Shortly before his fateful trip to Texas, then-President Kennedy had recognized the need for a special task force to deal with violent terrorists, one that utilized the abilities of all the various armed forces to end threats to peace. To this end, he commissioned one Lieutenant Joseph B. Colton, a Vietnam veteran with great character, to form and lead Special Counter-Terrorist Group Delta, which he christened G.I. Joe.

Though Kennedy was slain shortly thereafter, his idea lived on. Colton indeed went on to form the G.I. Joe team, and led the heroic members of this force on various missions against all manner of threats to freedom, the results of which remain classified to this day. In fact, aside from Colton, even the membership of this team has yet to be revealed to the general public.

At any rate, times change, and it was necessary in the early eighties to form a new Joe team. This task fell to Colonel Clayton M. Abernathy, who would also serve as field leader under General Flagg, though Abernathy was eventually promoted to the rank of Brigadier General and assumed full command of and responsiblity for the strike force.

Though designed to handle virtually any terrorist threat, up to and including those that utilize nuclear weaponry, G.I. Joe's principal foe over the years has been the clandestine organization known as Cobra. These terrorist thugs are bent on achieving world domination, and will go to any lengths to subvert anybody that gets in the way of their goal.

The battle between these two groups has raged for twenty five years now, reaching a global scale as Cobra moves on to bigger and better targets. During this time, the membership of the G.I. Joe team has swelled to include well over one hundred military operatives, and the group wields a massive arsenal of weaponry to fight Cobra with. These operatives / devices are organized as follows:

* Note that the archives for 1997, 1998 and 2000 are in fact a single archive - there weren't all that many new characters / devices released during this time. I decided that the few new personnel and devices that were released in each of these years didn't warrant their own archive, and that it was best to roll them into a single text file archive for your downloading convenience.