Palatinus' OverPower Forum

I was searching the net, looking up prices for OverPower artwork and stumbled upon this awesome group.  It is so great to see OverPower alive, albeit in a cult-like way.  I enjoyed Theo Stern's retelling of the evolution of the game.  If anyone wants other inside info, I would be glad to shine a line on some stuff.  I look forward to speaking with many of you.

Steve Domzalski
One of the members of the original design team

great to have you here

we want any inside info you got,  no matter how minor the tidbit!

Great to see you on the forum, Steve. I still have your Fleer Star Trek CCG card of you as one of the red shirt ensign officers.

Can you shed any light on what was to come after The Marvels? Was Thanos going to be introduced to the game? Any idea as to what his stats would have been? He's such a strong character that I figured he would have carried an inherent like Malebolgia.

I'm with breadmaster, we'll take any inside info you can disclose.

Take care.

Hello, Steve. Great to see you here!

I got a question or two for you. What was the coolest card idea the team had tested, that never got approved to be released as an overpower card?

Why wasn't Mephisto in Mission Control even though i seem to remember him being advertised for it?

From the beginning, the main goal for the rollout of OverPower was to keep it mainstream, both with the heroes and villains that were selected and the game play.  Early on, before Ron and many of the other entertainment card staff were hired on, I was the only one who was even close to being a gamer.  My first ComicCon, I reviewed about three different game engines.  Two of them were too close to Magic, and one was way too complex.  When we saw the Stern Brothers proposal, we all agreed that it definitely captured the feel of a comic book.  But Bill Jemas was concerned there were too many things to keep track of.  While it would have appealed to those who were familiar with CCGs, Jemas wanted a game that was easy to teach and easy to learn in a short time, but would take a long time to master.  Jemas was also the person who introduced the earlier concept of the poker (mission) betting system. Intellect and individually tuned KO points were eliminated to achieve that 'easier-to-learn' aspect.
Likewise, as the game progressed, we looked at each character for balance and popularity before including them.  Someone asked about Mephisto. We would often accumulate artwork, and if we didn't use it for a release, we would save it.  Unfortunately, I can't remember about Mephisto's exclusion.
The person who asked about Marvels, if you know your OverPower history, I was laid-off before that. I never made the move to Marvel, NY.  That was Ron.  The last set I worked on was Classic. After I was let go, I worked for Precedence Publishing for about a year.  They produced the Babylon 5 CCG.
I managed the Squadron Elite, which was the equivalent of the OP Legion.

Since almost 14 years have gone by, I will do the best I can to answer anyone's questions.

As I mentioned in my intro post, I am looking for OP art collectors.  Whom should I contact to inquire about collector value of OP original pieces?  I am scheduled to be on Pawn Stars in October and would like some kind of ballpark figure for what I will be taking.

Your best bet would be to bug John Latto, known as JohnL on these forums. He has stated in the past about selling some of his art: link.

http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/eemb/faculty/latto/index.html

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Not sure if you were involved in the decision making, but how come there was no 8 Fighting +3 Basic Universe for the PowerSurge release?

I ask because I'd like to put some interesting tidbits onto the Wiki so that it's not as bland as an encyclopedia of OP.

When a set was being designed, one of the limiting factors was how many different cards were being created and how many cards were being set on a printing sheet.  Remember, other than specials, which were limited only to the character named on it, universe cards were designed to be played by anyone with the right attributable power ranking.  Since there weren't as many characters that had 8s, the decision would be made to cut 8 universe cards first.  Obviously, the 8 +3 got cut to make room for other cards.

That makes sense, we're facing the same kind of issues with our release.

What about giving the Any Character - Bastion the ZZ code in Monumental? And were there any plans if OverPower were to run out of special codes (after exhausting all the codes from AA to ZZ)?

Great info, Steve!

What was Marvel's general involvement in OverPower while you were involved with the game? Did they have any characters they didn't want you guys to use, any final say in regards to the grids? I seem to recall reading, either on this board or on another site that DC wanted their flagship characters (Supes and Batman) to have two 7's in their grid, as opposed to an 8.

I'm assuming there was probably some give and take between the comic companies and those working on the game, because if I were DC I would have proposed a 24 point Superman with two 8's and I could see the people on OverPower explaining that a character with two 8's could be gamebreaking, etc.

why not axe the 8+1 or 8+2...they're all pretty much useless, but they got rid of the best of the 3!

Hello Steve,

I got a question about the AA special, 'Acts as a level 4 attack, may make one additional attack'. was it initially intended to be a level 5 attack? I remember ready about the history of OP from JohnL and he mentioned you making this 'correction'?

Reference: http://www.beenhereandthere.com/SMF/general-discussion/overpower-history-power-players-to-op/

bamf!

Hey Steve, good to see you here. I haven't checked in here for a while and it was cool to read your posts. You may not remember me but we met at San Diego in '96 and you probably remember my wife (Cherie 'two-timin' Briggs). Oh, and we also met at Berkeley and did some demos at a game distributor. I think Classic had just come out because I remember opening packs of it.

I have tried to make a few posts about the history of OverPower before it all got forgotten. Please correct my posts if I've got anything wrong. It was great to see Theo Stern check in with his recollections. I'm glad you clarified that it was Bill Jemas who came up with the venturing mechanism.

Anyway, I got very into art for a while just before OP died. I had around 150 pieces pass through my hands and passed on much of it so I could keep the pieces I wanted.

At the time I was buying a lot of art (1999) there was relatively little interest from the OP community in art and so little influence on the price in the fact that it was a published OverPower piece. With the decrease in the OP community and the increase in the comic art community since then  I can't imagine this has changed.

Most artists priced pieces similarly to a commissioned piece from them. For a lot of the artists Marvel and Image used this put pieces in the $40 range for a typical card art sized piece . DC pieces (inked, with backgrounds and often to a higher standard) tended to be a little more (although prices over $100 tended to sit around and not sell unless the artist was really famous)

You could bump the price up a bit more according to how famous the artist was (or how famous they thought they were!) and, at least on e-bay, the price for popular characters would jump a bit too. So you'd pay a lot more for George Perez's WonderWoman art than for Keiron Dwyer's Metallo.

Art for the Marvel sets was wonderfully inconsistent (all the early art was unfinished pencils, later art was inked but rarely with much background), sizes were all over the place (barely larger than the card up to full comic art board size), and artists ranged from who to wow (Ashley Wood and  Darick Robertson were some of my favorites).

Pricing the art, if its someone reasonably well known and  the art if at least finished, is really just similar to pricing a splash page or pin up piece from the same artist. For help with this there's always e-bay and several online communities - (eg comicartfans.com). Comic art collectors are a very competitive but also very helpful bunch. I bought most of my art via other art collectors putting me in touch with artists.

If you have any interesting art pieces from the early OverPower days I''d love to see them (and I'm sure others would too).

John

Steve, did that Pawn Stars air yet? Can you let us know when it will?

Hello Steve!

I had a question that maybe you could answer...

Who owns the rights to Overpower, and could they be purchased?  If so, how would someone go about getting that ball rolling?

Welcome Steve!