Steve Jackson

Steve Jackson (born ~1953) is an American game designer. After working for many years at Metagaming Concepts designing such games as Ogre and The Fantasy Trip, he left to found Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games) in the early 1980s. He designed many of the games published by SJ Games, such as Car Wars, GURPS, Munchkin and many others.

The company won a case against the US Secret Service after a raid of their offices in 1990 (see: Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service). The Electronic Frontier Foundation was created at that time to address this and similar cases.

Jackson is a 1974 graduate of Rice University where he was a resident of Baker College before moving to Sid Richardson College when it opened in 1971.

He is often mistaken for a different Steve Jackson, a British gamebook and video game writer who co-founded Games Workshop. The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that while the UK Jackson was co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, the US Jackson also wrote three books in this series (Scorpion Swamp, Demons of the Deep, and Robot Commando), and the books did not even acknowledge that this was a different Steve Jackson.

Jackson is also an avid collector of Pirates themed Lego sets. He has written a miniatures game that uses Pirate sets, Evil Stevie's Pirate Game, and has run it at several conventions.

Recently Jackson has exhibited his elaborate Chaos Machine at several science fiction or wargaming conventions, including the 2006 Worldcon.

External links

• Steve Jackson's official website
• Details on Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret Service
• Brief Steve Jackson Biography
• Pictures of Evil Stevie's Pirate Game on Brickshelf
• Interview by Tom Vasel
• Interview on Off The Hook just after the secret service case
• Pen & Paper listing for Steve Jackson (US)