1. Marvel Super Heroes (1984)
I tell this story a lot. As a kid in the 80s, the first RPG I became aware of was Dungeons & Dragons. The same as pretty much everyone else, in any decade. For a long time, though, I didn’t have anyone to play D&D with, and, more importantly, I wasn’t entirely sure how to play. It remained an object of fascination until a few years later, when I got the four-volume The Gamer’s Handbook Of The Marvel Universe as a gift. Those books translate every interesting character in Marvel comics circa 1988 into a collection of attributes that let you play them in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It took a while before I got a hold of the rules for the game, but just having the numbers, and access to the comic books they were derived from, made something click in my brain. I got to wondering, thanks to endless prompts from comic cover headlines, just who would win in a fight. Any fight. All the fights. And why was it always Wolverine?
At its most basic, Marvel Super Heroes is an elaborate answer to that question. It played out for me across endless battles with friends that summer, in which we re-enacted favorite comic storylines, or just pitted weirdo characters against each other in the name of science. A few years back, out of sheer nostalgia, some friends and I dusted the game off to try again. It held up OK, though supervillains wound up accidentally murdered at a higher rate than I recall from back in the day. We only played once; as a game, we’d had our fill. But I still flip through those handbooks every June, when school’s almost out and the promise of summer opens up once again.
