Barking Alien / #BLM #RenewTheOrville

In 1985, a year after the movie, West End Games approached Chaosium with the idea that we would design a Ghostbusters game for them. They sent a guy to talk to us and see what we would do. The guy, a fine game designer and a friend, was also a New Yorker and, shall we say, rather brusque. While discussing how I'd create the game, he made the offhand remark, "Have you done anything since Call of Cthulhu?" It shook me. I thought, "I've only worked on other people's games and done adventures and such. No new games. Maybe I'm a one-shot wonder." I made a brave face of it though, despite my inner turmoil, and then went ahead to design the game. I admit I didn't do what they wanted. They said they wanted it to be a scary horror game Just Like Call of Cthulhu, but I did not see Ghostbusters that way at all. I thought it needed a comical element, and so I incorporated it. I also created a whole new game system for it (the d6 system). After it came out, it won an award for game of the year, and later on it made it onto Hobby Games "100 best games of all time", so the good thing from MY point of view was that I decided I was not a one-shot wonder or a has-been and still had the chops. The d6 system is still being used today in the Star Wars RPG and some others so it's lived on.