Yeah. Hot Summer Nights was a summer promotion dating back to the mid-90's. Usually HSN entailed merchant events, auctions, new mechanical releases, etc. I think the last one happened while I was on a break so I'm not entirely sure when they petered out, but it was definitely an annual thing for many, many years and they certainly had an HSN auction with the move to the web in 1997.

It was a reoccurring, if not necessarily an annual event. I want to say the last HSN coincided with the release of the new races.

GM Scribes

Hot Summer Nights was a GEnie promotion, continued by Genie (when General Electric sold the sub-branch of online stuff) and later by Simutronics (when they went to the web as opposed to individual service access).

HSN on GEnie was an annual thing, to increase the userbase for their services, particularly games since those tend to be a) addictive and b) nearly pure profit. This was usually done with extraordinary deals, services, or whatnot. The traditional culmination in GemStone was the annual Auction.

I know there was one in 2002 since that was when all the Bard tweaks going on got me to reroll my ICE aged guy and bring him current.
"In an effort to meet that request last year, we brought you the very successful "Hot Summer Nights 2002." (Visit http://www.play.net/gs3/news/hotsummernights/hsn_review.asp for a complete review of all HSN releases.)" -- SIMU-MELISSA in "A Letter from the Producer: The Next Generation of GemStone" on 3/21/2003 at 1:03:55 PM #3289
Yes, that link is still live.

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Yes, I still have the item lists; their text files, so I just park 'em somewhere in c:\gs3\ on every computer I've got. :) Sending them to you in separate email, feel free to post them to KP.