[Legendary Games] Nostalgia Time!


Product Discussion

Scarab Sages RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games

Our mascot Wormy was trying to hibernate, dreaming sweet dreams of his wriggling youth, but he kept being awakened by some kind of "STAR WARS" stacked on top of the whole Christmas season. Seeing all the excitement made Wormy wonder...

What is your favorite childhood nostalgia moment in the sci-fi or fantasy realm?

Many people might hearken back to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or at least to 1977), but there are any number of books, movies, comics, and games (RPGs or otherwise) that might carry your personal favorite wide-eyed warm fuzzy, whether they happened under the Christmas tree, around a friend's kitchen table, or at the local theater.

Share your favorite, and revel in a lingering bit of joy you can carry with you all your days! Viva la fantasy!


I mean, in all of sci-fi, it's hard to top Star Wars for me personally. But as for what really really stuck around for me were the old Phantasy Star games for the Sega Genesis / Master System.

The idea of this omnipotent computer system that ran everything turning out to be corrupt was awesome for little me. Phantasy Star 2 had a lot of things going on that I missed when I was a kid, especially when it came to how bleak the "utopia" world was.

Even more fun, and is actually the basis for a campaign that I'm running right now, is what happens when that AI system that ran everything in the solar system crashes and dies, which is the intro plot of Phantasy Star 4. It causes a huge systemic collapse, and all the advanced sci-fi tech of Phantasy Star 2 that is super prevalent throughout the entire game, suddenly becomes almost non-existent for the decent chunk of the game, and you end up being the people to re-discover a lot that ancient tech.

So yeah, Phantasy Star 4 is one of those definitive games for me. I still have my Sega Genesis and that game, and they both still work just fine too :D

Scarab Sages RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games

That's a pretty cool-sounding game. I used to play Genesis with my then-brother-in-law, but mostly just side-scrollers like Sonic-type games. He did have some kind of Star Wars fighting game, which I was mostly terrible at (like I am all fighting games - the whole button/stick combos needed to do any of the cool stuff with characters are apparently beyond my manual dexterity to achieve).

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

The Secret of Monkey Island, was the first game I stayed up all night playing and still brings more nostalgia feels in me than Star Wars. As a result, I LOVE all the Pirates of the Carribean movies.


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For me it was two things. One was seeing Godzilla on my local TV as a kid. I mean, this was amazing! You could see GIANT MONSTERS battling it out with each other and leveling whole cities! This wasn't some small toy like King Kong or camera tricks, this was 'real'! I started loving monsters then and I still do.

The other was after my brother took me to see the 1981 Conan. I loved it, and said I wished there was more... So he took me to a bookstore and showed me the rack of Ballantine Conans with those Frazetta covers. And all these other names beside them: Anderson, Norton, De Camp, Adams, Tolkien, Lewis, more and more. I never looked back.


I hope this is an okay place to ask this, but it seems like Legendary Games has slowed down quite a bit from your usual rapid pace of releases. Is this real-life concerns taking precedence or has something gone wrong? Or am I just not noticing the new releases?

Sovereign Court

I would presume that they are wrapped up with fulfilling two kickstarters, both equally impressive in scope and theme. I'm sure that you will see a deluge of content in the coming weeks.

Scarab Sages RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games

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Some of the apparent slowdown is that we are not currently producing a weekly mini-product, so there's a little less in the constant flow like that... though we do have a new Mythic Monday product we are cooking up right now. I don't know if it will be every week, but pretty frequent.

Looking back, though, we released 6 new products in October, 6 more in November, and 7 in December, so I think our pace has been pretty consistent. And we just released our first product of 2016, too!

Fear not, the LG-train continues to roll!


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I'm primarily a late 80s early 90s child so I have some of the obvious basics.

Ninja Turtles. Specifically the first live action movie and the Archie comics.

Goosebumps.

The Death Gate Cycle books. These were my second introduction with high fantasy with the first being Fighting Fantasy.

Thundercats. Which is fairly influencial on my views on the division between fantasy and science fiction because the likes of it and He-Man made that like super grey.

Power Rangers.


...Let me tell you a story.

It was the winter of 1980. I was ten years old, and we were in the middle of a cross-country move from Colorado to central-coast California. We stopped in Los Angeles to spend the night at the house of a friend of my parents'. No kids, so I was left to try to amuse myself while they talked politics and so forth. TV time, let's see what's airing in this strange new land?

Now, I was a precocious (and fast) reader, having digested such things as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee when I was six or seven. I liked television, but there was only rarely anything I considered quality on. Probably the best thing I'd ever seen to that point was the 1970s Tarzan cartoon -- you know, the only visual adaptation ever to be reasonably faithful to the books? Some of Paul Dini's early work? But I digress.

So, flipping through new channels, I stumbled upon something different.

