| Scott Bizar | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Game publisher |
Scott B. Bizar is the founder of Fantasy Games Unlimited, a game publisher which contracts writers and artists that work primarily on role-playing games.
Career
Scott Bizar founded his game company Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) after being dissatisfied with games from TSR such as Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and Warriors of Mars (1974). The first two products from the company were the man-to-man miniatures combat game system Gladiators (1975) by Hugh McGowan, and Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age (1975), the first wargame to take place in the world of Conan, which was co-designed by Lin Carter who was roommates with Bizar. Bizar met Edward E. Simbalist and Wilf K. Backhaus at Gen Con IX in 1976, and he was interested in their role-playing game Chevalier they had brought with them but decided not to sell to TSR; Bizar helped get their game published over the next year as Chivalry & Sorcery, the first role-playing game from FGU. Bizar wanted a new science-fiction roleplaying game to be one of the flagships for FGU by the late 1970s, and contracted with Simbalist and Phil McGregor to develop this game, which was published in 1980 as Space Opera. During the process, Bizar never met Simbalist or McGregor, or A. Mark Ratner, and the project was completed over more than two years entirely by correspondence. Bizar began getting the rights to product lines in the early 1980s from publishers that had gone out of business, which brought Bushido and Aftermath! to FGU in 1981. FGU purchased the rights to Swordbearer from its publisher Heritage USA, and also bought the old stock of the game because Bizar considered this a necessary part of a deal like that; FGU published their own edition in 1985. Bizar was looking into new locations for FGU in 1987 that could lower his warehousing costs, and decided to move to Arizona where his friend Rick Loomis and his company Flying Buffalo were located. Bizar initially rented office and warehouse space in Tempe, but since FGU was having difficulties Bizar worked as a car salesman and then a school teacher. His parents were running Waterloo game stores in New York, and Bizar wanted to continue with the hobbyist industry so he used some of their stock to open a Waterloo game store in Gilbert, Arizona; the offices and warehouse for FGU were soon moved to his store. Bizar opened a second store in Phoenix, Arizona, but an employee at the Gilbert store used his name to get credit cards and bank accounts, offering the Waterloo stores as collateral; this massive fraud cost Bizar money as did the lawsuits that came from it, and Bizar ultimately closed the Phoenix store in 1996. Bizar had been reprinting some older books from FGU, while also preparing new books to be published, but he stopped publishing because of the fraud.
Even though all of the games published by FGU were owned by their authors and FGU had ceased publishing by the late 1980s, Bizar claimed that the products all continued to remain in print since he was selling the backstock through his store, so he claimed to have ownership over all of the trademarks to the games and that they did not revert to their authors, even if the other game rights did revert. Gold Rush Games licensed Bushido from its authors and intended to publish a third edition in 1996, but Bizar hurried the game into print again and advised Gold Rush Games that he would bring a lawsuit against them if they released their new edition. Bizar continued to keep most of the FGU properties off the market into the early 2000s by threatening lawsuits, although he has been willing to sell rights to the games if the purchaser will also accept the cost of all backstock for the game. Bizar started a website in 2000 to sell the extensive existing backstock of FGU products, and continued to produce reproductions of previously published FGU material. Bizar published some new books as well, including a second edition of Aftermath! Technology! (2008) from Dinosaur Games and the supplements Aftermath! Magic! (2010) and the Aftermath! Survival Guide (2008) by David Harmer that were not previously published; Bizar likewise released some original PDFs in 2010 for Villains & Vigilantes and made them available for free on his website. Jeff Dee and Jack Herman contended that their contract was with the company FGU Inc. rather than with Bizar personally, so therefore Bizar no longer publishing rights for V&V; Dee and Herman sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bizar in June 2010, informing him that he would not be allowed to sell games that they owned, and then Dee and Herman released Villains & Vigilantes (2010) version 2.1 using their newly created Monkey House Games brand. Bizar continued to refuse a license through early 2011 to have the right to keep publishing material Villains & Vigilantes and refused the arbitration with Dee and Herman that they stated their contract required. Bizar published some Giant volumes which collected older V&V publications along with new releases including Escape from the Micro-Universe (2011) for V&V and The Gauntlet (2011) for Aftermath! .
References
- ^ Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7.
- http://www.space-opera.net/GB/interviews/scott.htm Interview with Scott Bizar