Unreleased TFT Stuff: Interplay Issue 9

It's been altogether too long since I've posted - most of it just has to do with life getting in the way, though I do have some other reasons that will be the subject of a later post. But for now I'm going to start posting some drafts that have been languishing for awhile, now...

So, in my post about unreleased TFT materials [Here], I pointed out that publication of Interplay ceased after issue 8, a full six months before Metagaming closed. At the time I wondered why another couple of issues could not have been published before going under, and speculated that the collapse of Metagaming had been building, Howard Thompson's protestations to the contrary in Interplay 8 notwithstanding:

"Without phones rumors were rampant that something had happened to Metagaming Concepts Inc. Our industry seems to revel in bad news about competitors.

With the recession slowly ending and the weaker firms going bye-bye it's time for Metagaming Concepts Inc to plan the future. Products have always been our key to everything."  ('Coming Distractions...', Interplay No. 8)

It is simultaneously amusing and sad to see how that bravado all worked out... It is noteworthy, though, that, on the one hand, Howard Thompson comments on how the industry loves bad news about its competition, but in the next breath talks about "weaker firms going bye-bye" which comes across as "revel(ing) in bad news about competitors."

Until recently, I had not given the matter much thought, other than regretting that the designer's introduction for Conquerors of Underearth promised for in Interplay 9 was never published (along with the game itself of course). However, over on the SJG Forums a certain Steve Plambeck posted details (including a .pdf file) of an article regarding a proposed Wizardry Talent that William Gustafson wanted to include as an optional rule in the upcoming 2nd Edition of In The Labyrinth. In addition, he wanted Mr. Plambeck to write up the talent as an article for the then upcoming issue 9 of Interplay. The full thread is here.

The Wizardry Talent itself seems like an excellent idea; I've had similar thoughts, albeit for different reasons, as mentioned here. However, what really piqued my interest was the fact that here we had a full article that was intended for this issue. Further, I remembered that Interplay 8 had mentioned some articles that were planned for the next issue, thus, in a limited sort of fashion, one could plausibly reconstruct the contents in a limited sense. Here is a list of all the planned material, as attested in earlier Interplay magazines:

• Designer's Introduction to Conquerors of Underearth (mentioned in Keith Gross' Designer's Intro to Dragons of Underearth)
• Designer's Intro to StarLeader: Assault! (mentioned in 'Coming Next Issue' section on the title page of the issue)
• Trailblazer, Helltank, and TFT articles (also mentioned in 'Coming Next Issue' - note that the TFT article reference probably included Plambeck's article. Also worth mentioning is that in Interplay 7 Howard mentioned having so many TFT submissions that, "The problem is that we have enough good material to fill four more issue [sic] right now." Finally, Interplay 6 mentioned getting a designer's intro for Helltank.)

So right here we have a fair idea of what content would have been forthcoming, had the Fates been kinder. It is also worth mentioning that there might have been a designer's introduction to the forthcoming TFT superhero supplement In the Name of Justice, which had been displayed at the HIA show along with Conquerors of Underearth in early 1983, and perhaps some sort of mention of  the TFT MicroQuests Runesword at Regalan and Prison of the Spectral Demon which were also on display.

Going beyond this, Interplay 9 was also possibly going to feature the format changes that had originally been floated in Interplay No. 5, summarized here in the COMING NEXT ISSUE section of Interplay 8:

"Next issue may see the format changes that have been discussed before. The options are, keep INTERPLAY as is at a $2.00 price, go to 48 pages with thicker cover and interior pages for $2.50, or go to very good quality 64 pages at $3.00 but go to quarterly issues." 

This is very interesting, and we'll revisit these format changes again in a bit. But, based on all of the above, I here present a hopefully plausible reconstruction of the Interplay No. 9 cover:

The cover art I selected is actually an unpublished Pat Hidy piece that I won on eBay several years ago. Note also that the border format has actually varied pretty much from issue to issue during Interplay's short run - I chose the last format found in issue 8. And I decided to depict the issue with a $2.00 cover price, though for circumstantial reasons I'll get into in a moment, one of the other format and price options mentioned previous is much more likely to have been the one selected for issue 9.

Now, I'll say right off the bat that my cover art selection is WRONG. Not because of the obvious (i.e. an unpublished piece of art), but rather because I am 99% certain that the cover art would have been a black and white version of whatever art would have been on the Conquerors of Underearth cover. It is to be noted that the Interplay covers for issues 2, 4, 5, 7, & 8 all featured black and white or greyscale versions of existing game cover art (No. 2 - Unicorn Gold, No. 4 - Fire When Ready, No. 5 - Orbquest, No. 7 - Warrior Lords of Darok, and No. 8 - Starleader! Assault), so I'm pretty sure that would have been done here as well. However, since we will never know what that cover looked like (I reached out back in April 2019 to Denis Loubet to see if maybe he did the artwork for CUE, given that a pre-publication copy of CUE did exist and Loubet had done the art for both Lords of the Underearth and Dragons of Underearth, but alas he never responded to me) I chose to sub in a piece that is largely unknown by a different Metagaming artist (and my personal favorite) who did alot of TFT stuff instead.

I'll close this post with some speculation on why Interplay 9 never saw the light of day, even though at least some material was ready to go. The most obvious reason is that Metagaming may simply have run out of money. I've heard rumors that Metagaming stiffed their printers when they went under, and it could be that the funds just weren't there to get anything printed. Another possibility, though, is the aforementioned format changes - in particular going to more content with 48 or 64 pages. It may be that the additional time and work required to get the issue ready may have pushed the timeline to completion out so much as to doom it. Put another way, had they stuck with the same format and amount of content they might have squeaked the issue out. We'll never know, of course, but it is an intriguing possibility.