Hello there!
An interesting conjunction of events has brought me here, as I am one of the co-authors of the game. As it happens, I have just been contacted by RB II, who was trying to track the book down as well. Then, just for fun, I did a search on the name of the game (just to see what came up) and I found this post.
To briefly answer some of your questions:
1. I'd like to think our game was pretty sophisticated for its time, yet less complicated than what we saw as our main (would have been) competitor CHAMPIONS. It was a point-building system with dice for determining actions (ie. attacks, defense, etc.) We'd studied the three or so systems out there around the early '80s and came up with what we thought was a pretty darn good game. We were starting to worry that CHAMPIONS would eclipse us because it was taking so long for
JG to get to the point of being able to afford to publish it.
2. We were, indeed, very close to being in print. The game would have been out probably 9 months sooner, had I not moved out of town for a job and my co-authors sort of...didn't do much with it to put the finishing touches on it while I was gone. By the time I moved back into town and got to work on it again,
JG was already getting shaky, financially. The advertisement got us pretty excited. Then, they went under just as it was about to go to press. Took a while to get the manuscript back from them, as it had gotten buried under stuff at their location in Illinois. (This was about 1982 or 83?) To get
that close to being a published author was one of the single most disappointing moments of my life. It taught me a good lesson about how we all have them from time to time, though.
3. I have the original and complete manuscript in my possession. It's in my basement......somewhere.....
4. At the time, we were actually going to call it "Super Sentinels", but we were advised not to use it because of potential copyright infringement on the word "Super". Not sure how that could have been, but we rolled with it. "Supra" was always a little awkward, though, I thought.
5. I authored the game with two others - one whose name I remember, and the other's last name escapes me at the moment. I'll have to go dig the manuscript out. I lost track of either one of them over a decade ago, but I'm goig to try to find them, if
JG is really interested in doing something with it (I had no idea they were back in business until I was contacted just the other day!).