Hasbro has revealed plans for its entrance into the hobby board-gaming market in 1999 after its purchase of Avalon Hill in late October. The company plans on producing print and computer versions of titles together. Diplomacy will be the first title to be produced by Hasbro and is due to retailers sometime in the third quarter of 1999. Support for the Advanced Squad Leader series of games, reissues of other out-of-print Avalon Hill titles, and titles that were still under development when Hasbro purchased their licenses are also under way. Hasbro has hired two Avalon Hill veterans, Bill Levay as a producer and Don Greenwood for consulting purposes, to help jump-start production. The Avalon Hill licenses, which not only include Diplomacy and ASL but other games such as the RPG RuneQuest, give Hasbro a lot of material to look at and expand with. "At this time we want to develop Avalon Hill... to be the leader of strategy games," said Phil Jamison, Hasbro senior brand manager. "Hasbro is not out there to go and destroy what were some phenomenal strategy games." "You go back through and you look at which ones have the greatest value," said Gale Steiner, Hasbro spokeswoman. "You develop the ones who have the greatest value first, but then you continue to look at the other intellectual properties.... There's all kinds of things that can be considered an intellectual property. It takes time to go through those and see what's usable.... We're going to pump new life into properties that have been around for a long time but really haven't seen a lot of energy. We're going to put that energy behind them. I think that's great news for Avalon Hill fans." Back to Tornado Alert #34 Table of Contents Back to Tornado Alert List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Tornado Alert! This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com