMNT audience by accurately detailing the Turtles' world and providing rules for mutation, psionics, and other systems necessary to play out the universe of the comics. It quickly caught on and was one of Palladium's most popular games over the next several years.

Thus by 1986, the superhero scene had entirely changed from its state just a few years before. Where once there was a booming collection of independent superhero games, now only Champions survived, with licensed giants Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes taking up most of the field. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also a big hit, but as would increasingly be the case for Palladium, it was a hit for a somewhat younger demographic than the rest of the RPG industry.