30 Years At The Helm Of GURPS

The exact date on which I was engaged as the GURPS Line Editor is lost in time. I usually say, "Sometime in July 1995." But the earliest official correspondence I can find is dated July 5, which is the date I mark as my work anniversary. That means I've been the main editor of and rules nerd behind GURPS for 30 years this summer.

As a nerd, I feel compelled to point out that's over half of my entire life, 3/4 of my adult life, and slightly more than 3/4 of the run of GURPS to date, encompassing GURPS Third Edition Revised, GURPS Fourth Edition, the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, and much more. Hundreds of manuscripts and dozens of Pyramid articles have crossed my desk.

I suspect know (thanks, Irene!) that there are gamers who've been alive for less time than I've been working on GURPS. Which makes me officially Old. At any rate, things have certainly changed since I walked up the virtual hill both ways every day.

Back then, we called it "telecommuting" more often than "remote work." I had a second landline hooked up for the dedicated dial-up connection that required. This wasn't exactly fast (first 9,600 bit/s and then all the way up to 56 kbit/s, until ADSL showed up), so for anything big, we used paper – I had so many huge printouts arrive on my doorstep, and marked up a lot of GURPS manuscripts with a pen.

Talking meant either an expensive long-distance phone call or getting on a plane from Montréal to Austin – or more often, to Gen Con. Everyday communication was by email, with all the misunderstandings that come with a text-only medium. Video chats weren't practical, but real-time text chats (like the Pyramid MOO) were a life-saver, because I could clarify the unclear right away.

The line, the connection, the hardware, the heavy packages, the long-distance calls, the travel . . . it all cost a significant fraction of what I was being paid at the time. It's a wonder we did it! It felt like the future at the time, but from a 2025 perspective, it seems so low-tech and quaint.

So, the next time you play GURPS, take a moment to marvel at how we casually shoot hundreds of pages around in seconds; create products with authors, editors, playtesters, production staff, etc. in different cities; fix errata and update PDFs with a few clicks; and talk about it all with voice and images on any number of Discord servers, VTTs, and so on. Also take a moment to think about how, despite the occasional glitch (blame me!), this old guy managed to arrange something resembling internal consistency for so many years and so many titles.

-- Sean Punch