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After the dumb supers game with Hatboy and Greaseball, I actually started to put some rules together for my “play anywhere, anytime” game. Some of them may have even been inspired by that pre-QAGS QAGS game. While I don’t think I had anything written down, I had the basics floating around in my head and was waiting for the chance to spring it on unsuspecting players at the first opportunity.
The opportunity came during either the Thanksgiving or Christmas break, when classes were out and most of the people we knew had gone home for the holidays. A handful of those who’d stayed behind ended up at Scott “Skaught Fathom Lord Pixiepants” Bowden’s apartment, along with his visiting brother, John. At some point the idea of playing an RPG came up, then quickly started to be shot down as we went over the prep time for the games that we had the books (and therefore the mandatory charts and tables) handy. Before we could talk ourselves out of gaming, I tossed out the idea of testing the simple system I’d been working on, and the others agreed.
I don’t remember what the game was about. The starting idea might have been “slasher flick” (half of the reason I came up with QAGS was because I wanted to be able to run It Came From The Late Late Late Show without spending so much time on rules), but it turned into something much more convoluted. Again, I don’t remember the details, but I remember John’s character, mainly because it made such good use of the QAGS rules. His name was Joe, his Job was “Kung Fu Master,” and his Gimmick was “Fight Large Groups.” His Weakness was “Enemies: Ninjas (Note: Ninja’s ALWAYS attack one at a time).” Jackie Chan was his WWPHITM? and his Tag Line was a poorly-dubbed “You kill my teacher!” We didn’t have skills yet then (those were half-assed in Spooky and became official in a simpler form in Q2E). Again, I don’t remember many details, but I remember the game was lots of fun, the system seemed to do what it needed to, and John stole the show with Kung Fu Joe (who appeared as a sample character in Q1E).
Now that I had proof that the idea would work, I started working out more of the details and might have even written down the basic rules somewhere. I’m fairly sure we even played it a few times, though I don’t remember any details. Then one day a couple years later (I’m going to guess 1996 or 1997, since it was right after Leighton graduated from college and he’s a year or two younger than me) , Leighton knocked on my door with an idea: “You want to make games, I want to make comics and books, and we know a bunch of other people who want to make stuff. We should start a company, make something, and use the money from it to make something else.” This is sadly the most solid business plan Leighton and I have ever come up with.
We decided that our first product should be something quick, cheap, and easy that we could print cheaply, at Kinko’s if necessary. After going through some options, we landed on my simple game rules. We figured they wouldn’t take up more than a page or two, so we’d have to pad it out to make a book big enough to justify charging money for, but that just meant we could have fun with it. With our plan all worked out (except for those pesky details), Leighton and I bought something called (I shit you not) an E-Z Legal Kit, registered our corporation, talked our friends into buying shares, and became Hex Games. In the words of Douglas Adams, “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
