The first time Merle Rasmussen played Dungeons & Dragons, he thought it was a Halloween game.
"It was October 1975, and I was an 18-year-old freshman at Iowa State University. My roommate got this game filled with skeletons and undead monsters. I had no idea." The role-playing bug had bitten him, but fantasy wasn't his genre. So that same year, he started writing a game set in a modern world, the spy game that would become Top Secret.