Howard M. Thompson

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For the journalist and film critic, see Howard Thompson (film critic).

Howard M. Thompson was a wargame designer and founder of Metagaming Concepts. His first game was Stellar Conquest, a popular and well designed simulation of interstellar warfare.

Thompson is most famous for his idea to publish small, low-cost games in what came to be known as the MicroGame format. For a while, Metagaming dominated this niche wargaming market. In the early 1980s, some speculate that the company started to run into financial trouble, partially because of the generally poor economic situation at that time, and because of the split with one of his main game designers, Steve Jackson. Thompson was not satisfied with the work done on The Fantasy Trip by Jackson ^[1]. In April 1983, Thompson decided to sell the company's assets and shut the company down. Little is known about his present whereabouts.

On 1-Jan-1982 Thompson created Games Research Group, Inc., which was initially part of Metagaming.^[2].

A source close to Thompson was asked why Metagaming was shut down and if it was possible to contact Thompson for comment. The source responded that Thompson permanently left the gaming industry for personal reasons not related to Metagaming, and further stated that the request for comment was communicated to Thompson, but that Thompson declined. This source also said that he was unaware of any financial difficulty at Metagaming but could not rule it out. The source appeared to be under the impression that Metagaming's inventory and intellectual property was sold for profit, at least some of which was purchased by Avalon Hill.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Games designed

Stellar Conquest (1974)
Chitin: I (1977)
WarpWar (1977)
Treasure of the Silver Dragon (1980) (module for The Fantasy Trip role-playing game)
Treasure of the Unicorn Gold (1981) (module for The Fantasy Trip)
Starleader: Assault (1982)