Though I was a fan of Ogre and Car Wars, both designed by the American Steve Jackson (not the British one), I didn't pay close attention to the other games his company was publishing. Consequently, when GURPS arrived on the scene in 1986, I largely paid it no heed, aside from the very peculiar advertisements I remember seeing in the pages of Dragon and elsewhere, like this one.
What's most immediately striking to me about this ad – aside from the painful lack of a question mark – is that nowhere does it explain what GURPS actually stands for. That's probably intentional, since the oddity of the game's title is memorable and might serve to pique interest in it. By the time I first played GURPS in the early '90s, it was already common knowledge that this was the Generic Universal Role Playing System, so it never really bothered me. But to a contemporary reader of Dragon? I wonder what he'd have thought.
I think I probably saw GURPS in a game shop about as soon as it was released, so I knew what it was fairly fast. Even if I had seen the ads before I saw the game, I would have assumed GURPS was an acronym; when you 've got GURPS right next to RPG, the RP for "roleplaying" stands out.
ReplyDeleteNever played it and likely never will. BRP is the go-to, for a generic, skill-based game.
ReplyDeleteWhether you play it or not, the game's had many of the best RPG sourcebooks ever written for a wide variety of subjects and licensed IPs, and everything provides real-world measurements rather than just gamespeak to maximize portability to other systems. BRP is a fine game engine, but it doesn't begin to compare to GURPS as a resource toolkit.
DeleteA question mark would have required a smaller font for the name of the game, and possibly led to confusion as to whether is was part of the game's name.
ReplyDelete...could also be read as a statement rather than a question...
ReplyDeleteKnowing the way Steve Jackson (US) writes inside the books too, I bet you it is absolutely intentional on both counts, and for the same reason. Putting the question mark there would suggest that the name of the game is GURPS?, like Fiasco!.
ReplyDeleteAnd the name is explained right on the cover of the rule book, so the slight mystery in the ad is well within parameters. Speaking of And: Do you notice how every paragraph has "GURPS" in it, and four out of six start with GURPS, while the other two with And?
GURPS, GURPS And GURPS And GURPS.
Clearly also intentional.
Good times. Good game. And, let's face it: good Ad too.
Flagship Games' entire catalog of miniatures games ended in exclamation points. Pirates!, Taiko!, Mecha!, Starships!, Gladiators! etc. Made their products very identifiable.
DeleteWell, the ad worked on me. I picked up Man to Man and the supplements and then the boxed set when they first came out. They were a neat diversion from D&D at the time, especially as I'd totally missed TFT. We got into the deep combat system, but then discovered that, much like RuneQuest, if you tried playing it like D&D you died even faster than in D&D.
ReplyDeleteSo it went back on the shelf for limited non-FRPG play.
The real boon was the long series of amazingly well detailed historical and literary source books. Though crunchy, there was a ton of info in each that could easily be stripped out and used for other games. Very useful in the pre-Wikipedia era. And even the crunch heavy genre books were useful for inspiration in other games.
Though I tended to avoid the really numbers heavy genres, like the superhero books and the vehicle/tech books, as they were on the crunch level of Calculus & Crusaders... I mean, Champions and Hero System. Just not my cup of tea.
As a point of history, the acronym originally stood for "Great Unnamed Role Playing System" while it was undergoing design and initial testing, and the intention was to give it a "real" name when actually published. As often happens, inertia led to simply finding a different meaning for the acronym.
ReplyDeleteIt was an impulse buy for me. I saw it on the shelves of a high street HMV of all places.
ReplyDeleteThe combination of the cover picture, the concept of a generic universal system, which was a new idea to me at the time, and the authors name all intrigued me.
I recognised the name, but this was 92 and I hadn't gamed since 87. It took me awhile to figure it out which Steve Jackson it was.
GURPS (3rd ed) still one of my fav systems at its lower levels of complexity.