How i got Started with BattleTech (Story time)

 So, While we’re gearing up for the holidays, I’d like to share with all of you how i got started with this great game that we all love (and mostly tolerate the rest of the player base for).  For this grand, epic tale, we must hop into the wayback machine and visit long forgotten shores and accursed halls.  To begin this grand tale, we venture to the distant land of…1988, and Saturday morning cartoons. But Zardoz, i can hear you now, BattleTech didn’t have a cartoon on the airwaves in 1988.  You are correct, dear reader, but Robotech was on the air…

So, that’s right, my start with RPGs and BattleTech all actually stem back to my jackass older brother (I love him, honest), and his obsession with Robotech.  I remember waking up extra early to watch episodes with him before school, and the first Role playing game i ever read (not that i grasped everything, i was 6 after all) was the Robotech RPG by Palladium. I got pretty good at identifying giant robots and the broad strokes of giant bad guys, transforming robots (I also love Transformers) and the simplest part of the overall story.  

Now, fast forward a year, and the aforementioned Brother brings home a board game that has an Excalibur on the front and he starts playing this game on his 386 home computer (we were living the dream in rural Kansas with our high tech dreams).  Something about Crescent hawks?  Now, being the little brother, i naturally piss and moan at my parents about this game and low and behold my birthday comes up that year and i get one of these bad boys.

BattleTech 2nd edition starter set

So, without anything in the world but this box, i tear into it, devouring the rules as they sit and losing track of everything else.  Now, the aforementioned jackass older brother has 4 of the Tech Readouts, and i’m behind the curve, so a little arms race blossoms in our house until the lug goes to college and i have acquired the BattleTech Compendium and the 3050 TRO, (look, as a pre teen, omnimechs blew my freaking mind).  

And let me tell, i was fucking terrible at this game.  I didn’t understand the rules very well, didn’t understand the setting, or really know much of what i was doing.  That didn’t stop me from having the time of my life.  Fast Forward into high school and some of my other friends started playing and this is where i like to think that i really buckled down on the rules (and cried about the single season of the Cartoon) and got okay at the game.  

I played on and off throughout my teen years and when i went to college, it became one of my touch stones in gaming (the other two have sadly fallen away through the years as I’ve either not played them in too long or have outgrown them).  College was a renaissance for me in BattleTech and we had a lot of fun.  I even theorized a psych experiment i could do with battleTech for my Psych degree as a Grad student.  (Someday I’ll actually do that).  We played a lot of BattleTech, I wrote a lot of BattleTech stuff, and we had a lot of fun.  

The next big thing was a little company called Harebrained Schemes that kickstarted a BattleTech PC game, and i was hooked.  I backed like day 2, and played the shit out of it.  (I honestly have an itch to play again).  That got me caught up with Hyper RPG and eventually Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, who in conjunction with HBS, did a Live streamed BattleTech inspired RPG.  (Rules were pretty close, things got a little spicy on the RPG side).  I had a great deal of fun in that era, (and that’s about the time this blog started).  

I discovered i enjoyed writing about BattleTech, (Someday I’ll get something into Shrapnel).  So, i started writing articles and putting up ideas that i think are interesting to share with the rest of you.  For a while, i was writing 5 articles a week and burning out my candle at all ends, that pace couldn’t hold and eventually, i got sick.  (Like severely sick, like 6 more hours you’d have been beyond care, sick).  I spent six months of the year of the pandemic in a hospital, barely able to move and learning how to walk again.  

So, let’s roll time forward a little and i don’t get to play as often as i like, but i have been pleased by the resurgence of BattleTech since the CI Kickstarter.  (Still need to get my art for my Galaxy Commander pledge).  Then the mercs Kickstarter rolled in, and we all saw how well i backed that.  I understand that the delivery is still rolling out through the world, and i have high hopes that everything finished up soon and EVERYBODY has their cool stuff.  

So, now I’m looking forward to a happy release schedule of new stuff in the coming year, with the launch of Aces, more fiction, and whatever other wild surprises the fine folks at Catalyst Game Labs.  It’s going to be a fun year looking forward into 2025, and before we leave, I’ll answer one of the questions i get asked by folks a lot.

“Hey, Zardoz, why don’t you do videos?”  

“Well, Citizen, there’s a couple of decent reasons for that, most of them are hardware related.  I need to upgrade my Camera, (as its the same one i’ve been using for nearly a decade) and get a second one for close up shots of the things i’m doing.  Second, i need to upgrade my backdrop for taking pictures.  Third, i need a more enclosed space for making videos.  Fourth, I have both Cats and Dogs, and the Cats routinely steal small objects, like Battllemechs.  Fifth, there are a LOT of really awesome Batteltech Video producers out there, and not so many of us writing articles.  It feetls like my own little tiny niche.  One of the things i have promised for the new year is to get better at Instagram and creating Video Shorts.  Those might get some traction for the new year.”  

Also, next year might see me try and get some updated graphics for the channel and if the universe decides it doesn’t completely hate me, some merch so you can support the Blog.  IF the heavens align, we may start doing more interesting content while we’re at it.  

Anyway, that’s it for today’s story, but if you made it to the end of this, how did you get started with BattleTech?  What was your inroad? Let me know!  

Honorable Mention for the BattleTech TCG that Wizards of the Coast made for a few years before it killed anything that was remotely a potential threat to Magic: The Gathering. I loved that game, and it was glorious fun.

Honorable mention also to Mechwarrior: Dark Age, which came at the wrong time for me to really get into, as i was a fairly broke college kid.