It was a science fiction cartoon in progress. An alien fleet was laying siege to future Earth, and winning handily. Their city-flagship had just destroyed the Moon simply to make a point. The world government was surrendering. Only one Earth starship was still fighting, a weird but awesome thing that looked like an old naval battleship, and most of her crew had evacuated while the young captain, critically injured, was nonetheless boarding the ship of an old enemy allied to the new invaders. (He was bandaged and bleeding. In a cartoon.) The hero, a man with the Star Wars-esque name of Derek Wildstar, confronted his old foe, staring him down at gunpoint... only to collapse from his injuries, as a young lady evidently his romantic interest rushed to his side.

And the enemy, in a moment of nobility and regret, gave them the secret to the invaders' weakness and let them go.

Which is about when I had to be put to bed.

I was enraptured. I was stunned. I had never seen anything this good on television, animated or live. It fried my ten-year-old mind.

AND I HAD NO IDEA WHAT IT WAS CALLED! Couldn't find it in the TV guide, even. Series? Movie? What WAS it? In the days before the internet, these things were hard for a little kid to track down!

And then we left and finished our journey... and the whatever-it-was was not airing on any local channel. Frustration built.

Three long years later, Star Blazers FINALLY came to our neck of the woods, and my life as an anime fan truly began. :D

Scarab Sages RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games

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Evil Midnight Lurker wrote:

...Let me tell you a story.

It was the winter of 1980. I was ten years old, and we were in the middle of a cross-country move from Colorado to central-coast California. We stopped in Los Angeles to spend the night at the house of a friend of my parents'. No kids, so I was left to try to amuse myself while they talked politics and so forth. TV time, let's see what's airing in this strange new land?

Now, I was a precocious (and fast) reader, having digested such things as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee when I was six or seven. I liked television, but there was only rarely anything I considered quality on. Probably the best thing I'd ever seen to that point was the 1970s Tarzan cartoon -- you know, the only visual adaptation ever to be reasonably faithful to the books? Some of Paul Dini's early work? But I digress.

So, flipping through new channels, I stumbled upon something different.

It was a science fiction cartoon in progress. An alien fleet was laying siege to future Earth, and winning handily. Their city-flagship had just destroyed the Moon simply to make a point. The world government was surrendering. Only one Earth starship was still fighting, a weird but awesome thing that looked like an old naval battleship, and most of her crew had evacuated while the young captain, critically injured, was nonetheless boarding the ship of an old enemy allied to the new invaders. (He was bandaged and bleeding. In a cartoon.) The hero, a man with the Star Wars-esque name of Derek Wildstar, confronted his old foe, staring him down at gunpoint... only to collapse from his injuries, as a young lady evidently his romantic interest rushed to his side.

And the enemy, in a moment of nobility and regret, gave them the secret to the invaders' weakness and let them go.

Which is about when I had to be put to bed.

I was enraptured. I was stunned. I had never seen anything this good on television, animated or live. It fried my ten-year-old mind.

AND I HAD NO IDEA WHAT IT WAS CALLED! Couldn't...

"Ourrrrrrr Starrrrr Blazerrrrrrrs!!!"


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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Memories...

The Time of the Dark by Barbara Hambly, the first ever fantasy novel I read, which totally hooked me on the genre. It was a gift from my godmother, which I just devoured. As a result I've always had a huge soft-spot for fantasy world/Earth adventures, and is the reason my home campaign has travelled to 21st century Earth at least twice.

Star Wars, which I saw at least 30 times before I saw Empire Strikes back, because it was simply the most amazing thing ever. And I can clearly remember going to see Return of the Jedi at the cinema when it first came out.

My first ever roleplaying experience, with my best friend's older brother GMing for us. I played Chemlak, a thief (red box D&D) who collected swords (I mean literally collected: by 8th level he had the sword he started with, a silver sword, a +2 sword, and a sword +1, +3 vs dragons, all of which he carried with him). I still have his character sheet, somewhere.

The Exchange

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Jason Nelson wrote:
What is your favorite childhood nostalgia moment in the sci-fi or fantasy realm?

I remember reading the original Elric of Melniboné saga while simultaneously listening to an Ozzy Osbourne album (I think it was "No rest for the wicked"). At one point of the story, the page I read in combination with the song I heard created such an intense athmosphere that I had to reread the page several times while listening to the song over and over again.

A more funny memory has to do with a school exam I once had to write. Topic was the relationship between society and the individual. At that time, I was reading Karl Marx and Perry Rhodan ( an ongoing german sci-fi serial with around 2800 issues at this time, which starts with the first moon-landing, where a damaged extraterrestrial ship is found and then basically tells the story of humanity from this event on), so I based my essay heavily on those two sources. I was totally sure that my teacher would find out what I had done and was equally surprised when I got graded with an 'A' (something which didn't happen too often at that time ^^). So if any kids should read this: Reading cheap sci-fi is actually good for your grades (contrary to what your parents may tell you).


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Okay, having grown up with Meat Loaf and Uriah Heep blaring from the speakers of our cars, I developed a taste for such a music at a pretty early age. The perfect reading material for me at this time, the material that still makes me warm and fuzzy inside my cold, black reviewer's soul? Not the superhero-comics, though I read those as well - to me, my heroes are and always will be Conan, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Elric - the latter particularly due to my exceedingly bad health as a child.

