A Note from the Founder of Wargames Atlantic - Tony Reidy/Hudson Adams

I’m happy to announce that Wargames Atlantic will be refunding the backers of the Defiance Games Kickstarter from 2013. Details for backers are at the bottom of this note. You're probably asking why we are doing this:

There are very few people who know the real story behind Wargames Factory and Defiance Games and Tony Reidy. To understand what I’m doing I have to explain where I came from and what I lived through. The true story is a lot different from the stuff that gets thrown around in forums.

Wargames Factory

I started Wargames Factory back in 2007/8 after spending years researching the industry and trying to understand how to do hard plastic figures faster and cheaper as I thought taking what GW was doing for sci-fi and fantasy and doing it for historicals would be a great business model and no one was doing it at the time.

The idea was to use an all-digital process for tooling (what at the time I thought GW was doing - but realized later they hadn’t actually achieved that to the extent we thought). The reason to go the all digital route was that traditional 3-up tooling was slow and expensive (this is before the guys from Renedra were made redundant at GW and then launched their own operation - ironically Warlord, Perry, and I were all trying to do the same thing at the exact same time. I announced it earlier and Perry beat us to release and we tied Warlord).

As you probably remember the first Wargames Factory products were not as sharp as we would have wanted and I later found out we were being used as guinea pigs to perfect the all-digital process. We were also plagued with delays, bad shipments, mistakes (one time a whole mold of Celt parts was made backwards - i.e. all left handed weapons!) and the quality was improving but still not on par with what Renedra was achieving.

The mistakes and delays led to the business struggling and the Chinese factory owner proposed that he take an ownership investment in the company and help take it to the next level by doing the tooling at cost. He brought in two former toy industry executives to vette my business plan and tell him what we would need to make/do/etc. over the next twelve months to make it work. Like an idiot I agreed to a deal that gave him control of the company with the handshake wink-wink promise that controlling interest would revert to me as we hit certain milestones. I was young, anxious to build it, encouraged by the toy guys’ enthusiasm, and focused on the future and not protecting myself.

Anyway, we signed the deal and started executing on the plan. The quality levels really jumped - the Amazons, Greeks, etc were really crisp and where we wanted to be mostly. But the factory kept having production and shipping delays. The toy guys were all over him to catch up. I was completely frustrated. We had all this great product and it wasn’t leaving China. Things came to a head and after a heated phone call he basically fired me. (Later on he dumped the toy guys, never paid them, never paid anyone, and never distributed any profits to anyone with equity. He just stole it all and rebranded his own company in China as Wargames Factory to do outsource work for other companies - several of which he screwed over later as well. In some cases he caused people to go out of business or outright stole their molds or held molds hostage effectively cutting company’s off from being able to sell product.

Defiance Games

After firing me he had his minions start a bad mouthing campaign against me and the team leaving out all the details about the agreement and everything else. I was devastated and I also felt a huge responsibility to the guys who were working with me so we made a plan to launch Defiance Games as quickly as possible. Of course nothing ever worked.

We thought we had a US-based team to do tooling. Guys who had worked with Freeform and presented this whole plan to do tooling/injection for us at a discount so we could be a showcase of their work to get more customers. We went back and forth for months before they faded away. We eventually found people to cut the sci-fi Marine mold and although we were prepared for paying about 2x what we did in China, additional delays and flailing about led to the final pricing being over six times our old costs.

We tried everything. We moved to resin production. We set up a scratch-built heated machine to spin cast plastic (we had the equivalent of Siocast before Siocast!). But everything had taken too long, nothing was working, and it was just a nightmare. I had already lost a huge amount of money with WF and Defiance was just bleeding. It was a really bad time for me mentally and I almost didn’t make it through.

The Kickstarter

At the time there was a small team of people that had been brought in by a guy who had been a fan of WF and then supporter of Defiance. He along with a few other people tried to help me keep it going but as nothing worked I just lost hope that anything could work. Then they came to me with a plan - they had an investor who wanted to come in with them and take it over. They wanted to run it, they had a plan to do a Kickstarter with the hardsuit and other sets, and I agreed. I just wanted the pain and the stress to end and I’d go out and get a job and pay off my debts.

I signed over the bank accounts, all the websites, Facebook, passwords, etc. and ownership and said I just wanted to keep 10% and have some creative input. I figured that was it. I’d do everything I could to support them but I’d have no control and just walk away.

They got going and put the Kickstarter in place, did all the promotion, and ran it and did about $46K. In retrospect I think what happened was that they thought they were going to make a lot more than that and that would allow them to do everything they wanted to do. When that didn’t happen I got a message they wanted to meet up. At the meeting they told me they were out and weren’t going to go through with taking it all over and were giving me all the control back.

So there I was - debts everywhere, Kickstarter funded, and just me. I had to file for bankruptcy, the court determined which debts to pay off with what was left, and just shut everything down. Those years were the lowest point in my life. I hated everything, myself, hated anything wargaming related, and wanted nothing to do with any of it. I ended up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I always love reading how I “took the money and ran” - there was no money. The only guy who made any money from Wargames Factory and Defiance was the sculptor who got a regular paycheck all that time.

Wargames Atlantic

I got a job, paid down other debts, and tried to put it behind me. But through it all I kept up with one friend from Canada who’d been around wargaming for years. He had seen what had happened and had lived through it with me and eventually I kind of used him as a therapist going over what had happened, things I could have done differently, and all that. And in doing this I started thinking about how I could do it all better and really well and not get into any of the same situations - and the idea for Atlantic was born. Of course he thought I was insane.

I knew that I couldn’t do it as Tony Reidy - there was so much garbage out there and even if almost all of it was wrong - it’s impossible to convince anyone of the truth after the bullshit has become the talk track. So “Hudson Adams” was born to be the face of Wargames Atlantic.

But I wanted to redeem myself. I wanted to build something on my own the way I knew it should be done. I wanted someday - once the company was built up - to be able to release the Defiance stuff and make the Kickstarter whole.

And so I put together a plan, spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this better, and started. I had to hide who I was to do it, and I hated doing that and not being upfront with people, but it allowed me to show who I REALLY was through what I’ve built at Atlantic. Over the years I’ve confided in key people and partners who came to know the real me and not the Internet Boogeyman I was made out to be.

I’m sorry I misled you but the guy you’ve known at Wargames Atlantic - is me. This is the real me. I’m good to my team and contractors and business partners. I try to help smaller companies and boost the hobby as a whole. And I get to make fun products that people love. That’s all I ever wanted to do. 

Now after six years we’ve reached a place where we can finally make good on the Defiance Games Kickstarter and refund those backers. Eventually, we’d like to put the original Defiance Games products into hard plastic and release them as they should have been done, but in the meantime we want to pay back all those who supported that Kickstarter in the first place.

After 12 years it’s unlikely that a lot of the card/account/contact details are the same on Kickstarter, so we are going to reach out to people a variety of ways to try to reach all the old backers. We will also be posting on the Kickstarter page once access is re-established. In the meantime, we have set up a new email address: kickstarter@wargamesatlantic.com that you can email with a screenshot of your pledge and current PayPal or bank details for a wire transfer. Alternatively, for those of you who prefer we’ll send you a voucher for our website worth 150% of the value of your pledge. So if your pledge was $65, you’ll receive a voucher for $97.50.

I hope this will go a little way in righting this old failure.