Fantasy Productions

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Fantasy Productions (often abbreviated FanPro) is pair of game and publishing companies from Germany and the USA, respectively, who held the BattleTech license for a time. Owned and managed by essentially the same people, they are generally perceived as a single entity but legally they are in fact two distinct firms.

The German firm exists since 1983. The short-lived US firm was created in 2001 and ceased operations in 2006.

FanPro Germany

Inception

The Fantasy Productions GmbH, originally based in Düsseldorf and later in Erkrath, Germany, was founded as a Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts (GbR), a Partnership Agreement under the German Civil Code, in 1983 by Werner Fuchs, Ulrich Kiesow and Hans Joachim Alpers to produce gaming miniatures. Its roots are said to date back to the "Fantastic Shop" in Düsseldorf, established in 1977 as an importer of boardgames and books from Britain and the United States and merged into the FanPro GbR when it was transformed into a GmbH (Limited Liability Company) in 1988.[1]

Besides producing miniatures, FanPro created the massively popular and successful German fantasy role-playing game Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was published in cooperation with Schmidt Spiele (Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit GmbH) and Droemer Knaur publishing house because the young FanPro enterprise was too small at the time to handle the project by themselves. Kiesow's editorial work for Das Schwarze Auge was organized at FanPro, and the firm evolved into a major German publisher of role playing games and science-fiction/fantasy literature. Following the bankruptcy of Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit GmbH in 1997, FanPro published Das Schwarze Auge in-house.

BattleTech & Shadowrun licensee

Under license from FASA Corporation, FanPro produced the German-language edition of BattleTech from 1988 onwards and also the German edition of Shadowrun, FASA's other highly successful game.

FanPro did not merely translate the English material, however. They created some original content such as additional scenarios for their translations of various scenario packs, and created new products by combining content from several original sources into omnibus products like Mächte der Inneren Sphäre, which is essentially a compilation of the five original House Books, or the Atlas der Inneren Sphäre which compiles astronomical and planetary data from a wide range of original sources, adding newly drawn maps based on that information. FanPro also produced at least one German-only sourcebook (Ronin!) with completely original content (which was in turn used as the basis for the writeup on the Ronin Wars in Brush Wars, a subsequent publication).

In a 2003 interview, FanPro CEO Werner Fuchs said they were a smallish firm with just about 20 employees and that they were barely profitable (he literally claimed FanPro at the time was a "non-profit enterprise").[2] As of 2004, FanPro was reported to have 12 employees, plus a large number of freelance authors.

BattleTech & Shadowrun producer

When FASA unexpectedly withdrew from the market in 2001, the intellectual properties (IPs) to BattleTech and Shadowrun (among others) were transferred to WizKids. FanPro created a sister company in the United States (FanPro LLC, see below) to license these IPs from WizKids, thus becoming the producer for the original (English) version of both games as well.

Cutting back

In 2007, FanPro's BattleTech and Shadowrun licenses ran out and were not renewed. WizKids licensed the BattleTech and Shadowrun rights to InMediaRes instead, who proceeded to market the games through their Catalyst Game Labs imprint. FanPro also sold the rights to Das Schwarze Auge to Ulisses Spiele.

In this way, the company reduced itself to its book publishing division, formerly their Phoenix imprint. FanPro thus ceased to be a producer of boardgame and RPG material, but continued its novel series for Das Schwarze Auge and also series of German BattleTech novels, many of which were original work and not available in English (see Classic BattleTech novels). This led to a disagreement with Catalyst over whether or not FanPro had retained the right to publish new German-language BattleTech and Shadowrun novels (which Catalyst denied). FanPro ceased further publications for BattleTech and Shadowrun in 2008. (Ulisses Spiele), the new German licensee, seamlessly continued the series in 2011.

With Werner Fuchs still at the helm, FanPro now operates as Fantasy Productions Verlags- und Medienvertriebsgesellschaft mbH as a publishing house and RPG retailer. As of 2012, the online FanPro Shop has been merged into the online shop of the 17und8 GbR run by Werner Fuchs and Charif Ben Lasfar and FanPro does not maintain a separate web presence anymore.

FanPro US

In 2001, the owners of FanPro set up a sister company, Fantasy Productions LLC (also often referred to as FanPro US), in Chicago, although most of its employees worked remotely. FanPro US initially licensed the rights to produce English-language Shadowrun books in early 2001 from WizKids, who had obtained the licensing rights from FASA, and by the summer of 2001 FanPro LLC had also signed an agreement to publish what was now known as the Classic BattleTech product line in English. The staff of authors that went to work for FanPro was largely identical to the people who had previously worked for FASA, so the transition was seamless.

All English material published by FanPro (US) also bears the WizKids logo and is copyrighted to WizKids (instead of FanPro).

From 2001 to 2005, FanPro US released over a dozen original Shadowrun titles and reprinted core titles that FASA had originally released. They continued to release new Classic BattleTech books in English, and in 2006 released Total Warfare, the first in a series of revised full-color books for Classic BattleTech. FanPro Germany continued to translate these books and publish them in Germany, along with German-only Shadowrun books. Conversely, FanPro US published The Dark Eye, a translated English edition of Das Schwarze Auge.

FanPro LLC allegedly[3] lost a significant amount of money when their distributor Fast Forward Entertainment (FFE), through whom all their income was funneled, collapsed. FFE is said to have grown too rapidly and hired employees with FanPro's money while creating what was described as an "accounting mess" through poor bookkeeping that made it impossible to find out just how much of FanPro's money they had actually spent. This, combined with business decisions by the FanPro owners that benefitted FanPro Germany to the detriment of FanPro US, spelled doom for FanPro US.

The FanPro US staff made an attempt to buy the company out, but the owners refused. Subsequently, the staff all quit and then went to work for Catalyst Game Labs who had acquired the licenses. Catalyst even operates from the same business adress that FanPro LLC had previously had.

References

  1. Spielarchiv.de entry (German)
  2. "FanPro-Interna" report from RatCon 2003 on Vinsalts DSA-Ticker (German)
  3. According to a forum post by Rob Boyle

External links


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