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Previously a producer of which was to be heavily used in many of their licensed products. Around 1987 , the company acquired the license to produce a '' Star Wars '' RPG. Since the films had been released some years ago, and there was (at the time) no new media forthcoming, the success of these books came as a surprise. Their early work on the Star Wars Roleplaying Game established much of the groundwork of what later became the Star Wars Expanded Universe , and their sourcebooks are still frequently cited by Star Wars fans as reference material. Lucasfilm considered their sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn Trilogy , he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to base his novel on the background material presented within. Zahn's trilogy, in turn, renewed interest in the franchise and provided many sales for West End Games. In the early 1990s, the FidoNet Star Wars Echo hosted a message forum for playing the Star Wars RPG on computer Bulletin Board System s, and some current and future West End Games freelancers took part. In July, 1998 , despite very successful product lines West End Games went into Bankruptcy as a result of poor financial management. The company lost all their licensed roleplaying game settings, most famously Star Wars (which was most of their business). The company liquidated most of its assets, including a large backstock of unsold books, and heavily restructured. An almost complete unwillingness to maintain any Internet presence also hurt their presence, while other gaming companies had web sites and message boards, West End Games only had a contact e-mail address through America Online , and only actually launched its web site while in bankruptcy proceedings as a way of liquidating stock. By 2004 they had completely restructured and were regularly producing new products, including a generic version of their D6 System . Game designers affiliated with West End Games include Greg Costikyan , Paul Murphy , Eric Goldberg , Joe Balkoski , Jon Southard , Jeff Briggs , and Ken Rolston . SYSTEMS DEVELOPED
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