Gonzo: It's Always Been There

The 2004 Cover

Since it's April 1st, let's talk about "gonzo" gaming. I was about to start this post with "I was gonzo before..." then I remembered Thundarr. So when I thought I was being clever by mixing up time travel from a favorite movie of mine, 2002's The Time Machine, into a Tunnels & Trolls scenario, I was actually nodding to the movie's producer's nod to Jack Kirby's artistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world without a nuclear doomsday. We were so over nuclear war back in the Aughts as well as the 80s. Truer fans of gonzo scoff at Kirby's hack of Gamma World forgetting that his comic book Kamandi was a hack of Planet of the Apes a whole year before the first release of that game. Then there all the Cold War gonzo flix, many actually partially funded by the Depart of Defense, from the 50s to the early seventies like Santa Claus Versus the Martians or Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster to name two. Let's just admit that modern gonzo as we know it on our view screens and soft-cover publications has been around since at least Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Indeed, looking at my own writing, while I have always been  "Non-Tolkien" I have not been that gonzo at all. As a kid that grew up in Big 70s America and Split-Down-the-Middle German, compartmentalization has influenced my own fantasy explorations. I have been "sticking to niche genres," to quote a friend from Detroit, exploration. I suppose that I have never been the fan of the goofy language of most "gonzo" RPG works today. Long before RPG Pundit exclaimed his dislike of made up languages with the apostrophe as a major feature, I was never impressed by many of them because, as Tarnowski points out, they are not really languages. Despite the hard work of Klingon LARPers, Tolkien scholars, and, sad to include, a couple of residents of Kekistan, most RPG language is either pun-based or stupidly not usable. Both kinds fall flat on being any fun to figure because the authors' refusal to do anything besides trying to sound kewl. Still, to think how innocent I am for thinking mixing genres back in Tweens was gonzo. While my scribblings are becoming more and more gonzo in my own mind, I doubt that I am keeping up.

In gaming terms, gonzo has moved beyond Rifts. Some would say these days that that game is just a genre of RPGs. It is the Mixed Genre so to speak and there isn't anything gonzo about it. Sure the GM can have Thor show up in a scenario with Mexican wrestlers fighting vampires in Robotech suits, but that's just RPG. And whoever says that is right.