Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #224 - Origin Story of Magic

Episode Date: May 8, 2015

Mark talks about the origin story of Magic.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, well I still have my cold, but it means I have my deep husky voice. So I thought it's time for me to tell the origin story of magic. So I've talked about pieces of the story, but I thought it'd be nice to have a podcast where it's the whole story all at once. How did magic come to be? So today, I'm going to walk through the whole story. Like I said, you've heard bits and pieces, but this is all of it together. Okay.

It all begins back in, I think, 1990. Peter Atkinson and several of his friends were role-playing gamers that loved role-playing. his friends were role-playing gamers that loved role-playing. And they decided they would start a company to make supplemental material for role-playing games. And because they lived in Washington on the West Coast, they dubbed themselves Wizards of the Coast, being the West Coast. Now at the time, Peter was working at Boeing. Boeing makes airplanes for those unfamiliar, and it's one of the big employers here in Washington. So he worked at Boeing, and really, when Wizards of the Coast started, it was kind of almost a hobby. Everybody involved in it still had a full-time job. It was something they were doing out of passion. The idea of

having a role-playing game company was something that, as long-time role-players, they were just excited to be making their own content and something that they could share with other people. So when Wizards of the Coast started, it was a tiny, tiny company. In fact, for most of the beginning, at first they had no offices, and finally Peter sort of turned his basement into an office. So the earliest, earliest of Wizards of the Coast was in Peter Atkinson's basement. And for those who don't know, Peter Atkinson, for those who have never met him, he is a very joyful, happy, he loves... I mean, one of the big connections between both Peter Atkinson and Richard Garfield

is both of them love games. Love, love, love games. That games are a passion to them. And that Peter started his company because he loves games. And the reason Richard designed games is because Richard loved games. So we'll get to Richard in a second.

So Peter started this company. It's a little tiny company. In the beginning, all they were making was supplemental material for role-playing games. What that meant is here are some cool things you could do and you could apply this to your role-playing game. Peter made something I think it was called the Primal Order,

which was talking about layering over, I think, a system of gods in your game. But anyway, the idea was they were just making cool tools you could use in your own role-playing game. That's how Wizards of the Coast started. And that's what, in its roots, it was a role-playing game company. Okay, so let's flash forward a couple years later. I think 1991 or 92, 92, I believe.

So Richard Garfield grew up with a love of games. His parents loved playing games. His family, just due to, I think, his dad's job, moved around the world quite a bit. Richard, growing up, lived in different countries. He really got admiration for lots of different kinds of games in different places.

And Richard grew up with just a love of games. In fact, he became, he studied math, because math was the closest thing that he found that kind of had the same sort of quality that games did. And so he became a math student, eventually a math professor. So Richard designed games,

not because necessarily, I mean, at first it was just like, he had game-playing friends, and he would come up with cool ideas, and he'd play with them, and they would enjoy them. And at some point, Richard made a game called RoboRally. So for those that have never played RoboRally, the way it works is you all are playing robots

on the factory floor of a robot-making factory. And the idea is, for fun, the robots are having a little race. But because you're racing on the robot floor, there's a lot of obstacles. There's conveyor belts, and there is pits, and there's lasers, and there's all sorts of things you've got to watch out for.

And the way the game works is, you get a hand of cards, and each card represents a programming movement for your robot. Do you go forward a space? Do you turn right? Do you back up? And the idea is, movement for your robot. Do you go forward a space? Do you turn right? Do you back up? And the idea is you program your robot for the source of five turns.

And then everybody at the same time watches and sees what happens when the robot's... Now, the thing that's fun is, A, there's all these obstacles and you have to adjust for them, which can be complicated. And B, other robots can get in the way and do things. Meanwhile, every robot has a little laser on it

and if you get in front of another robot, you get dinged by the laser and take damage. And you get enough damage, your programming starts getting messed up. And so, anyway, it's a fun robot racing game. It's a very, very fun game. If you've never played it, more than worth it to pick up a copy.

