By the author from the introduction:
For me, Thrash has variously been the new hotness, a total mess, an old friend, and my white whale. Street Fighter II came out while I was in high school (I’m not quite l33t and/or old school enough for SF1), and I was just fascinated by it. When we started hanging out at the Chinese place across the street after school, we found a Samurai Shodown II machine there to distract us from Rifts and Magic. And we played it a lot, until one day they swapped MVS cartridges and it became a King of Fighters ’95 machine. Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game was likewise a must. I collected most of the books (minus that one adventure book), and read them and over time tried to rectify the abject lack of anything past Super Street Fighter II. I hate to admit it, but somehow we never quite got around to playing it, least of all before, in my first year of community college, when I first put pencil to paper and wrote “Thrash: Fighting Game RPG” in a notebook when I was supposed to be paying attention in English 1A.
The goal of Thrash was and still is to create a tabletop RPG that captures some of the awesome inherent in 2D fighting games. In retrospect, the original version of Thrash was sloppily put together from bits and pieces of Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game (at the time, White Wolf’s one attempt at a non-WoD game), Mekton Z (still my favorite mecha RPG), and Ninjas & Superspies (Erick Wujcik is awesome!). I think it got more revisions through complaints on the mailing list started by Rob Pool (which is still the official Thrash ML today) than through playtesting. Still, it let you stat up most any fighting game character, and it drew interest from people all over the world. In particular, I got a ton of e-mails from people in Mexico, Brazil, and Italy. I also used it to run a memorable and long running campaign called Karyuu Densetsu, the story of Asura Karyuu and her friends facing their destinies and seeing dragons fly free.
Thrash 2.0 is the white whale part. I first tried to start working on it around 2002. One way or another something—school, work, novels, other games, etc.—always seemed to get in the way, not to mention all the times my false starts collapsed in on themselves. But mostly, I think I needed to get more experience and become the guy that could pull it off. Hopefully after vastly expanding my horizons, including discovering the indie RPG scene, I’m ready to do this thing right at long last.
