“Dr. Malcolm Craig is a Senior Lecturer in American history and self-identified role-playing game designer at Liverpool John Moores University. His current research, which he is turning into a book, is on tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), particularly ones that take place in a post-apocalyptic or post-nuclear setting, and their relationship with the nuclear age”
“My friend and colleague who works at University of Liverpool, John Hogg, wrote a book in 2015 called British Nuclear Culture”
“These games and their play are these kind of unofficial narratives of the nuclear age, of fear of apocalypse, of dealing with the nuclear threat of interpreting the world around them”
“Twilight: 2000 emerged in late 1984. And it was created by a game design studio in Illinois called Game Designers Workshop. And many of the individuals involved in this — Marc Miller, Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, Thomas Mulkey — had military backgrounds”
“So the game itself was set in a future world of 2000, where, in the mid nineties, a war broke out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It led to a nuclear confrontation and the characters, when you start the game, are all American soldiers who are now isolated, cut off from command, in Poland in the year 2000, after this war has taken place”
“It’s very much grounded in reality. It is essentially a modern military roleplaying game. It kind of eschews the ideas of cannibals, of radioactive zombies, of all that kind of thing. It is different from some of the other post-apocalyptic games that emerged in the same period, where you could bring in all of these things like, know, mutants and cannibals and people emerging from underground with laser eyes and all these kinds of things. So it’s very much grounded in the reality of of military simulations and wargames really, there’s a lot of, because GDW, the designers, came from a wargame design background”
“One of the standard jokes about playing Twilight: 2000 was, “I’ve rolled up my gun, now I’ll create my character,” because your gun was more important”
“one of the interesting things about interviewing people who played this game in period, one of the first things they do would go down to the local library, and get atlases and encyclopedias and kind of Europe, maps of Europe and all that kind of thing to try and give a bit more depth and detail to their experiences of playing this game, to bring a bit more realism into it”
“there’s nothing in the basic rules of the game for rebuilding, for restarting civilization, for peacemaking. That just isn’t in there. It’s not part of the game. Yet, for a lot of people who are playing this game, that was the role they chose for their characters”
“Gamma World is almost the opposite of Twilight: 2000. It is this mad combination of a nuclear and biological war, hundreds of years into the future, and you can literally have a character who is a psychic rabbit with lasers for eyes. Or can play a walking Rhododendron bush, that can talk as well”
“it’s this utterly ludicrous gonzo take on the threat of nuclear war and what might happen after it with these, know, these crazy mutations and all these kinds of things. And it very much draws upon that particular and more phantasmagoric strand of science fiction from the like 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, where everything was mutants and cannibals and strange mutated animals”
“there’s a definite kind of bridge between the late 1970s, kind of gonzo stuff, but then you kind of bridge over in the early 1980s, where you get into the Reagan era, and you start seeing these harder-edged games like Twilight: 2000.”
“Since then, there’s much more of a tendency towards realism. So for example, you have games like The Morrow Project, whose book was deliberately designed to look like a US Army training manual. And in the back of it, it references Jane’s Infantry Weapons, and all of these huge list of American military manuals that were drawn on for the creation of this game”
“then you also have Aftermath, which is possibly one of the most complicated role playing games I have ever encountered in my life. It is really what was called in terms of rules, “crunch.””
“Aftermath was this kind of sandbox, which you allowed to create your own apocalypse. It didn’t just have to be nuclear. It can be environmental, could be alien invasion, all of these kinds of things”
“Hot War, though, was very much influenced by my teenage experiences playing games like Twilight: 2000. And I wanted to write a game that, rather than just provide the sandbox for driving around shooting things, emphasized the themes, for example, that come out of films like Threads, that the apocalypse is about human relationships, about community, about the breakdown of society. So that was very much embedded in the experience of play in Hot War”