So now that we are part of the Our Battletech family, we here at Arbitration Studios figured we should relate the story of how we came to be as a podcast, and where we hope to go.
It all started in March of 2006, when my lovely wife Mrs. Arbiter, stated her desire to go to Gencon. She was getting full swing at that time into MechWarrior Age of Destruction and had devoured almost half of the MechWarrior and Battletech Novels. So her desire summed up to “I want to go to nationals, get knocked out in the first round, and have fun staring at all the hot girls in costumes the rest of the time.”
[one_half][quote]We did not play in the nationals. There was too much to do.[/quote][/one_half]
[one_half_last]By that time I was already active in a MechWarrior Dark Age community called the Solaris Virtual [/one_half_last]Arenas. It was here I would give JPArbiters Unit Review of the week, talking about the various ‘Mechs, tanks and other do-hickeys in that game and how they would work or what I found interesting. (My Corporal Caesar Spano Review has been the most viewed ever.) Anyway, I floated the idea to that forum’s administrator of doing a short podcast to talk about all the comings and goings of MW:AOD, something that he was all too thrilled with. And the rest as they say is history. On Day 1 of Gencon 2006 Arbitration recorded it’s very first episode, and boy does it show. Mrs.Arbiter and I had no clue what we were doing. We were using DropBox to get the episodes to the admins of the SVA. It was just a bloody mess, and I had never had more fun. It was so much fun that I was only too happy to do it again in 2007.
Of course after Gencon in 2007 Wizkids was shuttered, and frankly the whole reason to go to the show looked in doubt. That FanPro was pretty much absent from their BattleTech license made it worse, and we had no inspiration to go to Indy in 2008. I am pretty sure that getting married in June 2008 and blowing most of our savings on a Disney Honeymoon was a factor, but I am not sure about that.
Still, that hiatus was exactly what was needed. Catalyst Game Labs was founded, BattleTech was on the rise, and I was starting to get fan mail about the show. Arbitration was back on for another convention schedule, but sadly it could not be Gencon this year. Because Jenny and I were doing what young married couples do, we found ourselves with a baby on the way, and her due date was projected to be August 16th, two days before Gencon Day 1. Despite my thrill at the prospect of having a Con Baby, she said no and we decided to go to Origins in 2009. it was that year we covered the Origins awards, and started branching out beyond our original focus and taking advantage of conventions as general trade shows. We also happened to score our first interview with the ever spastic and good looking Brent Evans, who has since become something of a friend of the show.
In 2010 we introduced the audience to our local spaz-attack High Test, who was attending his first Gencon. We knew we wanted to get Arbitration running full time at that point. Our only question was HOW?
But we will have more on that next time…
