Despite being April 1st, this is true 
We are 10 today.
Here’s a press release I’m sending to Flagship magazine:
April 1st 1994 we decided to go into business, buying a £100 license in
Saturnalia to run our first game Exile. In 1996 we picked up the UK Legends
license, in 1998 we formed Middle-earth PBM Games to run the UK Middle-earth
license. In 2000 we took over the US and Australian Middle-earth license, in
2003 we took over both US Legends licenses, the Australian license and also
acquired the game itself. Now, in 2004 we are negotiating with the owners of
Middle-earth to acquire that game.
We’ve had our fair share of difficult games. Our in-house designed ‘Endgame’
broke new ground in text description but failed to set the PBM world alight.
Iron and Steam was sufficiently poorly coded that as the game got larger,
turn processing got exponentially longer. We gave up once it started taking
longer than 24 hours to run a turn!
We bought Battle of the Planets, only to find that the rights to the game
had already been sold to a different PBM company. And of course we were then
contacted by lawyers representing the TV program…
And we’ve lost count of the number of times someone has been in touch to say
‘Do you want to buy my PBM game? I’ve drawn the map and written a 14 page
history, if you can just code it and market it, we’ll be rich!’. Whilst we
can’t necessarily follow through on these player’s dreams, their enthusiasm
is one of the pleasures of working in PBM.
We’re one of the top five PBM firms worldwide. Why? Maybe because we set out
with a certain philosophy. We decided that one of the main reasons that PBMs
went bad was the terrible rates of pay the GMs got. Without even a small
profit, wannabe GMs would burn out, decide to put on a suit and work in the
City.
Rather than try and undercut the competition, we set Exile prices a clear
pound more expensive than our rivals. We believed that players would be
willing to pay a little more to get a professional service.
Since then we think we may have run the most service orientated PBM firm
around and we certainly intend to try and remain that way for the next 10
years.
The other thing is that we love games! We gather every week for intense
sessions, which often turn into game theory discussions and house rule
designing. We play the games we run in order to really understand what its
like to be a player. We eat, drink and sleep games, and hopefully it shows.
A huge thanks to every Harlequin player who has played, come to pubmeets,
opined, won or lost a Harlequin game.
Thanks guys
Clint