How the Cold War influenced RPGs
It turns out there was a reason people were making games about mutation.
From Godzilla to Tom Lehrer’s song We’ll All Go Together When We Go, there’s a lot of iconic media about the anxiety of nuclear annihilation and American-Russian tensions during the Cold War. But what about RPGs? Malcolm Craig is a Senior Lecturer at the Liverpool John Moores University who is researching tabletop RPGs and their relationship to those big themes. Rascal sat down with Craig to talk about the first edition of Twilight 2000, masculinity, preppers, and how a novel about Hitler coming to the USA and becoming a science fiction artist might’ve inspired Gamma World.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Thomas Manuel: I know that you're an academic and a game designer, but maybe you can give me more context.
Malcolm Craig: Throughout my career, I've been interested in how the nuclear age has affected politics, diplomacy, culture, society, all that kind of thing. My doctorate, which I finished in 2014, was actually in the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the relationship between the United States, the UK, and Pakistan over nuclear weapons in the 1970s—but I grew very bored with that. I'm no longer interested in nuclear proliferation.
It was COVID that did it. I woke up one morning and went, ‘I don't like my research topic anymore.’ I was down in our cellar. I've got my old boxes of games down there and I opened them up and on top was first edition Twilight 2000. Historians have written loads about the history of nuclear influenced films, novels, TV programs. No one's written about role playing games and particularly how they dealt with nuclear war, like post apocalypse stuff. I was like, maybe this is my new project, and that's how it all began.
And at the same time, I had got back into game design after a long period away. In the early to mid late 2000s, I was quite involved, went to Gen Con all the time, wrote and published games like a|state, Cold City/Hot War. Hot War is post-apocalyptic. Cold City is Cold War influenced. I've come back to that with Handiwork Games in Scotland, doing a new edition of a|State and then working on second editions of Cold City and Hot War. So yeah, full time academic, has-been games designer.
