Good evening and happy holidays. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

For the last few years, the Mech Warrior and Battletech universe was in, I'd say it was pretty rough shape. It was starting to look like we might never see another Mech Warrior game on PC, and the Battleteck board game had kind of vanished from a lot of hobby shops after the last box that's sold out. But in this last year, we've kind of gone from famine to feast in a lot of ways. Catalyst Game Lab has released a new intro box set this past summer, I think it was, and a couple months ago, Prana Games announced they were developing Mech Warrior Online, a free-to-play MEC Sim for 2012. It's an exciting time to be a mech fan, and it's striking that both Catalyst and Prana

are really making an effort to place their games in the broader context of the Battleteck

universe, a game universe with a long, detailed history written over nearly 30 years, countless

expansions, novels, and video games.

Today we're going to be talking about that universe, the Battletech board game, and how all that history informs game design. To help us do that.

I can think of no one better to talk to than Catalyst's Randall Bill's, whose career is in

many ways also the story of Battletech. Randall, thanks for joining us today.

I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

We also welcome Russ Bullock and Brian Ekman from Piranha Games, and two people who have done a lot of thinking about the Battletech universe and how to give it its due and a PC game. Russ, Brian, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So, Randall, I wanted to start with you, but this is a question for everyone.

So why do you think Battletech has enjoyed such a loyal following over a really long history for a board game?

I was actually just thinking about this the other day, and I think I covered it in an interview that I did with Prada specifically on this topic.

And I think there's many factors that come into that.

One is you can never underestimate the power of giant robots blowing crap up on alien worlds.

Every 13-year-old boy, regardless of how old we might be, has the 13-year-old boy in us that still loves to just blow crap up. I think it's also the really iconic factions that it's instantly easy to

wrap your head around what that faction represents, and there's a lot of factions. So people can easily

find one that is one that calls to them.

I think it's the really dynamic characters all the way from, you know, your heroes to your

villains and everything in between.

And it's the ongoing storyline, this dynamic universe as you said it has

30 years of history that you can continue to go forward in you can't we can go

back and tell stories you know centuries in the history past all of these

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