Scott Palter received a JD from Stanford in 1972 and joined the New York State Bar before he began work at the family firm, Bucci Imports.
Then Costikyan and Goldberg brought Palter a manuscript for a role-playing game that originally had been conceived by their friend Dan Gelber.
[3] The high production values demanded by the wargames industry made them one of the few companies who could compete with TSR, and they were able to acquire the license from Columbia Pictures to produce an RPG based on the film Ghostbusters.
Lucasfilm considered their sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn trilogy, he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to utilize the background material presented within.
[2]: 251–254 1990 saw the release of the Torg roleplaying game, followed in 1994 by the Masterbook system, which was mostly used in licensed RPG adaptations: Indiana Jones, Necroscope, Species, Tales from the Crypt, Tank Girl, and The World of Aden.
[2] At the 1999 GAMA Trade Show, the new West End Games announced a third edition of Paranoia for late June or early July of that year, followed by a Bug Sector supplement,[4] but these were never released.
[12] West End also expanded back into board games, beginning with a new edition of Junta, which according to Gibson was one of the few products that did turn a profit.
In 2007, the company announced a new science-fiction RPG by Bill Coffin called Septimus, offering preorders, but following delays it was publicly cancelled by Gibson in March 2008.
Gibson stated in a 2010 podcast interview that he was "perhaps foolishly optimistic" in assuming sales would be higher than they turned out to be because "the name West End Games would carry a lot of weight".
A Kickstarter was launched in April 2016 and was successfully funded, but the death of Nocturnal owner Stewart Wieck in June 2017 ultimately resulted in the cancellation of that project.