The Questionable Art of BattleTechnology Magazine

BattleTechnology was a magazine dedicated to tabletop strategy game BattleTech. It was published irregularly between 1987 and 1995 by Pacific Rim publishing with approval of FASA. It was considered an official magazine and source of rules and scenarios. The magazine was written as if it were a magazine existing within the BattleTech world, but with meta information for rules. As you might expect, this was nearly always horrible, but it probably seemed cool at the time to someone.

Zack: Aren't you a little young to have enjoyed this in its heyday?

Steve: Man, you have no idea. Copies of this would sit on the shelf of a hobby shop for ten years. No joke. Ten years. You could probably walk into some hobby shop in Idaho or something and they would have a 1990 issue of BattleTechnology sitting next to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles After the Bomb and a Torg source book.

Zack: I just remember hobby shops smelling like glue, balsa wood, and unwashed t-shirts. And rows of awesome model kits with cool pictures on the box and you would get them home and glue them together and they would look like somebody crushed a party cup and put Air Force decals on it.

Steve: Well, see that's the thing, like hobby shops would often have to cover all their bases. So you would get that shelf with BattleTechnology and Torg and it would also be sharing space with a watercolor fairy painting book and maybe like a Lego book or something, all jumbled up on the shelf.

Zack: So did you read this magazine?

Steve: No way, dude.

Zack: Yeah. I think I knew a guy who had a couple copies. The sort of dude who carried dice everywhere and kept them in a tiger striped dice bag.

Steve: You mean a super rad as heck dude ready to get his game on.

Zack: That's it.