As with many things, the concept of Tech Infantry, or more affectionately known as "TI" or "Tech", came out of pure boredom. We can blame two people... Nathan Bax for starting it all... and Marcus Johnston for keeping it alive.
Season 1 (1997): While stuck in Morrison, Illinois during his summer break from ISU, Nathan Bax was bored out of his mind. Looking forward to the new Starship Troopers movie, he thought of playing a White Wolf game set in the Starship Troopers universe. He told a couple of his friends about it, including Marcus Johnston, Chris Yarwood, Martin Hohner, and Jennifer Simmons (Bax's girlfriend, later his wife) also joined in. Together they braved the worst the Bug War could offer. Not a lot of political backstory... just a lot of missions, dying, and good roleplaying. Lwan Eddington, Fialla Spencer, and Arthur Clarke make their first appearances.
Season 2 (1998): Well, we said goodbye to Martin, but added Penny Horwitz and Joel Ruggaber (who were engaged and later married). For the 86th Platoon, it was no longer just about the Bug War. Bax added in a political element and the 1st Civil War was changed by the player's actions. With the Triumvirate destroyed and all well with the universe, Bax got bored and decided to end it. Richard Fox and Maeve Harrington made memorable first appearances.
Season 3—Part 1 (1998): Penny ran the show now, 15 years ahead, and the players played the kids of their previous characters, on the run from the TI draft. Hilarity ensues as we keep running into our old characters, Penny gets more bossy and we all start getting bored.
"Ring of Fire" Movie (1998): Bax comes back down for Halloween and runs a session. The characters are taken through history to find out about the Orb and the Caal invasion that's being affected by it. Finally the Caal are stopped by taking the Orb out of existence altogether (thanks to "the grey man") and everything's back to normal.
Season 3—Part 2 (1998): Or is it? Well, Bax didn't like the way Penny had messed up his creation, so he basically destroyed a lot of what Penny was trying to set up. Penny solves this problem by creating an alternate universe, where many of our old and present character's situations were changed, and we had to figure out how this all meshed together. At first, it was a cool idea, but then it devolved into playing our old characters in weird ways. Personality conflict between Marcus (stressed out from student teaching) and Penny (stressed out from wedding plans) finally ended the game with little resolution.
Season 4.1 (1999): After a hiatus, Bax wanted to start an e-mail game in the TI Universe. Martin, Marcus, and Chris played, but then Bax got busy with work, and it was disbanded after only one or two turns.
Season 4.2 (1999): Marcus tried to use the e-mail game idea as well. This game actually went on for a couple months before it got stopped by Marcus' heavy workload in Korea and player disinterest. Erich Von Shrakenberg and Andrea Treschi make their first appearance.
Season 5 (2000): This was Bax's game that he played in the normal tabletop way down in St. Louis. Again, political intrigues abound, deception, lies, and good storytelling. What actually happened is a mystery because none of the veteran players were involved.
Season 4.3 (2000-1): Marcus, back in the Midwest but bored to tears due to his job at State Farm Insurance, revived the TI e-mail game in order to fill the time. This actually worked and had eight characters running through the ins and outs of the 3rd Civil War. It finally ended after 9 months of play... about a month or two too long.
Season 6 (2001): Bax again... with a lack of players in the St. Louis area, he called upon his old veterans to play once a month, in marathon sessions for TI. This was Y3K... sending TI a thousand years in the future in order to throw us off completely, and created the Holy Terran Empire. It was a very good storyline, but it was hard for all of us to be there every month. Eventually, the game disintegrated.
Season 7 (2001): Bax's second attempt to do marathon sessions, this time taking the same plotline, but set it five years later. However, Bax really wanted to do something else other than TI, so he systematically killed every single legend from the TI universe. It was fun, but sad.
"A Place Called Earth" Miniseries (2002): An attempt by one of the former players of Season 4.3 (Andy Hutchinson) in order to restart the TI universe. This was set at the very beginning of the universe, once vamps and werewolves came out of the woodwork. Interesting concept... but this e-mail game lasted for three turns before falling apart. One assumes this happened because of bad writing.
"Exodus" project (2002-2003): An abortive attempt at a TI revival that never got off the ground. Marcus was the instigator again, with lukewarm support from Martin, Chris, Bax, and a couple other former players. The idea was to set it in the year 4097, a thousand years after the Empire was destroyed at the end of the Y3K (Seasons 6 and 7) game. A handful of survivors from that cataclysm had managed to colonize a lone planet on the edge of another galaxy, but their colony had disintegrated into a dozen petty states all warring with each other, and technology had retrogressed to a hodgepodge of primitive and even medieval devices alongside a handful of surviving high-tech islands. It was an intriguing concept, but world-building proved more fun than actually writing a story or creating characters, and most of the players wandered off from sheer boredom while waiting for Martin and Marcus to finish drawing maps and writing out timelines.
Season 8 (2004): This was the second time someone had seriously come up with a way to restart TI yet again. After the "Exodus" idea flopped, there was always somebody trying to come up with something. Finally, over Christmas 2003, the idea of changing the timeline to allow the Eastern Bloc take over everything was rather intriguing. It lasted four months, before Marcus got burnt out, and although Ed Stasheff tried to keep it going, it ended soon after.
Season 9 (2011): Seven years later, many of the players had played other "play-by-email stories, but none of them ever lasted as long as Tech Infantry. Marcus was publishing the first of what he hopes is four Tech Infantry books, three of them comprising the PBeM seasons. As Chris was bored in Arizona, cut off from his friends, he was excited at the TI stories and thought back to the "Golden Age" of gaming he had participated in. He asked Marcus about starting a new campaign... here we go again!