[JLV]

I think Metagaming had a pretty good distribution throughout the US -- they'd been around for a while (though not one of the "giants" of the US gaming industry like TSR, SPI or Avalon Hill), and had a good reputation in terms of quality of rules and games (physical components were a bit weak, but printing was harder to do back then than it is now, too). But I don't think they ever got much entry into foreign markets. This, despite the fact that I think it was a good deal cheaper back then to ship something overseas, and customs duties and VATs and the like weren't as deadly back then to physical products.

Of course, the above opinion may or may not bear much relationship to the reality; I'm just remembering what I knew at the time about gaming in general.

(I would have been a big hit in the gaming community if I'd moved to Australia back then -- I had a collection of several hundred wargames and RPGs at the time Melee came out; and I found out years later that most of you had never heard of a good half of them!)