| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
It began in 1966 as a wargaming fanzine published by Chris Wagner (then a staff sergeant with the US Air Force in Japan), at first in Japan, then moving to the United States with Wagner. It was intended as independent competition with the Avalon Hill house magazine The General.
Although popular with wargaming fans, the magazine ran into financial trouble in 1969, and Jim Dunnigan agreed to take it over, founding Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) to publish S&T.
Dunnigan made some radical changes. Starting with issue 20, each issue contained a complete new wargame. Not only did this represent a break from the cautious AH policy of publishing one or two games per year (for fear of new games cannibalizing sales of old ones, an odd concern since both their new and old games sold for about the same price), but the need for new game designs spurred research into many of the lesser-known corners of military history.
Another innovation of the magazine was its feedback system, in which readers would answer various multiple-choice questions on a return card, whose data would then be entered into a Burroughs minicomputerMinicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems ( mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems ( microcomputers or for analysis. Thus S&T always had good information about which games readers were looking for.
In addition to the games, the magazine featured many insightful articles on military history, many of them notable for applying modern quantitative analysis to battles that had traditionally been described in a narrative "heroic" style.
However, SPI mismanagement in the late 1970sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Years: 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 Events and trends resulted in its assets being bought by TSR in 1982Events January January 6 William Bonin is convicted of being the "freeway killer". January 8 AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, disappears in the Sahara du, including S&T, which at that point had 30,000 subscribers. After several years (issues 91 to 111), TSR sold S&T to 3W , who published issues 112 to 139 before selling it to Decision Games, which was still publishing it in 20032003 is a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar), and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Summary Perhaps the defining global event of the year 2003 was the Invasion of Iraq launched by the U.
Back issues of Strategy & Tactics are today valued by wargame collectors, and some of them have seen steadily rising prices in the wargame market.