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Origins Awards
The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the gaming industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so (for example) the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins. The Origins Award is commonly referred to as a Calliope, as the statuette is in the likeness of the muse of the same name. Academy members frequently shorten this name to "Callie". History Originally, the ''Charles S. Roberts Awards'' and the Origins Awards were one and the same. Starting with the 1987 awards, the Charles S. Roberts were given separately, and they moved away from Origins entirely in 2000, leaving the Origins Awards as a completely separate system. In 1978, the awards also hosted the 1977 ''H. G. Wells awards'' for role-playing games and miniature wargaming. Categories The Origins Awards were initially presented at the Origins Game Fair in five categories: ''Best Professional Ga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Origins Game Fair
Origins Game Fair is an annual gaming convention that was first held in 1975. Since 1996, it has been held in Columbus, Ohio at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Origins is run by The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA). Origins was chartered to serve gaming in general, including wargaming and miniatures gaming. Origins is the site of the annual Origins Awards ceremony. For many years, the Charles S. Roberts Awards for historical boardgames were presented at Origins, but these are now presented at the World Boardgaming Championships. Board games, trading card games, LARPs and role-playing games are also popular at Origins. Origins Game Fair was formerly known as the Origins International Game Expo. The name was changed in the summer of 2007. Origins typically has a theme each year, which affects some of the events and decorations like banners or art, and the Origins mascot will be depicted wearing an outfit related to the theme as well. The theme in 2012 was Time Tra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PC Game
A personal computer game, also known as a PC game or computer game, is a type of video game played on a personal computer (PC) rather than a video game console or arcade machine. Its defining characteristics include: more diverse and user-determined gaming hardware and software; and generally greater capacity in input, processing, video and audio output. The uncoordinated nature of the PC game market, and now its lack of physical media, make precisely assessing its size difficult. In 2018, the global PC games market was valued at about $27.7 billion. Home computer games became popular following the video game crash of 1983, leading to the era of the "bedroom coder". In the 1990s, PC games lost mass-market traction to console games, before enjoying a resurgence in the mid-2000s through digital distribution on services such as Steam and GOG.com. Newzoo reports that the ''PC gaming sector'' is the third-largest category (and estimated in decline) across all platforms , with the ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liz Danforth
Elizabeth T. Danforth is an illustrator, editor, writer, and scenario designer for role-playing games and video games. She has worked in the game industry continuously since the mid 1970s. Early life and education She received her BA in Anthropology from Arizona State University, and her MLS from the University of Arizona. Creative work Flying Buffalo hired Danforth as a staff artist and for production work in 1978, and published her magazine ''Sorcerer's Apprentice'' (1978–1983) for 17 issues. While employed with Flying Buffalo, Danforth is noted for editing and developing the Fifth Edition of Flying Buffalo's flagship role playing game, ''Tunnels & Trolls''. She reprised this role in 2013 for the new edition, '' Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls''. Danforth is known primarily as a freelance artist in the fantasy and science fiction genres, with the majority of her body of work illustrating for the game industry between 1976 and 2004. She has created book covers, maps, and illustr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greg Costikyan
Greg Costikyan (born July 22, 1959, in New York City), sometimes known under the pseudonym "Designer X", is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including: hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards. He co-founded Manifesto Games, now out of business, with Johnny Wilson in 2005. Personal life and education Greg Costikyan is the son of attorney and politician Edward N. and Frances (Holmgren) Costikyan. He and Warren Spector, a game designer, were friends since high school. He is a 1982 graduate (B.S.) of Brown University. (subscription required) He married Louise Disbrow (a securities analyst), September 4, 1986. They have three children. He is a frequent speaker at game industry events including the Game Developers Conference and E³. Career Greg Costikyan has been a game designer since th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman (born July 12, 1947) is an American cryptozoologist who has written over 40 books on a number of topics, including the pseudoscience and subculture of cryptozoology. Early life Coleman was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a firefighter and his mother a homemaker. He graduated in 1965 from MacArthur High School. He studied anthropology and zoology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and psychiatric social work at the Simmons College School of Social Work in Boston. He did further studies in doctoral-level anthropology at Brandeis University and sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Coleman taught at New England universities from 1980 to 2004, having also been a senior researcher at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Policy from 1983 to 1996, before retiring from teaching to write, lecture, and consult. Cryptozoology Coleman writes on popular culture, animal mysterie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Chadwick
