I heard the premise behind the All-Batman game
several years ago, and began writing my version in the summer of 2006. Since the
original idea was not mine, I decided to do some research to find out who had
come up with the idea, so that I could give credit where credit was due. The
trail of the All-Batman has proven to be a much more tangled web than I’d have
thought possible.
Late at night after the day’s games have run
at Intercon, people often talk about interesting games they have played, heard
about, or hope to write some day. It was at one such discussion that I first
heard Uncle Don Ross describe the premise of the All-Batman game. He admitted he
had never played it, and wasn’t sure if it ever had been run or was a
recurring myth or rumor. The idea stuck in my mind, as it combined humorous
potential with some intriguing twists.
Several years later, at a party Uncle Don
asked me if I’d be interested in writing and running a small, short larp for
his “Intercon GZ” event (to be run at Intercon G in March of 2007). The idea
of the All-Batman game floated up, and we briefly talked about it and a few
other ideas. I gave him the usual “we’ll see” answer, and he made
encouraging noises and went away. The next morning, as I lay in bed half-awake,
bits and pieces started floating together, and by the time I got up it had all
but written itself in the back of my mind. Over the next few weeks all I had to
do was to tweak it and write it out, with the assistance of my wife Jennifer and
daughter Valerie. (The working title of the game then was “The Kelley Version
of the All-Batman Game”.)
Once I was certain the game was viable and
would be written, I contacted Uncle Don to coordinate with the GZ event. During
one of these discussions he mentioned that there had actually been another
All-Batman game. I worked the appropriate Google search phrases, and so found http://www.unseelie.org/donross-batman/index.html,
the some site of “The almost all
Batman tm game based on an idea that may have originated with Don Ross”,
written by Lee Rosenberg, Sharon Tripp, and Scott David Gray.
Until this point I had no evidence that an
All-Batman game had ever actually been written. I had also forgotten the nature
of the game Uncle Don had described years ago; the game outline presented on
their website is very different from the game we’ve written. I suspect they
got the idea from Uncle Don as well (through probably at a different party). I
was glad that I was following a “tradition” of All-Batman games—though as
yet I had no idea how far back the tradition actually stretches.
I had previously contacted Mike Young about
basing the combat mechanics of this game on his MENKS system, which is available
on the web at http://www.interactivitiesink.com/mechanics/index.html.
(He claims MENKS was not inspired by the Batman TV show, but I have my doubts.)
Now he, too, had played the All-Batman before, but when I mentioned the newly
discovered website to him, he replied that no, that was not the version he had
played in. It took him no little effort, but eventually he found an email
address, and introduced me to Diane Lawson-Miller.
Diane was a renowned larp-writer in the early
90’s, with such fabled games as “A Fist Full of Wu” and the “Luvboat”
games to her credit. Her version was run at an old Intercon, and she describes
the genesis of like so:
In short, they wrote one of, if not The, first
guerilla games. They thought about running it again at another con, but backed
down over concerns about licensing.
The one thing she did not recall was which
Intercon this was written and run at. I asked Mike if he recalled; he wasn’t
sure, but as it was a larp history subject he had CC’d Gordon Olmstead-Dean on
that email, and Gordon identified it as having run at Intercon VII (back in
March 1992). Hooked on history, I determined to look it up in the Metagame
archive. [“Metagame” was “The Journal of the Interactive Literature
Foundation”, a quarterly magazine put out by the old ILF. Besides articles on
larping, it also contained critiques and analysis of recently run games and
conventions. Look for them at http://metagame.larpaweb.net/,
it’s a great source of both history and general larping know-how.] Anyway, I
figured Intercon VII would be discussed in Volume 5 Number 2 (March 1992)… but
only the cover of that magazine had been scanned, presumably because whoever
scanned them did not have access to that issue. I don’t know if any mention of
the design or running of the game is in there.
But the story doesn’t end here. While
clicking around, making sure that I hadn’t made a mistake, I downloaded the
earliest Metagame available online (Volume 4 Number 4, November 1991), and as
will happen got caught up reading about larps. One article reviewed a game run
by Diane and Paul Dwyer named “Concatination”. This was a game about people
“writing” larps and getting them accepted by the larping community.
(Apparently, back then politics got in the way of writing larps. Can you
imagine?) The article listed the “games” they came up with including such
gems as “Beachhouse in December”, “
…and “The All-Batman Game”.
So the idea of an All-Batman game had surfaced
several
months before Diane wrote her version. But who came up with it originally? Were
they thinking of the same scenario as Diane, or did they have something else in
mind? Did the idea first come up during the course of Concatination, or had
“All-Batman” come up even before then? I may never know for sure, but Gordon
suggested the following:
The "All Batman
Game" was a takeoff on a similar silly concept. The "All Vampire
Game." It seemed back then that any game had a vampire in it, so
somebody came up with this amusing idea of an "all vampire game" where
EVERYONE was a vampire.
This gives you some historical context. That was FUNNY then. The idea of a
game where EVERYONE was a vampire. Just silly...
As for an all-vampire game, I’ll pass.
Who’d want to play in a game where everyone’s a vampire?