Back when I was a Catalyst Agent and Strat Ops was in the pipeline, I was looking for a way to introduce players to BattleTech with a game system that played as quickly as modern games like Heroscape and some of the others that have exploded onto the market in the last few years.
I thought that way was BattleForce, but BattleForce is a game of lances. I wanted to take the scale back up to BattleTech, while using BattleForce stats to speed up play. Finally, I wanted to still play it on hexes. The QuickStrike translation rules in Strat Ops were amazing, and they offered a fantastic opportunity to everybody.
So the moment Strat Ops came out, I rulesbashed QuickStrike and BattleForce together and went to town. I generated the first BattleForce cards so I could play with art and stats all on a trading card. I picked a trading card because games like Magic use that size, and I picked my general layout of name and cost on top, big picture, and stats below, because I figured if Magic did that, there are worse examples I could follow. And honestly, I just love the look of a really big picture dominating the card. It is a visual aspect that pulls people in, and all the most successful card games out there make certain that art is the focal point. Skunkworks began printing out similar cards within months, and now of course the MUL has cards. Of course they are turned 90 degrees on their side and the pictures are layered behind the stats. I don't understand that design choice, as it goes a bit sideways of card-style games I've seen. But I'm hoping it will work out. I know people that got to Gencon LOVED the stat card sets they sold there. I bought two packs myself. Hopefully they make more of those. ;)
Anyways, within days of Strat Ops coming out, IIRC, fans and Agents alike were asking for BattleForce/QuickStrike rules to be released as a standalone set. And over the years, the game has taken on a life of it's own, as players just loved it. Everybody took a slightly different path since it was a rulesbash. Some people played hexless, others with hexes, but in general everybody just played. And in general, people bloody well LOVED it. And people who had not played BattleTech in years started playing again and loving it.
And now we have Alpha Strike. Alpha Strike came out because we players played this game, and we asked for standalone rules. Alpha Strike may be the first BattleTech game that was published because the players already played it and asked for it to be made. I personally think that Alpha Strike is the future of BattleTech. If BattleTech is to compete with other modern games, I think that Alpha Strike is the scale and format that it will take back into mainstream gaming. And if that happens, it is because of all the players, and all the Agents who jumped all over the idea of twisting two sets of rules outside their intended function and just bloody well had FUN doing it.
In short, it was printed because of all of you who wanted it. I'd say that's a good pedigree to start out with. I hope it flies. :)