gemini://gem.hexandcounter.org/gemlog/posts/warp.gmi

Two years ago I stumbled into the website of Warpspawn Games, and a few days ago (no... a few months ago, as I did not get around to complete this post until now) a thread on Boardgamegeek reminded me that they exist. Or existed. Warpspawn Games was mainly the work of a Lloyd Krassner, who passed away in 2020. I have no idea who he was, but I am fascinated by what he achieved. BGG lists 924 games designed by him. Warpspawn as publisher of 1032 games (a few others contributed games as well). From what I can tell those were all created from 1997 to 2017, and posted as free print'n'play downloads.

Unfortunately the full catalogue of Warpspawn is no longer available. A total of five Yahoo Groups and Google Groups existed for hosting some of the files, and both those sites are long gone now. Some fan-made(!) materials posted by others are also no longer available or can only be found via archive.org.

In short this was yet another deep rabbithole of early www for me to get lost into. I can't imagine something like Warpspawn happening in 2022. If someone tried something like that now it would be all based on trying to farm clicks and crowdfunding and advertisments.

If the games are any good? I have no idea. But I like the primitive graphics, for those games where there even are graphics. It is all extremely lo-fi in a good way. Most games are just plain text in simple HTML documents. I piped all the rules through lynx -dump to get actual plain text text files and you can't beat the readability of that. Something like Warpspawn would be perfect to host om Geminispace, rulebooks as gemtext and a few image-links when necessary. Definitely putting some of their solo games on my to-play list. Maybe there are some games for more than one player that I can find an opponent for as well some day.

Lloyd Krassner also contributed to most issues of the CounterMoves Zine, a free online zine about games ("Small Games For Big Fun"; editor in chief a Tom Higgins) published 2001-2004. Six issues in total from what I can tell. Each issue contained a free game using the "CounterMoves Generic Microgame Engine (CGME)", dedicated to the public domain. The magazines themselves were published under the GNU Free Documentation License, later one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY-ND-NC, I think). It looks very much like Warpspawn, but not sure if the zine is connected to the publisher in other ways than that Krassner was involved. I suspect others were also involved in both projects and that the games included in the zine are related to the games published by Warpspawn.