WHEN AND WHY WEST END GAMES ENTERED BANKRUPTCY

West End Games has been and for many gamers still is a much loved gaming company, mainly due to its wonderful Star Wars RPG (this seem confirmed by GenCon 2023 data about tickets sold for RPG sessions...) and other popular games such as TORG, Ghostbusters, Junta, Paranoia and the D6 System in general. WEG was born in 1974 as a wargame company, founded by Daniel Scott Palter that used money from his family's firm (Bucci Imports, importing costly Bruno Magli Italian shoes and parent company of WEG) for this project. Ijn 1984 WEG diversified in the then burgeoning field of role playing games - albeit non abandong completely the military simulations field - publishing the very first edition of Paranoia. But the true masterstroke was acquiring the gaming license for Star Wars, beating companies such as TSR and FASA, with an advance of $ 100.000 (again, supplied by Bucci Imports) and releasing the core book in 1987. Today it may seems awfully cheap to get such a license for 'just' $ 100.000, but at the time Star Wars was considered a 'dormant' intellectual property and mass market interest was very low. Years passed and many more games were released: some were financially successful, some not (Tank Girl, anyone?), but the company seemed quite stable and solid albeit sometimes being (very) late in paying freelancers and contributors (this happened regularly in the gaming industry even in majior companies...). Then July, 2nd arrived... 

Peter Schweighofer, editor of the great Star Wars Adventure Journal, remembers:""Consider yourselves unemployed," was how the company's owner initially broke the news to the puzzled editors, graphic designers, and sales personnel unexpectedly summoned to his office". These were stunning news considering that WEG had declared sales of $ 2.000.000 in 1997 and Star Wars, experiencing a rebirth of mass market interest after the release of Timothy Zahn's novels, was going strong again. What happened? Bucci Imports had been forced in bankruptcy and WEG followed the path of its parent company - the exact financial links between Bucci Imports and WEG were not clear (Scott Palter declared in a Pyramid magazine 1999 interview: "We had about 11 companies that owned pieces of each other. Trust me, you don't want to know the corporate structure"), but it seems likely that after helping various times Scott Palter's company (for example in acquiring the Star Wars license) was WEG's turn to help Bucci... at no avail ("There were multiple, very large dollar transactions between the shoe company and the game company which we disclosed to the court". So, that fatal meeting happened. It seems, (it was written in Casus Belli magazine 115, August/September 1998) that Scott Palter offered his employees to stay with no salary (an offer that was flatly refused) and decided on July, 6th to liquidate WEG's products offering them to the public with a discount of 65% on the cover price. The money should have been used to pay the most pressing debts - most surely, Lucasfilm royalties were extremely high in the list. Then he entered WEG in Chapter 11 opening 'negotiations' to 'save' the Star Wars, Hercules & Xena and DC Heroes licenses. 

After the bankruptcy WEG, called WEG/Creative Design Group, was described in the same Pyramid interview as "a bankrupt corporation liquidating inventory to pay off its debts under court supervision". Scott Palter entered in a 'partnership' with a French game publisher, Yeti, part of comic publisher Humanoids, that had some English language edition of its books (for example the Metabarons saga): this second company was called WEG/Yeti ("WEG / Yeti is a brand new corporation which will produce new fun stuff" was written in a press release quoted by Pyramid: "Separate assets, separate check books, separate bank accounts"). The company, produced some more games (a new DC Universe RPG, an original Metabarons RPG, a card game called Zoom) but sales were never satisfying and Humanoids in 2002 liquidated the 'new' WEG. The 'old' WEG kept selling its remaining assets to try to pay creditors and amazingly sold Paranoia to the 'new' WEG. Having already experienced a lot of problems due to the bankruptcy, Costikyan and Goldberg took Palter to court over ownership of the game and in 2000, "the courts ruled that the license should revert to Costikyan and Goldberg" writes Wikipedia. It's not known when the 'old' WEG ceased to exist - it seems very unlikely it managed to pay all of its debts - but its founder died in 2020 after starting another game company, Fiery Sword Productions, in 2001 and running a column on the US game market in the French game professionals magazine Jeux Pro.