Anime Madness

In the fall of 1993, two of my brothers, Erik Weswig, Matthew Johnston and I were riding home from the anime group we belonged to when Erik came upon a grandiose idea which was so very typical of him. With anime and collectible card games exploding in popularity in the U.S. at the time, we would combine the two into what we thought would be a fun and entertaining combination.

After some further brainstorming, we had a base idea of how the game would work and better still, we had a name.

We called it Anime Madness.

Being all of 16, and having a hard enough time getting through adolescence intact, we were incredibly green but undaunted and rather than go to classes and do the usual high school grind, Matt and Erik spent many an hour in the computer lab at Sunset High School designing the cards on truly draconian programs installed on a Mac SE/30 and I helped come up with rules, ideas and the occasional quote which actually ended up on one of the finished cards.

Erik's first idea for a card that started the whole thing was one called The Ugliness Compensator, which allowed the player, if they thought their opponent was rough on the eyes, as it were, the player didn't have to look at said opponent for the rest of the game.

We were 16. Maturity was still a ways off.

We had planned this to just be a fun thing we could use for the anime group  as a substitute for Magic: The Gathering, which had totally taken over our weekly meetings. And despite the occasional setback, we were having a ball putting it together when Erik died on March 5, 1995.

With the man who'd created the concept gone, Matt and I weren't sure what we planned to do with everything the three of us had put together. We wanted to finish it, and after some long talks, decided not only would we see it through but we were going to go all the way and turn this into a full-fledged, marketed game sold around the country and maybe...even the world.

So, we kept going. After graduation, Matt and I continued to get the rules codified. We even brought in his mom to help play-test it after we figured if she can learn to play it, ANYONE could.

*Editorial Note: To her credit, she did learn how to play it and in the first game she ever played, she beat me. I regret nothing.

Even when he went off to college, Matt continued to also refine the card design, thanks to the semi-improved technology available at the University of Oregon when we realized we needed one more thing.

We had a card game based on anime, but we had no anime to put on the cards.

So enlisting the help of some of our friends at Northern Oregon Vancouver Animation (NOVA for short), and after contacting the major U.S. anime distributors of the day, Pioneer, Viz, Streamline, U.S. Manga Corp  and AnimEigo, we supplied the gang with a couple of sample decks and instructions and let them go down to Los Angeles to meet with them at one of the many conventions going on at the time.

As I recall, Viz looked at it, but balked then walked out and Streamline wasn't even there. AnimEigo's head Robert Woodhead, though, was intrigued enough at the potential of what we'd done to let us have the licenses to three titles, Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth. We were both stunned and enthralled and with laserdiscs in hand, YES, LASERDISCS I SAID, we went back to work finishing the game, spending many an hour with Matt's dad's laserdisc player plugged into a computer and running even more draconian video capture software over every millimeter of them to get the images we ended up using.

*Editorial Note #2: Keep in mind this was 1995-96. AOL was still around version 2.0 and Netscape still existed. Otherwise, there was no Google Search and therefore, no proper internet.

Despite that, by the time Matt was finally done after many, many hours of slaving over the damn things, we had our final designs and were ready to unleash it upon the world.

We had investors backing us and after setting up a deal with a card printer and the largest distributor of cards and comics in the country at the time, off it went into the great beyond. Matt and I were 19 years-old and still had the belief that we would indeed conquer the world with our game. And of course, we got nowhere close. 

In the end, we barely broke even on it, but our investors got their money back. While we were called as a massive Magic clone, and rightly so, we still managed to get recognition in major publications of the day and even won an award. Inquest Magazine named one of our cards one of their picks for 1996. Sadly, I don't remember what exactly it was, but it was something.

We were actually in the planning stages for a new set of cards, which I was much more involved in, when Matt and I made the decision to finally shut it down. To have done it once, at our age and with everything we would've had to do in order to make it work again, was just not possible anymore.

By that time, Pioneer, who had scoffed at our design, had gone with a competing design that was also at the same con, and eventually became Ani-Mayhem. They ultimately proved more successful than us, but really only just. By 1997, the CCG bubble had become so saturated that all it could do was burst.

I was disappointed, to be sure, but I got over it. 

To this day, I still have three packs of the game I helped create more than half my life ago now, and I'll never get rid of them. I haven't played an actual game of it since we first brought it out, and while it was an interesting novelty I'd show at job interviews for a while after that, in the hopes it would help show what I could do, that eventually stopped as well.

Honestly, I felt like we'd failed somehow and that while it was a nice ride, I couldn't really call it mine because I wasn't the one behind it. I felt like I was more along for the ride than anything and what we'd create next was truly going to have been my proverbial baby.

For the last three years, they'd been tucked away in one of my many boxes in my storage room, buried under other things I'd decided I didn't need to see or think about anymore.

But as I was going through my yearly Spring Cleaning, I remembered I had them so I went digging until I found them again. And as I've been sitting here flipping through them, the embarrassment and sense of shame I'd somehow latched onto these cards are gone. 

This is my game. I helped create it and I can say so because my name is on it. 

Matt and I could've quit, but we didn't. While our classmates were freaking out over geometry homework, SAT's, college applications and who they were going to prom with that Spring, we were doing the same thing and starting our own business, before we'd even gotten our diplomas.

That's not something to be ashamed of. Rather, I should be damn proud of it. And I am. Regardless of what anyone else can say about me, I helped create something both tangible and lasting, and not many people get to say that in their lives. If I can do it once, I can do it again with the novel I'm writing or anything else I choose to create.

We also never forgot Erik, either. It was his idea that started this whole crazy ball rolling and as his friends and brothers, we were crazy enough to see it through to the highly improbable conclusion. And we let everyone who ever put their $15 down on a deck know that when they opened it up for the first time.

I miss those days. I miss them a lot. For all the craziness of it, we also had a lot of fun putting it all together and then seeing the result of that be shared by other people. Apparently, we were a big hit in the Midwest. How many people can say that?