Frank Chadwick is an American multiple-award-winning game designer and ''New York Times'' best selling author. He has designed hundreds of games, his most notable being the role-playing games ''En Garde!'', '' Space: 1889'' and ''Twilight 2000'', and the wargame series ''Europa'' and ''The Third World War'', as well as creating '' Traveller'' with Marc Miller. Beginnings Chadwick formed the ISU Game Club at Illinois State University with Rich Banner. The club focused on wargaming, but the students also began designing games as a fun activity and were able to convince the university to fund a new program called SIMRAD ("SIMulation Research And Design"), with the intent of aiding instructors to produce specifications for simulation games. They used their club funding to design war games. They also formed a small educational games organization in response to a project by the university to bring new ideas into the system. After failing to win this project, Chadwick and Banner, al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bob Charrette
Robert N. Charrette (born 1953) is an American graphic artist, game designer, sculptor and author. Charrette has authored more than a dozen novels. His gaming materials have received many Origins Awards. Charrette was inducted in the Origins Hall of Fame in 2003. His work is known for a clean, realistic style that invokes themes from Feudal Japan and Chanbara films and in particular, historical and fantastic representations of Samurai culture. His early work in game design and miniature sculpting set the tone for depictions of Japanese mythology in American fantasy and science fiction. His 1979 role-playing game ''Bushido'' was one of the first role-playing games with a non-Western theme and remained in print for more than three decades. Charrette produced gaming products for Fantasy Games Unlimited, Grenadier Models Inc. and Ral Partha Enterprises, FASA and currently operates Parroom Enterprises, LLC, a boutique miniatures game company. Early life Charrette grew up in Rhode Isla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Darwin Bromley
Darwin Paul Bromley (October 23, 1950 – January 2, 2019) was an attorney and a game designer who had worked primarily on board games. Career Attorney Darwin Bromley was a railroad game fan, so in 1980 he founded the company Mayfair Games to publish a railroad game of his own; the company was named for the Chicago neighborhood where it was founded. Bromley soon brought Bill Fawcett on as a partner in Mayfair Games, and together they designed the game ''Empire Builder'' (1980). Bromley was involved with the Chicago Wargaming Association's convention, CWAcon, where Mayfair's first fantasy adventures in their new Role Aids game line were run: ''Beastmaker Mountain'' (1982), ''Nanorien Stones'' (1982) and '' Fez I'' (1982). With Bromley's legal expertise, he felt that Mayfair could legally use TSR's trademarks as long as they were careful, so beginning with their '' Dwarves'' (1982) supplement Mayfair made it clear that they were not the trademark holders by printing on the cover ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerald Brom
Gerald Brom (born March 9, 1965), known professionally as Brom, is an American gothic fantasy artist and illustrator, known for his work in role-playing games, novels, and comics. Early life Brom was born March 9, 1965, in Albany, Georgia. As the son of a U.S. Army pilot he spent much of his early years on the move, living in other countries such as Japan and Germany (he graduated from Frankfurt American High School), and in U.S. states including Alabama and Hawaii. Brought up as a military dependent he was known by his last name only, and now signs his name as simply Brom: "I get that asked more than just about any other question. It's my real name, my last name. I got called Brom all the time as a kid, and it just stuck." Brom has been drawing and painting since childhood, although he had never taken any formal art classes. "I wouldn't exactly call myself self-taught, because I've always looked at the work of other artists and emulated what I liked about it. So you can say th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Larry Bond
Lawrence L. Bond (born June 11, 1951) is an American author and wargame designer. He is the designer of the ''Harpoon'' and ''Command at Sea'' gaming systems, and several supplements for the games. Examples of his numerous novels include ''Dangerous Ground'', ''Day of Wrath'', ''The Enemy Within'', ''Cauldron'', ''Vortex'' and ''Red Phoenix''. He also co-authored ''Red Storm Rising'' with Tom Clancy. Early life and education Bond was born on June 11, 1951 and grew up outside St. Paul, Minnesota. When he was eight years old, an uncle gave him a copy of ''Afrika Korps'', spurring his lifelong interest in wargames. In 1973, Bond graduated from St. Thomas College with a degree in quantitative methods, and worked as a computer programmer for two years before joining the U.S. Navy. Career U.S. Navy Bond graduated from the United States Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island in 1976. He spent six years on active naval duty, including four years on destroyers, followe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jolly Blackburn
Jolly Randall Blackburn is best known as the creator of the comic strip ''Knights of the Dinner Table''. Biography Jolly Blackburn went to Ball State University. Jolly Blackburn majored in anthropology, history, and classical cultures in college. Blackburn later joined the Army, and launched both the gaming magazine ''Shadis'' and his company Alderac Entertainment Group (named after his ''AD&D'' campaign world) while still in the Army. The original ''Shadis'' was a black-and-white digest featured gaming articles largely written by Blackburn, and each issue featured several pieces of fiction collectively called the "Alderac Anthonology" which detailed Blackburn's world of Alderac (one of Alderac's moons was Shadis, from which the magazine borrowed its name). He conceived of having a comic strip that became ''Knights of the Dinner Table'' (''KoDT'') in 1990 as part of ''Shadis'': "I had been a great fan of J.D. Webster's ''Finieous Fingers'' from the early ''Dragon Magazine'', an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
