GAMING NEWS: Happy Birthday Primarch & Net-Epic!

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Hi Everyone,

Well, Net-Epic has lasted another year and so has Peter Ramos, the father of the Net-Epic project!

*** What's Net-Epic you ask? ***

Well, Net-Epic is one of the truly lasting counter-culture movements in the gaming community...

Epic itself was a small-scale (6mm or roughly 1/285 scale) miniatures game that was created some time around 1989 with the first edition called Adeptus Titanicus I, which featured combat between "Titans" or giant robots in the nascent world of Citadel / GW's 40k universe. A few years later, Space Marine 1rst Edition came out, which added vehicles and infantry to the giant robot mix. And a few years after that, Space Marine or Epic Space Marine 2nd Edition came out, sometime in the early 1990s, which made a huge impression in the gaming community. Expansions came out, new miniatures were sculpted... it was a happy time.

And then the unhappy times came to players of what are now known as the Specialist Games line... GW (Games Workshop, the megalithic UK company that has dominated the miniatures hobby) decided to cancel almost all of their popular side games to concentrate on their main line: the 28mm sci-fi 40k game and the 28mm fantasy game, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Epic was tossed unceremoniously to the side. It was almost recreated in an abortive game called Epic-40k in the late 1990s, but the company quickly rejected the game and stopped supporting it in something like six months of its initial debut.

The result was that the Epic (6mm sci-fi) community was abandoned... We kept playing, but the company had left us behind for other pastures. Enter the Net-Epic project! Peter "Primarch" Ramos organized a team of fans to continue work on the Epic game utilizing the very popular Space Marine 2nd Edition game engine as the basis of a fan-created Epic game. And thus, Net-Epic was born!...And what a success it has been! It's been "I-don't-know-how-many-years-later" and even the official Epic folks over at GW / Specialist Games have recognized the Net-Epic project.

As a side note, the name of one of the original Net-Epic web sites as well as the Net-Epic fanzine was called the "EPIcentre Incoming" and is still around, to my knowledge, although now it's simply called "Incoming!" and covers games other than Epic.

At any rate, Happy birthday to Peter Ramos and the rest of the Net-Epic gang!

I know it's belated, but better late than never as the saying goes. I spotted Ramos Circle some time ago and decided to share the photo with Peter and the Net-Epic gang as sort of an impromptu birthday gift...

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For more information about Net-Epic, please check out these sites:

Newest Net-Epic site:
http://netepic.org/EPICentre/

Slightly older Net-Epic site:
http://epic40k.com/index.htm

Net-Epic Discussion Group at Yahoo E-groups:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/netepic/

Specialist Games, home of latest official Epic game, Epic-Armageddon:
http://www.specialist-games.com/

And my friend Stephane's site (...in France) with an article about Net-Epic:
http://www.stephane.info/show.php?code=epic

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Have a great weekend!

Shabbat Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

P.S.
The center of all Epic gaming can be found here:
http://www.epic40k.co.uk/