Steve Jackson (US)

For the British co-founder of Fighting Fantasy, see Steve Jackson (UK)

Steve Jackson (born ~1953) is an American game designer.

Biography

Early Life

Jackson is a 1974 graduate of Rice University where he was a resident of Baker College before moving to Sid Richardson College when it opened in 1971.

He is often mistaken for a different Steve Jackson, a British gamebook and video game writer who co-founded Games Workshop. The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that while the UK Jackson was co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, the US Jackson also wrote three books in this series. He was in fact the first author to write under the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone present banner, with his Scorpion Swamp being the first book in the series not to be written by one of the two co-founders of the series.

Jackson is also an avid collector of Pirates themed Lego sets. He has written a miniatures game that uses Pirate sets, Evil Stevie's Pirate Game, and has run it at several conventions..

Recently Jackson has exhibited his elaborate Chaos Machine at several science fiction or wargaming conventions, including the 2006 Worldcon.

He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Career

After working for many years at Metagaming Concepts designing such games as Ogre and The Fantasy Trip, he left to found Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games) in the early 1980s. He designed many of the games published by SJ Games, such as Car Wars, GURPS, Munchkin and many others. The company won a case against the US Secret Service after a raid of their offices in 1990. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was created at that time to address this and similar cases.

Bibliography

Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

• (#8) Scorpion Swamp (Puffin, 1984)
• (#19) Demons of the Deep (Puffin, 1986)
• (#22) Robot Commando (Puffin, 1986)

Honors

• Jackson has received over a dozen Origins Awards.
• In 1982, he became the youngest game designer to be inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame.
• His role-playing game GURPS and card game Munchkin (card game)|Munchkin were named to the Origins Hall of Fame for 1999 and 2012 respectively.
• In 2009, he was admitted into the Order of the Pineapple.
• He was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured as the king of clubs in Flying Buffalo's 2011 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.

External Links

• Steve Jackson's official website
• Details on Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret Service
• Brief Steve Jackson Biography
• Pictures of Evil Stevie's Pirate Game on Brickshelf
• Steve Jackson | BoardGameGeek
• Interview by Tom Vasel
• Pen & Paper listing for Steve Jackson (US)