I wish GDW had...
Thanks for all the replies!
At the time, as a Reagan kid, I found 2000/2300's narrative of a lost American Southwest to Mexico highly implausible (we ditched the idea and that of a independent Texas when we moved to 2300 games). However, in 2016, living in California where I see buses in the SF Bay Area having only Spanish-language ads, the idea is not so far-fetched to me (and I am not a Trump supporter). That said, a Mexican Army able to sustain an invasion even in the face of weakened US forces is still a stretch.
I have to remember at the time when I was 16-20 that we played T:2000 not so much for its post-nuclear world but because it was a military RPG and there were few of those. You had Merc (I think), Delta Force, and then the Merc:2000 supplement. Phoenix Force provided modern firearms rules. T:2000 was the most fleshed out.
I tried running Merc:2000 but I found my friends had less interest in a game that took place in Nigeria or the Philippines with (fictional) wars that they couldn't relate to. WWIII of course was all too real a thought.
By the time of the early 90s, we laughed at 2nd ed T:2000 and its attempt to preserve the Cold War narrative. We moved on to 2300 though I had one hard core friend that kept running T:2000 into 1992 by just pretending the USSR still existed in his alternate universe. I joined in one night but just didn't find it the same fun by that point. By the mid-90s when I was an Air Force historian, I declined to take part in all attempts by friends to restart Twilight as I knew the idea of special forces all-star teams carrying seven rifles with specialty ammunition riding around in M1A2s as we had played were not at all realistic.
A few years ago, I wanted to gather the old gang for one last session using Bear's Den. I changed the timeline to an alternate 1980s to account for the dated technology and equipment. I rewrote the history to use real persons like Powell and Clinton. Sadly, despite some "I'll play if he plays and if he plays I'll play" conversations, it came to naught.
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