Resurrection!

One of the most exciting things about the internet is its ability to either connect or resurrect those elements from my past that would — at another time — have been lost to entropy.

Here are some of my favorite examples of media that have been resurrected since I was a kid to be enjoyed by a new generation.

Elfquest
Detail from a signed promo poster I found in my stuff from 1993.

Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, is a fantasy comic series that was started in 1978. I never read the complete run of Elfquest when I was a kid, because getting all of the issues meant visiting comic book shows or shops, and also cost money. I had some of the WaRP Graphics issues, and some of the Marvel issues, but I didn’t have the entire series. A couple of years ago, I decided to look up Elfquest on the internet to see if there were graphic novels available, and lo and behold, the entire comic book series was available to read online! Not only the original series, but every Elfquest comic written, over 6,500 pages of comic book, was available at

http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics3.html

I read the original quest with my kids as our bedtime stories. We used my laptop because the pages were viewable fullscreen and had been re-colored. I asked my kids if they wanted to try to read from the copies of the comic books that I owned, but the WaRP issues were black and white, and once you’ve started reading digital color there’s no going back. Parents, note that I did skip pages 15-16 in issue 17, and you might, too, depending on the age of your kids; it’s essentially a sort of pre-battle Saturnalia.

Lone Wolf
I actually had a copy of this book…

The Lone Wolf series of books by Joe Dever took the idea of “choose-your-own-adventure” titles and added role-playing game mechanics to the story-lines, creating an interactivity that usually got me killed during my first encounter with a bad guy.

I hadn’t thought about these books in years until last week when my friend Johnster dropped me a note that the books had been fan released in app form:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.GDVGames.LoneWolfBiblio&hl=en

This app takes the content that Joe Dever has made available via projectaon, a site dedicated to sharing the entire Lone Wolf series for reading online.

Avalon Hill’s Dune

This image is NOT the game I pulled out last weekend to play with my boys; instead, this is a picture of the components completely redesigned by a fan named Ilya Baranovsky, whose entire creative endeavor can be downloaded and printed out from BoardGameGeek. I’ve already begun printing the components because—let’s face it—this is a beautiful re-rendering of the original game.

The idea that fans can take a game from the past and re-energize it is phenomenal. I picked up a copy of Wizard’s Quest, which the boys and I played a few weeks ago. They enjoyed the random attacks from orcs and dragon in this game, and I’m looking forward to playing it again. The thing is, there is a fan expansion called Advanced Wizard’s Quest that makes use of the board from Wizard’s Quest, but includes entirely new counters for new races and a totally new ruleset!

This isn’t the only game I came across like this. I managed to pick up a copy of Scotland Yard at a garage sale a few years ago for something like a quarter. A guy named Gioacchino Prestigiacomo created an Italian variant based on Blade Runner, and the rules are posted through here.

Dune II
I spent hours on this game twenty years ago…

I have to leap-frog here from board games into video games. I wasn’t much of a video gamer because I never bought the systems. The most I had was a computer, and after a Commodore 64 it was the clearance model IBM compatible from Wal-mart, so running power games was never in my cards. One game I did own was Westwood Studio’s Dune II, a game that I actually won as the Atriedes.

Once Alex, Bryan and I finished our very short board game version of Dune (it turns out that Dune should really have six players for it to be competitive), the boys remembered that I have a copy of Dune II on an old computer in the basement. They asked to play it for a while, but it wasn’t long before Bryan raced upstairs with his Nexus because he had found an edition available at Google Play: Dune 2. So here it is, twenty years later, and the game I was playing (in this house, actually, where I am writing this; at that time it was my grandmother’s house, and I stayed here to house-sit, and I brought my giant computer because it was so exciting to get out of my parents’ house and sit-up all night playing video games and eating Gardetto’s!) is now available to a new audience on a new platform, the mobile device. Dune II is still every bit as playable as it was then, which is a testament to its design.

These are all examples of how the books and games from my childhood have grown and evolved in the era of the internet. I’m thrilled to be able to revisit them, and also to share them with my kids, and maybe even to adapt them in new directions with new ideas and creativity.

My compliments to Richard and Wendy Pini, and Joe Dever who have made their works available for people to enjoy through the internet. It takes an enormous amount of faith to share intellectual property; I’ve done it with a few of my old works, and I have some intention to follow suit with some of my newer work, but not until you’ve purchased a copy of Raceboy and Super Qwok Adventures from Amazon or Barnes and Noble!