Our history, sad as it is.

Inferno Games was founded in 1991 by Eric M. Aldrich I, Michael Fryer, Steve Seacord and Michael Russell. The original reason for starting up a game company was to publish and sell a game called Starship Command. Once Starship Command was published, (which turned out to be quite a nightmare, and did not make much money) the company kind of faded away. Seacord and Fryer left, thinking the company had no real future or hope. For the next year or so Inferno Games did not do much, but there was a real interest had in Starship Command. About a year later a big fan of Starship Command, Nick Cortinas, offered to fund a new and better printing of Starship Command. This really kick-started Inferno Games. Once a better edition of Starship Command was out, things started to move along for Inferno Games. A few months after the release of Starship Command, Fryer and Seacord rejoined the company along with Kristin Ahlgren, Nick Cortinas, Shane Liebling, Eric Nyquest and Tracy Langston (who did much of the cover art).

The company had many ideas for new games and was well into developing them. However, the first thing to do was to put out the expansion to Starship Command. In development were other games such as Galactic Empires, Maze Course, Piracy, Red Scare and Necromancer. Many of these games got to the final stages of development, but as with many other game companies there was one thing that ran out -- cash -- so many of them never saw the light of day (or the print shop). The publishing of Starship Command II sucked up all the company cash, and did not catch on as well as we had hoped.

For the next 8 years of so Inferno Games has been pretty much in Limbo. All of us have always had other full time jobs to support ourselves, so Inferno Games sometimes -- many times -- had to take a back seat to pay our own bills. But, to our surprise, we learned that there are still people out there that want our games. So, we put up this web site as a cheap way to get to you. Hope you enjoy it.

Post Mortem, er, Script, March 2006 by Eric M. Aldrich I

The fact that this web site exists at all is due to some odd circumstances, but to keep it short, it just happened that Michael Russell ("Mike") and myself by somewhat divergent paths ended up living in the same area again after 10 years, 400 miles north from where we started in Long Beach, California.

Of course, right after we put this web site up Mike moved from the SF Bay Area to the Washington DC area, and shortly thereafter I got married (Mike was my Best Man -- we're still speaking, honest!), so that was the end of work on this web site.

We're not gone, but I can't see anyone having the time nor the financial solvency to restart Inferno Games any time soon, so it will have to remain in its undead state for the time being. Pity, but there's not much that can be done about it.

We're glad that so many people are interested in the games we did publish. We had a lot more in the pipeline, that's for sure. For those curious, Maze Course actually got finished. Galactic Empires was all but done, but would have been a $50 game back in the mid 1990s (think Axis & Allies in space). Piracy and Starship Command 3 reached advanced playtest stages but never got to the point we thought they were good enough -- Starship Command 3 was so bad we scrapped the whole concept. Red Scare and Megalomania while great concepts never got firm rules. Necromancer was supposedly finished but I never played it -- Mike Fryer had a working copy but apparently he was never happy with it. Exploration received at least one playtest, but was in need of a major re-write.

Yes, we did have a computer version of Starship Command that was in the works, produced by Logicware. But they went belly up in the midst of working on it. It reached a semi playable stage, in fact. Given that I program for a living, I might try to do my own version one day.

Hopefully, I'll have the time to clean this place up a little. As some of you might have discovered, I've started plowing through the 2+ years of accumulated email....