GuildOfBlades.com
Title
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
Description
The Guild of Blades Publishing Group is a Detroit area based adventure games and entertainment publishing company. The Guild's first publication was the Guild of Blades club magazine released in 1994 and the company was officially founded two years later in 1996. The Guild of Blades began as a small part time venture between Ryan Johnson and Bruce Dowrie. Its first product, released in 1996 was the Grunt Fantasy Miniature Battles miniatures game, which proved a solid success for a "small press" company. In 1998 the Guild expanded its game lines with the introduction of the Dark Realms Role Playing Game and its first Empires of History Game, The War to End All Wars.
1999 was a tremendous growth year for the Guild of Blades, with the release of many new Empires of History Games, expansion of the Worlds of Heroes & Tyrants RPG line, introduction of the Heroes Forever RPG and much more. Europe 1483 was first published and the 1483 Online game was initially launched as a play-by-email game. 1999 was also a pivitol year in the nature of the hobby game market and the consistency of its distribution systems. Due to the changes in its primary market, the Guild of Blades began a slow transition to internalize most aspects of its manufacturing process, which has helped to catapult the company to new hieghts in the years since.
With 10 years and 140+ titles produced, the Guild of Blades remains a strong and vibrant small publishing firm. Today the company consists of a staff of 4 plus it utilizes a number of freelance workers for creative contributions such as commissioned artwork, editing, game design, and sales representatives. The company is still primarily owned by its founders, yet has brought on several additional investors over the years. The Guild of Blades remains focussed on the production of creative intellectual properties with strong ties to game production for several platforms, including traditional print games, games in digital formats such as PDFs, interactive computer games and online games. Additionally the company operates a small print shop that is primarily used to support the production of its own products and its strategic partners. 2005 will see the official launch of the long anticipated Guild of Blades Fiction Group.
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