History
Buck Rogers was a fictional character created in 1928 by Philip Nowlan. A Buck Rogers comic strip written by Nowlan was syndicated by John Dille (who may have contributed the nickname "Buck" to the character). Ownership of Buck Rogers and other works passed into the hands of the Dille Family Trust.
In the 1980s, John Dille's granddaughter, Lorraine Williams, was the president of TSR. In that decade, business for TSR was booming, mainly as a result of their popular RPG, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Lorraine Williams decided to merge Buck Rogers and D&D to make the XXVc game setting, which came out in 1990 and was based on the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition rules, but there are some small differences. It was a new incarnation of the Buck Rogers world created by William's brother, Frank Dille. Its universe was limited to the solar system, and revolved heavily around interplanetary travel and terraforming. A few dozen expansion modules were published, as well as a line of novels and graphic novels.
The company TSR owned Advanced Dungeons and Dragons at the time and had worked with SSI on a computerized version of the rules. SSI developed their "Gold Box" game engine for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, so it was natural for them to use the engine for the XXVC rules.
Read more about this topic: Buck Rogers XXVC
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)