LOL! 
Brian
http://www.hexwars.com/ - it’s an subscription site for playing online SPI games.
Yes, I’ve got that one - it was fun as a solitaire game.
The other major solitaire game was Wolfpack - I never enjoyed it as much.
I wish I hadn’t wasted my money on those games. $40 or more for a game in a ziplock bag seems pretty steep, and I read that the publisher of the games said that SPI went out of business partly because he thought they sold the games for too little money. Also I didn’t think the games were very realistic. I received “The Desert Fox” with a copy of S&T, and it was impossible for Rommel to take Tobruk if the German player used the historical strategy in the magazine article in the game’s Tobruk scenario. Some of the games take weeks to play so I guess they couldn’t have play tested them as thoroughly as they thought or said. Or maybe it was all the beer and pizza/pretzels at the open test sessions they used to have.
Moved Cafe Society --> the Game Room.
Not SPI, but SJ’s Car Wars and GURPS, D & D, AD&D, Starfleet Battles, Squad Leader, and Air War were all games I really enjoyed. There was another one that was set in WW2 as a flight sim/combat that I can’t remember the name of.
Never played Car Wars, but friends of mine were really into it so I sat through many many evenings while they played and I read books and made commentary (and snacks).
The problem was that those old wargames never managed to break out past a niche market. It’s not too surprising - playing them did take a lot of time and space and the game mechanics were complicated. They were never going to appeal to the crowd that liked Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit.
And while it took a lot of effort to make the games, it paradoxically was an easy business to get into. The old cliche was that every game player had a game designer inside of him.
So you had a small market which was flooded with products. Most of these little game companies were doomed to go bankrupt within a year but new ones kept popping up. And SPI and Avalon Hill had to compete against them while selling enough games to keep their business afloat.
Air War was SPI. Squad Leader was Avalon Hill. Starfleet Battles was Lou Zocchi, I think. D&D and AD&D were TSR. And Car Wars and Gurps were, as you noted, Steven Jackson Games.
Of these companies, Steve Jackson Games is the only one still in business.
War in the Pacific
Freedom in the Galaxy
Rifle & Saber
Sixth Fleet
The Battles of Bull Run
several more I’m forgetting
War in the Pacific took longer to play than the war took to fight.
Anyone wanting to check out some old school wargames has an opportunity right now. Steve Jackson has republished his first game, Ogre, which he designed in 1977. (Despite its title, it’s not fantasy. It’s a sci-fi game about robot tanks.) He’s selling this reprint for its original price - $2.95.
It was an interesting game is you had twenty people with a couple of years to kill and a spare house to set it up in.
I had several back in the day (but was more of an Avalon Hill guy/kid), but have had fun picking up vintage copies of SPI games when I can. Fun to pore over, although my eyes fail me much of the time. The print on the counters sure seemed a lot larger 30 years ago…
Most of my stuff was Avalon Hill or GDW, but my uncle had a S&T subscription that I got a lot of hand-me-downs from when he was bored with them.
I definitely had 6th Fleet, that was a lot of fun. Also had John Carter, I played that endlessly, it was a good one to also mod with homebrew solo rules to play solitaire.
There was also a S&T game that was based in cold war eastern europe, RDF I think. It was fun except that the AH-64 helicopters were insanely overpowered and unbalanced, one pop-up attack with a rack of hellfires was insta-death for the Soviets.
edit: Doh! And I zombied myself. Hmm, I’ve put on weight…
OGRE! I loved that game! It always reminded me of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series in some ways. I never got around to it but I always thought doing an OGRE style game with SFB and a Berserker might have been interesting…