Battletech

Mechwarrior 2

Fell in with a group of nerdy friends in high school 35 years ago who played the tabletop game. Can't say I've ever read any of the books, but I've enjoyed the game ever since, both the tabletop and the HBS game (which is what I play these days).

I checked out Decision at Thunder Rift randomly from a library as a kid 30 years ago.

Funny enough, it was when r/grimdank turned into a BattleTech meme subreddit for a short while that I discovered BattleTech. Since then I've been hooked in entirely.

I'm a 2nd generation mechwarrior. I was a military brat, and my father, a USAF officer, was home maybe 25% of the time. But when he was away, I kept a connection to him through his toys. DOS games (in 2000-2004), Gamma World TTRPG, the NES, and, above all, a Tabletop Wargame called Battletech and it's younger TCG brother.

From memory, he had 2 decks for the TCG, davion v dcms. He had 4 minis, a marauder, a rifleman, a gryphon, and a wasp, all from the OG robotech metals. There was the clan invasion box set with the mad cat on the front, sourcebooks for Snord's Irregulars, Fox's Teeth, and Black Widow Company, TRO 3055, and the box set expansion to Solaris VII.

As a home-schooled kid who moved every 2-5 years, my friends always changed, but the universe of 3055 felt so vibrant and deep that it became an anchored escape from life to ground me and nurture my creativity. It really felt like I was spending quality time with my dad when he was half a world away. Now, he's retired and we crack out my 150+ mini collection to play company v. company battles in alpha strike. I still have all his old books and maps.

My friend had the tabletop game and we played few matches around 89.

@Vcio I had a cd of freeware and shareware games and one of them was basically old megamek. No idea if those two are related in any way, because I couldn't figure out what I was doing. It was just a spreadsheet generator to me, with some cool words attached that I didn't know the meaning of. Then I told my friend about it and his older brother had the books, so my friend passed along some setting details to me. Mainly about how Kitfoxes were very cool because some had a gauss rifle, as I recall.

A couple years ago I was job hunting and almost got hired by Harebrained to work on the game. I had bought Battletech a few weeks before my interviews for research to know what I would be getting into. Made it all the way to final interview but they passed on me. I've been interested in the tabletop pretty much since then but haven't gotten around to actually playing it

On a bright summer day in 1996 my father packed the family into his brand new minivan for a trip to the nearby medium-sized city to visit Circuit City. In which he purchased a Compaq Presario desktop computer pre-installed with Windows 95, a monitor, and several accessories including a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick.

On the box for this joystick, up in the corner above the picture of the stick itself, was a small picture of a game box below the words "Free inside!", half the box's background was black, the other half orange flames, and in the middle stood a really cool looking robot tank thing. It stood on backward kneed bird-like legs, had arms that ended in lasers and machine guns, two boxy missile launchers on its shoulders, and a cockpit that looked like a B-29. It had nose art of this bright green bird of prey holding a katana painted on the side. It was easily the coolest thing I had seen in my entire 9 years on Earth.

Inside this box was a black compact disc labeled Mechwarrior 2: 31st Century Combat.

And here's the thing, that game did a tremendously bad job of indicating it was from a bigger franchise; other than obviously being the second game in the series. But like I had a copy of Descent 2 as well, there isn't a ridiculously deep universe behind that one, why would there be behind this one? So MW2: 31CC did grab me a little more than a lot of the other games I had at the time, I didn't really follow it up much, plus, 90's kids didn't have many ways of doing that; Google hadn't been invented yet, and we didn't really get much use out of that Compaq's 28.8k modem. I played the hell out of it, then eventually moved on to other things.

Later on, I was in like 9th grade or so, I was upset about how school was going, and trying to cheer me up my father said "Are there any video games you want?" "Actually yeah, there's an expansion for Half-Life I want." "Think Staples has it?" "I think they do." He drives me down to Staples, and there in the software section (remember when Staples had a software section?) was a boxed copy of both Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and right next to it a box that said "Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance." I left that store carrying both boxes.

Mechwarrior 4 ALSO wasn't very good at indicating that it was from a bigger franchise. If anything, knowing only what I had learned from Mechwarrior 2, it seemed even cheaper because they didn't seem to keep their lore straight. I kept wondering why they insisted on calling the Mad Dog a "Vulture," the Timber Wolf a "Mad Cat" and the Summoner a "Thor," and wondering my Star was now called my Lance, etc. then I started playing multiplayer, and I got into this Battletech Universe roleplaying league. And the guys I got into playing with were like "Yeah no it's this whole big thing with all these novels and stuff."