One Small Step Games to Bring Back Ares Magazine

Those of us with a few grey hairs recall the days when multiple companies produced house organ type magazines (TSR had The Dragon, Chaosium published Different Worlds, Avalon Hill got it started with The General) and many of the titles – especially if they were bimonthly – would include a full game within the pages. One of those magazines was Ares which began under SPI but continued on for a few issues after TSR purchased the foundering wargame company. Ares was focused on fantasy and SF gaming and I certainly remember quite well a couple games which appeared in its pages, especially Return of The Stainless Steel Rat!

Now we’ve got word One Small Step Games is working to bring Ares back to the public, as a bimonthy, which will also include a complete game in each issue.

Here’s the announcement:

Ares Magazine?  Ares was a science-fiction and fantasy-oriented game magazine published in the early 1980s by a SPI, a popular game publisher at the time. It included game, movie, and book reviews, science and science-fiction articles, game mods, and a complete game in every issue.

After a dozen issues, SPI was acquired by TSR, the then-publisher of  Dungeons and Dragons. TSR squeezed out a half dozen more Ares issues, then folded Ares into Dragon magazine. This wasn’t a good fit for Dragon magazine, and couldn’t do the promise of Ares justice. Ultimately, TSR lost interest in maintaining Ares as a Dragon fixture, and set Ares aside. The fog of memory consumed it.

From the Ashes

One Small Step has many amazing game designs in the works. BattleChrome — Zone 17. Star Fury. The Queen’s Guard.  We felt that a magazine could do wonders to support these products, but OSS would find it difficult to provide good value for consumers with a simple house organ.

But Ares wouldn’t be a simple house organ…

Could we resurrect it?  Who owns it, if anyone? Does it have active trade value?

So we began making inquiries.

Our inquiries have now evolved into declaration. We are trying to bring Ares back, with more pages, higher quality content, and better production values.

The vision we hold is for an all-new Ares magazine, published bi-monthly, with 80 pages of fiction, 20 pages of OSS nonsense, and a complete game in every issue.  

If you remember the old magazine fondly, the new edition will retain the portion of the original formula that makes sense, but provide more content and higher quality. If you don’t remember the original edition . . . well, you still get all of the delicious nutrition, but without any of the nostalgia.

There are still a hundred things that can go awry with our plan, but if we can stay on course, you should see our Kickstarter program before the end of the year. 

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...

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