Scifi-wise, as a German, I obviously devoured Perry Rhodan - the whole collection my parents had, which amounted to about 1800 issues. Yeah...

From there on, the books and games began and the rest is history...but those grim heroes with their tales of Pyrrhic victories always resonated most with me.


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Lots of good memories -- how about Silverhawks, though? (Not as good as Voltron or Thundercats or MASK, but a little more sci-fi-y than those.)

The Exchange

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Endzeitgeist wrote:
Not the superhero-comics, though I read those as well - to me, my heroes are and always will be Conan, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Elric

Me too. I was surprised to learn much later (when Eric Mona published the Planet stories line), that some of the stories I had read in my youth in german hadn't been available for an english-speaking audience for a long time. So before I even learned about Conan or the Lord of the Rings, I already had read stories by Moorcock, Robert Silverberg,C.L. Moore and C.L. Cherryh.

Though what started it all must have been Grimms' Fairy Tales and the Nibelungenlied. I still can tell my kids most of those tales without even looking in a book. That's what a mother reading them to you over and over again does.

Sovereign Court

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I was heavily influenced Grimm's Fairy Tales, but I got them through this show.

Similarly, David the Gnome was a big influence.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Endzeitgeist wrote:

Okay, having grown up with Meat Loaf and Uriah Heep blaring from the speakers of our cars, I developed a taste for such a music at a pretty early age. The perfect reading material for me at this time, the material that still makes me warm and fuzzy inside my cold, black reviewer's soul? Not the superhero-comics, though I read those as well - to me, my heroes are and always will be Conan, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Elric - the latter particularly due to my exceedingly bad health as a child.

From there on, the books and games began and the rest is history...but those grim heroes with their tales of Pyrrhic victories always resonated most with me.

I always knew we had similar sensibilities, but every time these little details emerge, I smile to myself, as they are so similar to my own. It is no wonder that I have been in harmony with your reviews much more often than not. Funny how life works.


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I have to agree with End. When I was a kid growing up and you could still find comics for $.35 in the corner store, my favorites were the horror, fantasy, and war titles. You could have Batman and Spider-Man, I wanted the Thomas/Buscema Conan, the Colan Dracula, the Haunted Tan, and all those cheap and gloriously awful DC horror comics and Marvel monster reprints.

And does anyone else from the States remember the old local horror shows that were often the first introduction to Universal, Hammer, and Toho? Like 'Shock Theater with Dr. Shock' in SE Pennsylvania?


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Chemlak wrote:

Memories...

The Time of the Dark by Barbara Hambly, the first ever fantasy novel I read, which totally hooked me on the genre. It was a gift from my godmother, which I just devoured. As a result I've always had a huge soft-spot for fantasy world/Earth adventures, and is the reason my home campaign has travelled to 21st century Earth at least twice.

Wow, been a while since I heard that book mentioned. I still have that trilogy sitting on my shelf. Good one.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Elorebaen wrote:
Chemlak wrote:

Memories...

The Time of the Dark by Barbara Hambly, the first ever fantasy novel I read, which totally hooked me on the genre. It was a gift from my godmother, which I just devoured. As a result I've always had a huge soft-spot for fantasy world/Earth adventures, and is the reason my home campaign has travelled to 21st century Earth at least twice.

Wow, been a while since I heard that book mentioned. I still have that trilogy sitting on my shelf. Good one.

Did you know that there's a fourth one? Can't remember the title right now, and it's (IMO) a bit odd because it is a standalone novel set in Darwath with Gil, Rudy and Ingold but otherwise seems only vaguely related to the original trilogy. Still, it's awesome because it does provide a further adventure for the main cast.

(And yes, I have them on my bookshelf, too.)


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Let's see. For me, it was 1986...or rather, the year 2005. The Decepticons had taken over the Autobots' home planet of Cybertron....

Yes, my oldest sci-fi/fantasy memory was the G1 Transformers, at least one I carry nostalgia for. That movie came out the summer after my dad died, and for my 11th birthday I asked my brother if I could see it. I'd never been in a movie theatre before. But that, that I wanted to see. So in August, my brother tells me we're going for a drive. He takes me to a small second-run theater and buys the ticket, drops me off, makes sure I have a soda and popcorn, and in I go. I still remember crying as Optimus died, almost as badly as a couple months before when Dad died. I mean, I loved Dad, but Optimus was a role model to me, and he went down fighting his worst enemy. Not a good year, that, but I still tear up everytime I watch the animated movie.

In the written form, it was a bit over a year later. I was in 7th grade when one of my few friends gave me some old books he'd bought. They were rather old copies of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (by which I mean they were older than me). I read through them and I was hooked. Here was literature I could get behind, unlike that crud in English class. I still own them, though the Fellowship lost its back cover and I split the spine on Return of the King. If I reread them, I read from the Omnibus I got for Christmas from that same brother a few years ago. I even rewatch the movies (Jackson's movies, that is) every year at Christmas time, because for a few years that was our tradition, my brother's and mine: we'd go see them in the theater. He like Star Wars, Star Trek a bit less, but he grew to like those movies too.

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