Fugate is the founder and publisher of Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine (MRH).
[1] Joe D. Fugate, Sr. and Gary Thomas founded the company Digest Group Publications (DGP) in 1986 as a business that they ran part-time while working as editors at other jobs.
[2]: 203 Fugate wrote articles for the digest-sized magazine The Traveller's Digest that DGP published, and these articles got the attention of Marc Miller from Game Designers' Workshop, who invited Fugate and Thomas to work on expanding and revising their material for GDW; as a result they produced Traveller Book 8: Robots (1986) for Traveller, which began a years-long working relationship between GDW and DGP.
[2]: 58, 203 Fugate later announced in The MegaTraveller Journal #4 (1993) that DGP would no longer produce material for Traveller, feeling that with GDW they had a "puppet on a string relationship".
[2]: 205 Roger Sanger, a fan of Traveller, came to see Fugate at his home one morning in late 1994, hoping to purchase books from Digest Group Publications; Sanger bought some of the remaining backstock at that time, as Fugate needed money to pay back creditors and had been holding onto the boxes of DGP items.