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Steve JacksonAmerican game designer
Country:
 USA |
Content:
American Game Designer
In the early 1980s, after many years of working at Metagaming Concepts, where he created games like "Ogre" and "The Fantasy Trip", Steve Jackson founded the company Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games). Steve directly developed many games published by his company - "Car Wars", "GURPS", "Munchkin", and many others.
The Raid and the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The company won a case against the United States Secret Service after their officers raided the company in 1990. The raid was conducted because one of their employees, Loyd Blankenship, was associated with hacker groups. In hacker circles, he is known as "The Mentor" and was the founder of the hacker group "Legion of Doom". In 1989, he published a stolen file from the corporation BellSouth, which contained information about their emergency response system. Government agents were concerned that this could help hack the system, although the file only contained contact information. Following this case, the non-profit organization Electronic Frontier Foundation was created.
Biography
Steve Jackson graduated from Rice University in 1974. He initially studied at Baker College and then, starting in 1971, at Sid Richardson College. Steve is often confused with his namesake, Steve Jackson, a British author of game books and video game developer, and one of the founders of Games Workshop. The confusion is further amplified by the fact that while the British Jackson was working on the "Fighting Fantasy" series, the American Jackson also wrote three books in this series ("Scorpion Swamp", "Demons of the Deep", and "Robot Commando"). However, from the publications of these two authors, it is not clear that they were written by different people.
Steve Jackson is an avid collector of LEGO pirate sets. He has written several miniatures games with a pirate theme, such as "Evil Stevie's Pirate Game", which he showcased at various conferences. Additionally, Jackson presented his creation, the "Chaos Toy Machine", made from Chaos Toy sets, at several science-fiction and military gaming conferences.
Kickstarter Success
On May 11, 2012, Jackson launched a Kickstarter project dedicated to the sixth edition of the game "OGRE". The project became one of the most successful on the platform, with 5,512 people donating a total of $923,680. This success laid the foundation for another project focused on reissuing "Car Wars". The use of Kickstarter in the gaming industry, combined with marketing research, proved to be unprecedented.
