THE EVOLUTION OF CRIMSON SKIES

Some ideas are just too good to give up on. Take Corsairs, a multiplayer pulp adventure title designed in the Nineties for networked gaming pods in entertainment centres around the world. Co-creator Jordan Weisman’s thought was to add to the attraction of his centres by complementing their existing titles BattleTech and Red Planet with a third offering, and he remembers tying it into an evolving narrative. “As we added more story and more different worlds to the Virtual World Centers we needed an underlying fiction,” Jordan considers. “So we created the Virtual Geographic League, and this Thirties-explorer aesthetic. We were thinking about a third title, so Mitch Gitelman and I started a Thirties aviation combat game called Corsairs, since so many of the League’s characters were famous aviators – like Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes.”

But as thrilling as the idea of multiplayer dogfights in bespoke gaming cockpits seemed, the declining income of Jordan’s centres caused him to put on the back burner – until he needed a concept for a board game, which he subsequently called . “I realised it had been over a decade since I had created a new world, and I decided that maybe that was what I needed to do,” Jordan recollects. “So I went back to the core of , and I built a world around it. But since I wasn’t able to do at the Virtual World Centers I did it as a board game at night with a couple of guys from work – Dave McCoy and Vic Bonilla most prominently.”