It was only a few weeks ago that game industry mainstays Bill
Jafee, James Mathe , Lee
Garvin and Steve Creech
passed away. Saturday brought notice that Rick Loomis, owner of Flying Buffalo Games and publisher of
the Tunnels and Trolls RPG and Nuclear War card game, passed away after a
lengthy struggle with lymphatic cancer. Loomis’ position (much of
the following information comes from Rick’s Wikipedia page) as a major figure
in the gaming industry dates back to 1970 when, while serving at Fort Shafter
in Hawaii, he picked up a copy of Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg. Finding himself
fascinated by the game, he soon developed his own game, Nuclear Destruction,
one of the earliest, if not the earliest boardgames to feature hidden movement.
Offering to moderate play by mail games of Nuclear Destruction with fellow
soldiers, he soon had some 200
servicemen signed up to play, leading Loomis to ask friend and fellow soldier Steve
MacGregor to write a computer program to moderate play. When this proved
successful, Loomis and MacGregor founded Flying Buffalo Inc. in 1972, to run play
by mail games as a for-profit operation, making Loomis, as far as he knew, the
first person to ever purchase a computer solely for gaming. While focusing on play by mail games at the
time, Loomis also acquired the rights to Nuclear War,
which (I remember owning a white boxed copy of the game back in the early
1990s) became one of the company’s best selling products, with multiple
expansions, including a randomized set of 40 cards released during the first
TCG craze in 1995.
In 1975, Ken St.
Andre approached Loomis with the new RPG he had developed: Tunnels and Trolls. RPGs were
still very new then, with Dungeons and Dragons the only published one. While
the rules for D&D fell under copyright protection, the concept of
roleplaying was not and Tunnels and Trolls, or T&T as players soon
shortened it to, approached the genre with a much looser feel and more clearly
written rules, making it the second published RPG. Loomis took 40 copies of the
game to the Origins Game Fair and sold every copy, leading him to acquire the
rights to T&T and bring a second edition of the game out under the FBI
imprint. Loomis then wrote Buffalo
Castle using the T&T rules, arguably the first solo RPG adventure, even
pre-dating the “Choose your own Adventure” books . FBI’s newsletter SuperNova
contained some of artist Liz Danforth’s first work in the gaming
field (FBI printed three magazines over time. The third, Sorcerer’s Apprentice,
is still one of my favorites). In 1981, Loomis published the first of the Grimtooth’s Traps books,
one of the first RPG sourcebooks not tied to a specific system (although
Judges’ Guild predated the release of the Grimtooth books, its early
supplements were all tied to specific RPG systems such as D&D and
RuneQuest).
In 1978, the Association of Game Manufacturers formed, soon
renamed the Game Manufacturers Association, nee
GAMA, and elected Rick temporary president and treasurer. He went on to serve
as GAMA President for a number of terms, then moving to the President-Emeritus
position, regularly attending board meetings. Loomis and Flying Buffalo were
fixtures at both national and regional gaming conventions, setting up for
decades in dealer and exhibit halls at Origins, GenCon, Eisen Game Fair and the
GAMA Trade Show to name a few. After I got to know Rick, I learned we shared a
fondness for Diet Mountain Dew, so if I knew he would have a booth at a
convention , I made it a point to always bring in a couple of twelve packs of
Diet Dew and drop them off at his booth.
Even with his veteran’s benefits, the family’s medical bills
will run in the tens of thousands. If you are of a mind, you can contribute to
the Go
Fund Me campaign or purchase a Catalyst Bundle of
Holding .
During the decades he spent in the industry, I never heard
him speak a bad word about anyone and never heard anyone say anything negative
about him. Thanks for everything Rick. The world is a better place because you
were in it.
