Tri Tac Games - Misplaced Pages

Game publisher

Tri Tac Games
Industry	Role-playing game publisher
Headquarters	Pontiac, Michigan, USA
Key people	Richard Tucholka
Website	Official website

Tri Tac Games is a publisher of role-playing games based in Pontiac, Michigan. The company is built primarily on the work of Richard Tucholka, its founder and president.

Company history

Tri Tac Games was founded in 1978 as "Tacky Tack Games". Tri Tac is one of several small companies that rode the wave of interest in RPGs beginning in the 1970s with TSR's Dungeons & Dragons.

The company's first product was the humorous microgame Geriatric Wars. It was followed by: Fringeworthy, the first interdimensional travel RPG; Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic, a late 20th Century Horror RPG; and FTL:2448, a space RPG. All three were created by Tucholka. The company name was changed to "Tri Tac Games" to reflect what the company saw as the more serious nature of its new products.

Currently the company sells a number of games and books, including a book of cartoons and a cookbook called Damn Strange Recipe Collection. It has reincorporated as Tri Tac Games, LLC, and its owner is Richard Tucholka's widow, Melody Natcher.

In 1994 the Tri Tac offices were raided by the FBI, because of alleged similarities between promotional ID badges distributed by Tri Tac personnel and certain official U.S. government ID badges. After the raid, the federal prosecutor assigned to the case elected not to press charges. A year later the FBI visited the Tri Tac booth at Gen Con 95 to see if Tri Tac was distributing similar ID badges. Tri Tac was no longer selling the badges but they did display one of the controversial badges. It was sealed in a frame with a newspaper report about the raid. The FBI determined Tri Tac presented no threat to national security and left without comment.

After Tucholka's passing in 2017, his wife, Melody Natcher, took over as the owner of Tri Tac Games and has released several of the games, some with complete make overs such as Hard Wired Hinterland, and others just spelling and grammar corrections.