Okay. So, Richard... Pardon me, one second. One of the side effects of having a cold is I've got a cough. This is the Market Sick episode. Okay. So, Richard had a friend named Matt. Not Matt.

Mike Davis. Mike Davis shared Richard's passion for games and also had a little bit of a business sense to him. Mike Davis would go on to be one of the early... In fact, when I got hired, the man who hired me was Mike Davis. He was, at the time, the VP of R&D. So Mike

really wanted, Mike thought that Robo Rally was a good enough game that they could make it. And so Mike said to Richard, we should sell this game. And Richard at the time, I think Richard was definitely in the camp of, he just wanted to make fun games. Richard was enjoying the making of the games. But Mike sort of got in Richard's head that if you want to see

this game made, we gotta go to go to small game publishers. In fact, we've got to go to every game publisher, and we have to try to get them to make this game. So I think they started with some of the bigger game publishers, and a bunch of them probably didn't even return their phone calls. So they started going from the bigger ones to some of the smaller ones. And eventually, on their list was... And I think Richard's family at the time lived in Portland.

So Washington was just close to where Richard... Richard was in Portland from time to time. So Mike and Richard decided to come up to Washington one day to meet with Peter Atkinson of Wizards of the Coast. Now, be aware it was a tiny, tiny company at the time. And I'm not sure what all got Peter to take the interview and do it but they came up

they showed him Robo Rally and Peter's response was that is an amazing game that is an excellent game I can't make that game and what Peter explained is he was a small company Robo Rally has a board, has pieces has just different components it just there's a lot going on

it's an expensive game to make from what we call the cogs the pieces you have to put together and Peter had a very small tiny company so what Peter said is look, I'm printing material I have a relationship with a printer I can print

and he said, you know, I have a friend named Jesper and through him I have a connection of a local art thing I know a bunch of local artists so I could probably make something that was made of cards if you could make a card game

that's something I could produce and then Peter said here's what I'm looking for once again Peter had a mindset of a role player he said what I'm looking for because once again, Peter had a mindset of a role player, he said, what I'm looking for is a small portable game that you could carry with you that is something you could play in between role playing games and the idea

was just something, you know, because a lot of times in role playing, you have sessions and like you can have gaps in between where there's just a little bit of down time and not enough that you would go somewhere, but you know what can you do in those downtimes? Also, I think Peter very much was thinking in the mindset of role-playing.

So Richard said, well, I kind of had this idea. Richard, years earlier, had come up with this concept of a trading card game. Now, have you ever heard me talk about magic? What I call it the golden trifecta, which are the three genius ideas that Richard came up with to make magic, one of which is the trading card game. Trading cards have existed for a long time, and there are definitely games people would play with trading cards. I know when I was a kid, I

had baseball cards. There were games I would play with my baseball cards. But the trading cards weren't inherently game pieces. They were trading cards that people would then play games with. And Richard said, well, what if the thing you opened up, the random factor, was itself cards? You know, trading cards were game pieces. That the cards were cards in a game. And then you could take those cards and from those cards you could build a game. And Richard had the inkling of the idea of a trading card game. But he never, you know, he just had the rough idea. But when Peter said this, Richard was like, I have an idea. Give me

some time. Let me go see if I can put together a prototype. So at the time, Richard was, I believe, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. So in Pennsylvania, Richard had befriended a bunch of people, some of which were people that he had met in grad school. So like Scaf Elias and Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, those are people he'd sort of met through UPenn. And he also was frequenting a local bridge club, and through the bridge club he met Bill Rowe, Charlie Cattino, Joel Mick, Lily Wu, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard

Kallenberg. So the first group is what we now know as the East Coast Playtesters. Those are the people that made Antiquities and Ice Age and Fallen Empires and Alliances. The second group is most of the people that made Mirage. He also met Barry Reich, who was one... Barry was the person who made a set that we had borrowed some stuff for Invasion.

