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How old is Viper?
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In a discussion today, a friend of mine and I got to comparing the ages of Viper and Cobra (the GI Joe version, not the DC version). So, we decided to look it up.
Well, while we could find that 'Cobra Command' dates to 1982, we could find no info on how old Viper was. The earliest reference we could find was 1984, but it's possible Viper is actually older than that, having appeared in either an old rulebook or adventure.
So, can anyone give me any info as to when Viper first appeared in the gamebooks? Not the timeline date, the date the real-world books appeared on shelves containing any info about Viper?
Well, while we could find that 'Cobra Command' dates to 1982, we could find no info on how old Viper was. The earliest reference we could find was 1984, but it's possible Viper is actually older than that, having appeared in either an old rulebook or adventure.
So, can anyone give me any info as to when Viper first appeared in the gamebooks? Not the timeline date, the date the real-world books appeared on shelves containing any info about Viper?
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VIPER dates back to 1981 and the organization was probably invented prior to the game's first publication in George MacDonald's original Champions campaugn. George, a big 70s Marvel fan, was certainly inspired by HYDRA, not Cobra. As the organization evolved, Cobra certainly had an influence on its development; I was a mild GI Joe fan myself. However, none of the incarnations was meant to be a precise duplicate of the GI Joe villains: hence you really don't have analogs of Cobra Commander, Destro, Stormshadow, etc, and there's no real VIPER-X or Viperia in Cobra. The current Surpreme Serpent certainly has visuals similar to Serpentor (though Essec's background is very dissimilar), and the *****ss and the Baroness are both allegedly European nobility (though personality wise, they're very dissimilar: the *****ss is a manipulative mastermind pretending to be a legitimate businesswoman, the Baroness is a kickass spy. The *****ss has yet to be introduced into the MMO).
I liked the cool vehicles and sub-divisions in GI Joe's Cobra, and those were an inspiration on some of the vehicle designs and agent packages I did for the 1993 VIPER sourcebook, though they evolved in different directions. That's about it: any other similarities probably stem from their common inspiration from HYDRA, whose agents are themselves rooted in James Bond's SMERSH, Nazis, and generic agents of the sort which populated pulp serials. If you dig through history a bit, you'll discover quite a few paramilitary secret societies existed which probably inspired the pulps; CO's Hunter-Patriots are an update of an actual historical secret society of the 1830s.
Thank you! That answers my question precisely, and as I expected. I was pretty sure Viper was older than Cobra.
Speaking of which, does Viper owe any character homages or the like to DC Comics' KOBRA organization?
The perk icons definitely are
I think they knocked me into half the nice hallway tapestries in Alpha Base.
I have to however improve my Infernal Cricket form to best their tougher challenges ahead.
You were lucky to avoid me tonight as that honour went to the excellent Green Guardian ..
Hydra or Cobra for Homage both work nicely in Mr McDonald's work here.. [you better go big or go home]
HOTs for me and Frags.. and a good old Neut for Viper X..
Yeah.....actually the same guy who made Hydra made Cobra. My google skills on this compy are limited...so I don't have a name....He transplanted Hydra over to G.I. Joe out of creative laziness O_O.
It's funny, in Invincible by Robert Kirkman (Image Comics) there is a homage group called "The Lizard League". They are actually more similar to Viper than anyone else. Kirkman is one of the many comics creators I suspect played Champions PnP at some point in their lives.
Did the filter actually trigger off of the word D.U.C.H.E.S.S. ?
BTW, to the OP: Viper is ten. Yes ten years old. You have been being trounced by a ten year old.
Sad. Very sad.
Apparently so.
By the way, have you played Thundrax's PnP version at Dundracon in open gaming ?
The name seems very familiar and, except for this year, Ive attended DDC every year since the mid 80's.
I played him three times there as far as I remember, in the md-to-late 90s, iIRC.
Once was an all-star run where George ran a scenario where Destroyer erased the superpowers of every super on earth, and we had to find a way to get them back (which I believe involved the powerless heroes distracting Destroyer while the Harbinger of Justice solved the problem).
On Saturday night of the next year's con, George and I got bored, so he ran a follow-up solo run which was a moral dilemma: Desrroyer came to Thundrax and offered him the opposite; he'd give every person on earth superpowers, if Thundrax agreed to it. Thundrax thought it was a bad idea, and the two parted. For MMO RP, I lifted those con runs and stuck them into his personal timeline prior to Detroit going boom.
Neither was in open gaming. I believe I brought him into an "every hero fights for a chest full of expeirence points" scenario one year, that's the most likely place where you'd have met me playing that character. I may have played him in a big Steve Hendferson run one year, but can't remember if I played Thundrax or Stuntman or Johnny or a pregen. Do any of these sound familiar?
My memory is slipping, but it was at the Dunfey, either at Dundracon or the Pacific Origins held there, that I was introduced to Champions back in '81 or '82!
Glenn Thain was my GM and we played on a table in the hallway... We fought the Xxoonn (multi-colored hairy aliens) if I remember correctly... I still have the original "Green Guardian" character sheet suppied to me for the demo game... Bought the game and made my first original character, "Phoebus", in the car on the way home...
I even have an original ink drawing of Wolveroach and Cerebus done by Mark Williams!
The start of many years of good times...
The original sourcebook was criticized by many people at the time as being too "supers-heavy" and Steve and I both agreed the revision needed to focus more on the agents. We didn't ignore the VIPER allied viillains completely, and there were going to be more: Steve (presumably for space reasons) cut a few supers who were designed for the book like Adder. There was also more info on VMS-Alpha, who were essentially the proto-versions of the members of VF-2, whom the GM could mutate into supers to accompany Armstrong/VIPER-X, which I'm sorry didn't get included. But even with that, there's a lot of meat in the 192 pages of that book, and quite a few templates that you can easily drop on low level supers to make them good VIPER vilains. Steve and I both wanted to avoid the label of "VIPER Enemies"; it might have been nice to expand the book to 208 pages and add 5-6 more members of Dragon Branch, but I think we put in enough for a GM to run a good VIPER campaign.
I expect in a few years Steve will get around to revising VIPER for sixth edition (2013 would continue the every ten years rule for a VIPER book.