Does anyone remember the last few years of the 1990s? (Yes, I know... That was at least a lifetime ago in Internet Time. But try, OK?)

Back in those ancient days, Your Humble Narrator was swimming against the tide, and getting a considerable amount of water down his gullet. Against all sane advice, my partners Gary M. Williams, Greg Poehlein and I were attempting to launch MicroTactix Games, a new publishing venture in the Adventure Gaming industry. This is always something of a quixotic sort of thing, but at that time it was more idiotic than usual. The adventure gaming market was imploding. Distributors to the trade were either closing their doors or merging with other distributors in an attempt to survive. RPGs weren't selling, the CCG boom was dying, and we weren't feeling too good ourselves.

There are always barriers to reaching a market, even a tight little hobby market like ours. But hobbyists, bless them, spend money when other people are sitting on theirs, and this has always been some consolation for those who make their living selling to them. If you have the right product, even in a bad economy, hobby industry sales can be a matter of putting it on the shelf and jumping back to avoid being trampled by the crowd.

In the case of adventure gaming, however, there was a lot of product and a shrinking number of fanatics (that is the root of the term "fan," you know) leaping to purchase it. Fortunately, Dork Tower's megaenthusiastic Igor and his spiritual brethren still existed, but it was getting tougher to reach even those loyal spenders of cash. To do so, you had to get a product into the stores these fans frequented, and to get there you had to convince a shrinking number of game industry wholesale distributors that your product was different than the megatonnage of card decks and role playing manuals they already had forming homes for indigent dust mites in their warehouses.

Also, printing costs were soaring. A large company could afford to have one or two products that didn't perform up to expectations. A small company could not -- one mistake would tie all of your available capital up in a loser, leaving you nothing to assault the market with a second time. Further, a successful release could be as bad as one that didn't make the grade! More than one company released an unexpected hit, then discovered the money wasn't coming in from distributors in time to pay for additional print runs and follow-up releases. Success killed as many companies as did failure.

The distribution chain was reacting to the CCG implosion by pulling back their purchasing -- a sensible thing because those who didn't died first. The smart ones learned the lessons taught by other distribution outfits in other industries and embraced the concepts of Just In Time stocking procedures. They ordered more often in smaller amounts from a narrower selection of proven publishers, trying to stay just in front of the demand. If you couldn't keep up, they passed you by. The fact that game distributors like Alliance, Georgia Music and Centurion exist today proves they were smarter than the average bear at the time. Fortunately for the small publisher, people like Eric Rowe of Wizard's Attic had other bright ideas to aggregate their more limited product lines to get them efficiently to market.

Even so, it was lean, and no one in their right mind was launching independent publishing ventures without a lot of backing, some solid sure-thing titles, and a high-paying 9-to-5 job. Well, except us.

Bright, we weren't. Frustrated, we were. We were bucking the tide in more ways than one, putting together low-priced lite-rules systems in a world of megaslick RPG books, and selling cardstock building kits to people used to spending tons of money on plastic and resin scenic accessories. It was working, but not fast enough to grab any sort of mind share, let alone market share. We were undercapitalized and underdistributed.

Thus, in September of 1999, I put forth what I referred to as "A Modest Proposal". The original document as emailed to my partners seems incredibly naive today, but I'll quote from it so you can understand where our heads were at the time:

OBSERVATION: At current levels of production and with current distribution, we cannot hope to grow MicroTactix Games at any acceptable rate. This isn't going to change in the foreseeable future.

ITEM: What we DO have is the ability to create large quantities of material quickly, to expand and revise and develop that material, and to put it into gameable form. Right up until we have to print it -- that's where the production cycle bogs down.

ITEM: The existing distribution network for games is collapsing and mutating into a new form.

ITEM: Though our lack of distribution has kept us from building sales, we have built a respectable "brand name" in MicroTactix, which is well known among fans on the Internet. This brand name identification, however, depends on our continued expansion of that brand, keeping a flow of new material in front of the public.

ITEM: The most important short-term early goal (especially in an Internet-based operation) is to achieve solid market penetration. The more people using and relying on your product, the more dependent on that product your market becomes. Companies such as Netscape, Amazon.com, Yahoo, and others have proved that this market strategy works best for young, flexible, and internet-savvy firms that are undercapitalized and faced with competition from more traditional firms that are much larger and more established. This describes us perfectly.

