Requiem For HERO

On November 28, Hero Games announced on their website that there were some changes to the company and two of their three employee were let go and wished well in there future endeavors. The statement said that Hero would remain in business but "just a bit more slowly." Reading between the lines is rather easy in this case, because in between those lines is the simple fact that the Hero Games that helped shape both my childhood and young adulthood is dead.

Hero Games' death is just another symptom of the disease where the blessing of technology is the rest of world's curse. Amazon is wonderful, but it killed Borders. MP3s killed the independent record store. Newspapers and books are seen as things of the past; not as the foundation of the present. Massively multiplayer online role playing games have killed the tabletop role playing games.

Not that Hero Games didn't do their part in their decline, they sold the rights to their intellectual properties to Cryptic Studios which weakened their foundation. They rolled out a sixth edition to their game when there really wasn't much of a demand for it. Instead of producing products that would fill in needed gaps in their portfolio, they rehashed older materials that the majority of their consumers already owned. But that's only part of why they're in a business equivalent of a coma, the main reason is the decline in popularity of tabletop role playing games.

I was first introduced to Hero Games in fifth grade. We had been playing Dungeons and Dragons and, as a change of pace, the dungeon master brought in Champions. Champions was their superhero role playing game. Comic books were a very important part of my life and here was a game in which you could be one. Bliss! You couldn't be Batman, but you could create any hero you wanted to be in an universe of your own design. This fueled my imagination. Not only was I gaming with Champions, but I was also creating stories with their characters. Soon Doctor Destroyer, Foxbat and Howler were as big of villains to me as Dr. Doom, Luthor and the Joker. I could create worlds with characters that weren't untouchable, anything could happen.

As time wore on, I became less and less interested with the books and would still buy Hero Games products out of a sense of completion. Years went by and I gamed less, but I still wanted to see what their interpretation of their characters were. There were ups and downs. Until Steven S. Long bought Hero there was a large drought between products. They launched their fifth edition and things were golden once again. Time passed and you could tell there were some financial problems. Books shrank in size and rose in cost. Covers were no longer original art but collages of interior art. The art suffered. They had great artists like Patrick Zircher, Greg Smith, and Glen Johnson, but after they couldn't afford quality art they started hiring people who had no business having their art published in any format. The ideas were still great though, so I stuck with them.

When Hero decided to go to a sixth edition, I finally said enough. There weren't enough new characters or settings for me and I had all that I wanted. Now it seems more customers followed my lead. While Hero Games had risen from the ashes before, it was in times where tabletop games were still in demand.

Hero may rise from the ashes, but now the fire is out.