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The first convention that Leighton and I went to as (something approaching) legit game designers was UKon, a small convention that the University of Kentucky game club used to run (maybe they still do, I’m not sure). I’m not really sure how many games we ran, but I remember four that I’m reasonably sure we ran that first year. We didn’t have any products to push, so we relied heavily on pop culture for our inspiration.
Leighton ran a Scooby Doo game, but I was running another game at the time and didn’t get to participate or watch. I know that Agents Mulder and Scully showed up because Leighton ended up including them in all the games he ran that weekend. I remember it being a success, but don’t know any more details.
While Leighton ran Scooby Doo, I’m pretty sure I was running The League of Kick Ass Dudes, which we would go on to run at quite a few other conventions over the years. The basic idea was “You know League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? What if it was 80s action heroes?” We later realized that “League of Awesome Dudes” was a more appropriately 80s name, but I usually forget that when I actually talk about the game. The players chose MacGyver, Dr. Samuel Beckett, BJ McKay, B.A. Baracus, Jill Munroe, and maybe someone from Airwolf or some other show I wasn’t familiar with.
Once I knew who the PCs were, I decided that they were all working for Knight Industries: BJ McKay was driving their truck/mobile base, B.A. was the mechanic, and the rest were general purpose heroes for hire. The next step was to figure out who Sam Beckett had leaped into. Since Michael Knight wasn’t a PC, someone suggested having Sam leap into him, but then someone else suggested Bo Duke, which is what we ended up deciding on. That brought up the important question of which car he was driving: K.I.T.T. or the General Lee? Someone came up with the best solution: It’s the General Lee, but it’s got K.I.T.T.’s brain and toys. I don’t remember many details of the plot, but I know Ferris Bueller was the main villain and there might have been some tasteless vehicular homicide jokes during the car chase scenes.
Continuing in that vein, the next game up was The Dukes of Hazzard. I don’t remember which one of us had signed up to run it, but Leighton and I ended up sharing GM duties. As we were scheming to come up with a plot, Leighton realized something: there were five people in an Invisibles cell, and there were five main good guys (Bo, Luke, Daisy, Uncle Jesse, and Cooter) in The Dukes of Hazzard. So we had Sir Miles Delacort visit Hazzard in (of course) a souped-up death car and basically combined an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard with elements from the fox hunt issue of The Invisibles and Death Race 2000. The Dukes won the race and saved the farm or whatever, just like they do every week.
The final game of the evening was a View-Askewniverse game, featuring characters from Kevin Smith’s movies (I think it was just Clerks and Mallrats at the time). I actually had a plot in mind for this one: They’re all at a comic book convention when David Prowse (the guy who wore the Darth Vader suit and who I’d recently heard was an enormous dick to fans) loses his mind and starts trying to kill everybody. I didn’t say it was a detailed plot outline. The game had a lot of players (enough to require us to combine two tables) and was one of the few games going on at this time–the club was more into anime then, so 75% of the con was in the video room most of the weekend–so we were able to get loud and LARPy. That worked out great, because the guy playing Silent Bob really committed to the role and had the pantomime skills to make it work. The other player that really helped keep things moving was the guy who played Banky Edwards. He immediately decided that his top priority was to protect Stan “The Man” Lee at all costs, which ended up driving large chunks of the action. We must have obviously been having fun, because we started to attract an audience. By the time we reached the exciting climax, there were a bunch of people standing around the table watching me and the guy who played Silent Bob swing plastic lightsabers at one another.
Overall, our first convention as a company was a huge success and we probably could have sold some books if we’d had some.
