Multi-Man Publishing

About the Publisher

Still Active?:  Yes (1994-1995, as third party publisher; 1996-1998, as official ASL content providers for Avalon Hill; 1998-present, as official publishers of ASL under license with Hasbro)

Country of Origin:  United States

In 1977, wargaming company Avalon Hill (the company that invented modern wargaming in 1958 with the game Tactics) released a game called Squad Leader, designed by veteran game designer John Hill.  Although there had been popular tactical war games before (notably Panzerblitz), Squad Leader found an immediate audience, primarily because it captured the "flavor" of World War II fighting so well.  Avalon Hill released three expansions over the next six years (Cross of Iron, Crescendo of Doom, and GI: Anvil of Victory).  Each added new rules and nationalities to the system.  However, there was no rhyme or reason to the expansion, and by GI, the Squad Leader system had rules that were scattered (badly) over four separate rulebooks, two different types of unit counters, and a welter of conflicting interpretations.  It was more of a ratty looking patchwork quilt than a smooth, playable system.

Avalon Hill's brain trust finally decided that Squad Leader had to be scrapped and the system reworked from scratch.  Thus Advanced Squad Leader was born in 1986, designed from the beginning as a universal World War II era squad level fighting system.  ASL was a tremendous design success--one of the best wargames ever designed.  Over the next few years, AH released more new core modules, as well as other modules designed to expand the system.  Some of these--such as "Deluxe ASL," designed to be compatible with miniatures, failed, but others, especially the "Historical ASL" module Red Barricades, succeeded fabulously.

The departure from AH of several principles, notably Bob MacNamara and Charlie Kibler, ended up in a "dark ages" for ASL in the mid-1990s.  Official ASL products were few, and those that were released (such as the 1995 ASL Annual and Kampfgruppe Peiper I), were flawed.  AH seemed to have little interest in ASL.  Many fans feared for its future, a fear that generated a great activity among non-official (or "third party") producers of ASL compatible material.  However, instead of dropping ASL, AH reached out to a nearby amateur producer, Multi-Man Publishing, and tasked them with developing ASL material for AH.  This revived "official" ASL with more ASL Annuals (1996 and 1997), HASLs (Pegasus Bridge), and modules (Doomed Battalions).

Unfortunately, AH could not survive its own financial incompetence.  In 1998, its parent company, Monarch Services (which owned AH because of a prior AH bankruptcy) decided to sell the intellectual property of the money-losing company to toy company giant Hasbro.  Again, many fans wondered how ASL could survive this drastic development.  In the end, MMP was able to act as a "white knight," in part because it had been joined by professional baseball player Curt Schilling, who was also an ASL fan.  With Schilling, MMP was able to obtain an exclusive license to produce ASL products.

Thus the "MMP era" was born.  MMP began reprinting older ASL modules as well as continuing to release new ones.  At the same time, MMP tried to keep alive other old AH game series (such as the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series) and expanded further by absorbing The Gamers, a well-liked wargaming company run by Dean Essig.

The results were mixed.  These growing pains, coupled with the fact that MMP was still a "part time" business (its principles all had other jobs), meant that MMP was not easily able to satisfy the demands of either its ASL audience or its Gamers audience for new products.   Its production bottleneck at times was severe.

On the other hand, the quality of the products that MMP did release was generally high.  Certainly, their production values were typically much higher than those of any third-party producer (of particular note, MMP's ASL Journal stands head and shoulders above all other ASL magazines and newsletters in production values, content, and editing quality).

Moreover, MMP demonstrated a laudable commitment to keep ASL products in print and to attract new blood to ASL (primarily through the release of ASL Starter Kits).  These facts have enabled MMP to retain their position at the pinnacle of the ASL world.