By Mike Pondsmith / R.Talsorian Games

Anime Mecha The TTRPG

purple-haired pilots of gigantic humanoid robots fighting for humanity and living...complicated romances.

Aug/Sept 1994

Here (still late) is a look at issue 14 of Mecha Press magazine.  The first issue of Mecha Press that I picked up sometime in late ’94 or early '95.

This issue sees the continuation of three articles from the previous issue: the synopsis of Armored Trooper VOTOMS; capsule reviews of models from the Victory Gundam series; and “The Basics of Mecha Modeling”.  And there are write-ups of a couple of other mecha series: Zeorymer and Detonator Orgun.

You may have noticed the words “House Special” on the cover of this issue of Mecha Press, this is because much of the issue is devoted to games being (or planned to be) produced by Dream Pod 9.  Jovian Chronicles, Heavy Gear and Moonlight Mechanix* are written up in this issue in much the same way that mecha anime series are normally, with profiles of their fictional worlds and the mecha found in them.  Some space is also devoted to Heavy Gear Fighter, the card game which was actually the first Heavy Gear game published.

Also of note is the “Engineering Outlook” section, which features an article on both real-world and fictional cockpit control systems.  Interest in the details of real-world military hardware was, of course, quite common in mecha fandom in the ‘90s.

As I noted above, this was a special issue for me, being my introduction to Mecha Press. It also gave me my first look at Armored Trooper VOTOMS, which would become one of my favourite mecha anime series, and it also threw me into the worlds of Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles, game settings that I would come to know and love in the future.