34 GREATER GAMES INDUSTRY • #43 WINTER 2018 Industry Talk Industry Talk Industry Talk Industry Talk Industry Talk Industry Talk Industry Talk continued on next page – by s. CROMPTON G aming companies come and go, but for many gamers Flying Buffalo feels like it’s a permanent fixture in the gaming industry. Founded in 1970, Flying Buffalo Inc. is still run by Rick Loomis, the man who started the company 47 years ago. Flying Buffalo started out as the very first Play-by-Mail company that created and ran its own games. Its best known PBM game is Starweb, which, along with Illuminati , has i i won several Origins awards over the years. Flying Buffalo also runs BattlePlan, Riftlords, Heroic Fantasy and Feudal Lords PBM. But Flying Buffalo’s destiny was changed when Rick Loomis met T&T creator T T Ken St Andre and agreed to carry Ken’s game to the Origins game convention one year. In 1975 Rick Loomis started publishing Ken’s Tunnels & Trolls, the second oldest role-playing game. T&T did quite well for Buffalo, no doubt partly due to the fact that T&T could be played solitaire, with the invention of the solo adventure. Buffalo has published over 25 different solo adventures, which read like a choose-your –own-path book, only you use the T&T rules for combat, casting magic and escaping T T dangerous situations. Rick wrote k k Buffalo Castle, the first ever (anywhere) solo adventure for a role playing game. T&T’s rules are less complicated than the earlier editions of the other famous RPG and that allowed it to expand into other languages as well. It also was easier for people who used English as a second language. Within a few years of the well-known 5th edition of T&T (published in 1978) it was available in German, Italian, French, Spanish and Japanese and the game was widely sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Australia. The 5th edition of T&T remained the standard for the game T T from 1978 to 2012. In 2011 a beautiful new French edition of T&T was published and this inspired the T T T&T fellowship to do something similar in English. In 2012 Flying Buffalo brought the old team together to create Deluxe Tunnels &Trolls. A hugely successful Kickstarter was launched and a new age for T&T began. T T Deluxe T&T uses the same basic T T rules as 5th edition, but now with added optional rules, more detailed charts and more information about the creatures, kindreds and history of Trollworld, the place where the T&T adventures take place. The new book is 365 pages, but still maintains the original simplicity of the game. Many of the old products were put back in print (updated to work with dT&T) and new adventures were published as well. The renewed interest in the game leads to MetaArcade’s T&T Adventures App that you can now play for free on your smartphone. There are now also a Polish edition of T&T and work is ongoing for a Finnish, a Portuguese, and a new Spanish edition as well. Old is new again: The Tunnels & Trolls Renaissance