Steve Jackson

Steve Jackson (born 1953) is an American game designer whose creations include the role-playing game GURPS and the card game Munchkin.

Education Steve Jackson was born in 1953. Jackson is a 1974 graduate of Rice University, where he was a resident of Sid Richardson College. Jackson briefly attended the University of Texas School of Law, but left to start a game design career. Jackson got his first design for the company published as Ogre (1977), followed by G.E.V. (1978), which were both set in a futuristic universe that Jackson created.

Jackson realized that Melee could be expanded into a complete fantasy role-playing game, and started working on The Fantasy Trip before Melee was even published. The Fantasy Trip was initially scheduled for release in February 1978, but the design and development required more work than Jackson had anticipated and the game was not released until March 1980.

On May 11, 2012, Steve Jackson's Kickstarter funding project for the 6th Edition of his Ogre game became the highest grossing boardgame project at Kickstarter, with 5,512 backers pledging a total of $923,680. The success of the Ogre Designer's Edition project prompted the launch of a second successful project - running from Nov 29, 2019, through Jan 6, 2020 - to help re-launch the popular Car Wars franchise as well.

The two "Steve Jacksons" Jackson is often mistaken for 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 acknowledge that this was a different 'Steve Jackson'.

1990 Secret Service incident and legal actions

The United States Secret Service raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games on March 1, 1990, based on suspicion of illegal hacker activity by game designer Loyd Blankenship, and seized (among other materials and media) his manuscript for GURPS Cyberpunk; when Jackson went to Secret Service headquarters the next day to ask them to return his book drafts, the Secret Service agents told him that they believed GURPS Cyberpunk was a "handbook for computer crime", despite his protestations that it was just a game. Through the newly created civil-rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, SJG filed a lawsuit against the government, which went to trial in early 1993 as Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.

Personal interests

Jackson is an avid collector of Lego (especially pirate-themed) sets. He has written a miniatures game that uses Pirate sets, Evil Stevie's Pirate Game, and has run it at several conventions. He has been an active member of several Lego users groups, including the Texas LEGO Users Group and Texas Brick Railroad (which also reflects his liking for model trains).

Honors Jackson has received over a dozen Origins Awards. In 1982, he became the youngest game designer to be inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame. His role-playing game GURPS and card game Munchkin were named to the Origins Hall of Fame for 1999 and 2012 respectively. He was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured as the king of clubs in Flying Buffalo's 2011 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.