About The (Former)DM
To save having
to give out the same information to everyone that I start conversing with
and also to satisfy people's curiosity, here is a little information about
myself, who used to slave away each day keeping Bohavia on the rails in conjunction
with the players.
As is the case
with the majority of Bohavia's players and long term lurkers, I'm no youngster,
having achieved the veritable age of 37. I originally discovered D&D in
the late-Seventies while I was at school, moving on to AD&D as soon as
it came out. After a few years of happy gaming, all of the other players moved
away from my home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England and so I stopped playing
for the best part of twenty years. I rediscovered AD&D when visiting a
Toy Exhibition in London in 1995, where I discovered that AD&D had not
died out during the previous two decades, but had, in fact, grown to become
a huge hobby compared to where it was when I left it. As a result of this
fact, and also the Magic: The Gathering phenomenon, my business partner and
I opened the first dedicated hobbygaming store in the Czech Republic. After
going through a Magic: The Gathering phase, which quickly passed, I moved
on to Warhammer Fantasy Battles and then back to AD&D.
May
1997 was a life-changing month, as it was the first time that our
office went on-line and I had web and e-mail access for the first
time. It immediately became my favorite toy and has been ever since.
While surfing, I discovered PBeM's and soon started off playing in a
couple of games. Finding them both to move too slowly for my tastes,
I started off an abortive attempt at GMing a game of my own using a
now dead system called Waste World. As the system was so new at the
time, I had difficulty finding good players and so folded the game
after a couple of months. Learning a lot of lessons from my mistakes,
I set up Bohavia, determined to get it right this time!
Incredible as it might seem to some people, I did
have a life before there was Bohavia. Since leaving school at the age of 16,
I've been through several jobs ranging from a bank clerk through the manager
of a rock band and disc-jockey. I eventually landed up as Marketing Director
for the UK's leading video distributor of the time, where I worked on such
titles as Terminator 2, Dances With Wolves and Total Recall. The company then
decided to set up shop in Eastern Europe and so I volunteered for the job
of running it. I spent the next 18 months traveling between London and Warsaw,
Prague, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest setting up video and theatrical
distribution companies in five countries. Eventually, I decided to go the
whole hog and leave the UK to move out to Prague.
In the burgeoning
capitalism that appeared after the revolution, it seemed as if everyone was
making money apart from my friend and myself and so we decided to have a go
at making a little for ourselves. We started off by importing a few computer
games, the first time that anyone had tried it seriously in the Czech Republic.
It succeeded way beyond our expectations and, before we knew it (literally
- accounting has never been our strong point!) we were turning over $3 million.
Unfortunately, this was too big for us and so we sold the business to our
competitors in order to concentrate upon our other business activities.
Shortly after starting the distribution business,
we also started a computer games magazine, Score,
which grew to become the biggest selling games magazine in the country. Over
the next two years, our company, Art Consulting, grew to where it had an annual
turnover of $3 million through publishing four different titles.
Everything
in the world was great until the Fall of 2000 when I discovered that the guy
who was supposedly running the company while I was spending nearly all of
my time running Bohavia was busy lining his own pockets at the expense of
the company - a very common Czech trait as I now know. Unfortunately, by the
time we found out about it, the damage was irreparable and so we ended up
giving the dregs of the company away for a song. Shame.
It
was at this time that I realized that I had to give up running Bohavia, putting
the newly launched Bohavia:
The Next Generation in the more than capable hands of Jason, who has been
doing a fine job ever since.
Since
then, I've been working 16 hours a day to try and come up with new and interesting
ways of making a living, although the projects I have been working on are
still yet to see the light of day (as everything takes three times as long
to accomplish when you are reliant upon Czechs to do anything). Hopefully
things will start moving in late october 2001. Watch this space.
As well as trying to forward my secret projects,
I also represent the games distributors, Virgin
Interactive Entertainment and Interplay
across Central & Eastern Europe and also write very occasional articles
on the computer games industry in Eastern Europe.
On
the rare occasions that I'm not either working or doing Bohavia
stuff, I'm usually entertaining my Czech wife, watching junk TV or
movies or listening to alternative music.
That's quite enough about me for now.
But in case you're wondering what I look like, it's this...
In the unlikely
event that you want to know more, then please e-mail me.
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