ITEM: Our customer base is on the Internet. It is the place where we can most efficiently promote and market our products. We cannot compete directly in the classic distribution arena, but we are effectively competing for brand name recognition with companies much larger than our own ONLINE. This means our most active customer base is internet-savvy, computer-literate, and in touch with technology. They don't mind buying over the web, they like to download and try new things, and they are more concerned with content than package.

CONCLUSIONS: Reducing our output or reworking our present publication schedule and methods in any fashion is not going to solve our problems, or even extend our life in the business. The current methods used in an effort to print new products, keep existing products in print, promote products for continued sales, pay our inevitable business overhead, AND maintain any sort of growth curve -- let alone generate any sort of income -- are not resulting in growth. We could concentrate on growing only a single product line, but even then we cannot produce ENOUGH material to grow that product line at any reasonable rate because of the realities of the print/sales/reprint cycle.

To grow, even to survive, we are going to have to move to a new marketing approach...

See? I was naive, pompous and arrogant, all at the same time! Not everyone can a mange that hat trick. (I still wince at using Netscape as an example of Internet success...) And this was from a person with well over a decade in various aspects of the Adventure Gaming business!

Even so, we were right about one thing -- we needed to change direction. The direction we chose wasn't new. In fact, it was well-established in many other sorts of specialized publishing arenas. The only thing radical about it was we thought it could succeed. And, for the most part, we were the only ones who did. Despite all advice to the contrary, we weren't ignored by serious gamers, rampant e-file piracy didn't destroy our customer base, people did get over the reluctance to purchase something they could not hold in their hands, and we didn't destroy our reputations in the industry. (Well, in that last case, no more than I would have otherwise...)

For MicroTactix, becoming an e-publishing company wasn't a strategic choice as much as a bid for survival. I was no marketing genius, just a guy looking for a loophole. But if anyone would find a hole in the rules by which the hobbyist-oriented publishing industry worked, it would be adventure gamers. Along with other pioneers who faced the same challenges and saw the same hint of light at the end of a long tunnel, we did.

E-publishing is not just a way to bypass the distribution chain and avoid printing costs. The hobby distribution market has bounced back a great deal, and will continue to improve. E-publishing, however, is a way to build brand recognition and market share, and to expose the early-adopters and opinion leaders in this hobby-oriented market to your products. It can also be a way to produce and distribute items that leverage the strengths of the electronic format to do things print products cannot. But, primarily, it is a way of maintaining a level of diversity and promoting different approaches in the face of rising costs and narrowing channels. We'll talk about these challenges, ways of facing them, tools for approaching e-publishing, and profiles of successful e-publishing efforts in later installments of this column, with Matt Drake of Spectre Press and I alternating as your guides.

Meanwhile, with luck and the support of loyal fans, patient freelancers, and other True Believers, MicroTactix has grown since our Modest Proposal of late 1999 from a one-product company to having over 50 SKUs offered for sale. We have been paralleled and followed into this end of the pool by dozens of others, who are producing adventure gaming products that are winning over an initially skeptical buying public. The new RPGnet Mall is home to an growing number of these e-publishers, many of whom are doing things with the form that we didn't even imagine when we started. We'll talk to many of them in the coming weeks about why they chose to be e-publishers, how they approached the idea, and how they have fared in the market.

I'm not ready to take that Last Laugh yet, but we have come a long way in a short time. A sigh of relief and a smile as we look to the future seems appropriate.

Matt Drake here, with a short note to finish off this introductory installment of Virtually Adventurous. I'm the sole proprietor of Spectre Press, and I represent a different side of adventure gaming. Guy and I both have experience working in gaming, but where his is based a great deal more in traditional publishing, I have only ever done gaming work for Internet-based game companies. When I first stumbled across online game publishing (my first exposure being Microtactix), I was captivated. The idea of publishing in a totally new environment, with a totally new set of rules, made me want to see how far I could push those new rules myself.

When I return with the next installment of Virtually Adventurous, I will explore my own reasons for publishing electronically. I'll particularly take note of some of the more creative and flexible uses of the medium, with a few examples from the wide array of electronic publishers creating exciting new products today.

Guy McLimore is Executive Editor and CEO of MicroTactix Inc., which is a fancy way of saying he's the Face Man for a coalition of adventure game designers, writers and artists who are too busy cranking out great products to keep him from stealing the spotlight.

Matt Drake is sole proprietor of Spectre Press, and couldn't produce a wooden nickel without all the incredible freelancers who prop him up and make him look good.