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We’re at part 6 and don’t even have a book yet, so I’m going to bullet point through some things to keep this from being an 4 million part article. So, after doing Ukon:
- There was some kind of issue with the printing. I don’t really remember the details, but we ended up with a situation where we got some of the books but couldn’t get the rest until we paid Bob more money than we’d originally planned.
- The book looked like this:
- Other than UKon and one or two other Lexington conventions, the books were only available at Red Rock (the store where I worked) and our website (which was hosted on my mindspring account under a long URL that inluded a ~). I don’t think we sold a single copy online until we moved to the hexgames.com domain a few years later.
- Remember that Yahoo! map we’d included? We figured out that was covered under copyright (again, the internet was young and nobody knew how it worked), so we ended up having to buy the long stapler, print a bunch of copies of the map page, and then pull books apart and staple them back together with a page that had a map we could legally use. A few years later, when we got the hexgame.com domain, preparing a copy of QAGS for sale also involved putting a sticker with the new website over my old Mindspring URL.
- When we first started the company, Leighton and I had made it clear that we were hoping to publish things by other people, especially (at first, at least) supplements for QAGS. A bunch of people said they wanted to write things. Most of them stopped as soon as they realized that writing a game is work. We did get our first two releases, though: Ray Forsythe and Skaught Bowden wrote Stuff (and equipment guide) and Leighton wrote Mars & Venus at War (the first Herrick Agency adventure). I think I also started Paradise (my personal least favorite book we’ve every published) around the same time, but it wouldn’t be finished until later.
- Both Stuff and Mars & Venus at War went through multiple covers. The first Stuff cover was a drawing of a catheralpult that I think Robert (the art teacher, not the Walking Dead guy) did. For a later printing, Ray did an architectural-type drawing of the cathedralpult. Mars & Venus had one truly awful cover and one pretty bad cover before getting the only kinda bad cover (designed by me and Ray) that we use today.
- In case you’re wondering, a cathedralpult is an enormous catapult that throws churches.
Remember how Leighton and I bought that E-Z Legal Kit and became a corporation? All during this time, we kept getting things from the state about taxes and employee holdout and stuff like that. Since we didn’t have employees or taxable sales, we just ignored them. Turns out you’re supposed to send them in, even if they’re filled with zero. Eventually we got a letter from the state tax board informing us that we owed thousands of dollars in penalties.
Leighton and I went to the tax office in Frankfort in hopes of working out some kind of payment plan or something. That’s where we found out for certain that the E-Z Legal Kit is not the best choice for setting up a corporation. Fortunately, the tax people were very nice and treated us like we were the morons we were rather than hardened tax criminals. In fact, I’m pretty sure they called people in from other offices just to laugh at our incompetence. In any case, we ended up getting everything fixed for a few hundred bucks instead of a few thousand.
After that, we decided our best bet was to stop being a corporation and just try to sell the books without all the paperwork that we didn’t have the time or patience to create. We called all the stockholders together for a meeting to let them know about our near-miss with thousands of dollars in debt and our plan to shut down the company. We still planned on making games, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with doing it as a legally recognized entity.
We ended remaining a company thanks to a guy we knew from college (we’ll call him SupaGenius)–who had previously had nothing to do with nor expressed any interest in Hex–had a plan to turn things around. We stupidly listened to him, which began The Age of the Monster Box. I’ll talk about that next time, but it will also be very brief and glossed over both for legal reasons and my own sanity.