He made the Barry mechanic, the domain was his. So anyway, Richard had a bunch of friends, and so he started playtesting his game. And what he did, literally, is he would take, you know, sort of cardboard-type material, print on it with pictures, and the pictures were just stuff he had cut out. Like, I remember Healing Sav was originally called Heal, and it was a photograph, or I'm sorry, a photocopy of Scaf's foot, I believe.

And they were just, I remember, if you've ever seen the, I don't know if you have ever seen the originals, but they're just, they were pop culture references. They were whatever Richard could find that just was kind of cutesy. And so he made these little cards.

The cards were about maybe two and a half inches by an inch and a half. They were pretty small, smaller than a normal magic card. And he just made them out of cardboard. He photocopied things on them, they were black and white, and he started making his game and started playing.

And what he learned as he started playing was, it was very clear, very quickly, that there was something going on here. People were definitely getting into collecting these cards, and these weren't even fancy, pretty cards with pretty pictures, they were little slips of cardboard. And people were trading and getting really into playing this game.

And as Richard playtested back in Philadelphia, it was crystal clear there was something going on here. So Richard did a lot of fine-tuning. He worked with all his playtesters, and then he came back and he showed to Peter his thing. Now be aware, when Peter had asked for a game, I think in Peter's mind, he was asking for, you know, like a card game. Like you buy a box and there's cards in it and you play with those cards. A traditional game with cards. What Richard came back with was much more grandiose. The idea of a trading card game, where Richard had started from is, Richard was fascinated by the idea of a trading card game, where Richard started from is, Richard was

fascinated by the idea of a game that's bigger than its box. And what that meant is, part of the game experience was when you met other people who played the game, you would learn and be introduced to and explore new facets of the game. Normally, like, let's say I play Monopoly, and I

play Monopoly. I go to my friend's house, you know what I'm saying? I have Monopoly, they have Monopoly, it's the same 40 squares, you know, that there's, there's not, you know, when I play Scrabble and go to play my friend's house, it's the same Scrabble board, there's no differences, but Magic is like, I go play with my friend or play with somebody new, and they'll have cards that maybe I've heard of, but never seen before, they might have cards I've never heard of before. I remember when I was taught how to play, there was a man

who, when he taught me, explained to me to spread my cards apart because he had heard of this card that you could flip in the air and destroy whatever it landed on. So don't put your cards too close together. He hadn't even seen it. He was talking about Chaos Orb, obviously. He had just heard about it.

So anyway, Richard was very fascinated by this idea. And it was actually a much bigger idea, I think, than what Peter had asked for. But to Peter's credit, the second Peter saw it, Peter realized that there was gold. That this was something amazing. realized that there was gold. This was something amazing. And Peter did not, I mean, Peter did not walk into running Wizards of the Coast

as having a lot of business background. He had never run a company before. But, to Peter's credit, he was a gamer. He got this was an awesome game. And Peter was all in. You know, it was a tiny, tiny company, but they're like, we're going to do this. We're going to make this game.

And so Peter committed, Richard was in, and they were going to do it. So early on, Peter sort of reached out to people he knew, mostly from friends and things that he had met through role-playing and stuff. I think Peter and Jesper had been friends. I know through Jesper that they connected to, there's a local art college that a lot of the early magic people came from.

And the ones that weren't in the college were just local. Most of magic's early art was all local, Western Washington, Washington sort of people. So they just started putting this together. And Peter had had a connection with a small printer in Brussels named Cartamundi, who would be Magic's first publisher. And still, to this day, they still make Magic cards, although we're so big now that one printer is not enough. So anyway, so they

start to work on getting this together. They had hired an editor, so it was a woman named Beverly Marshall Saling, who had started to work for Wizards so early that she wasn't paid in money, that her earliest, she was paid in stock, which at the time was a big deal, because stock is not necessarily worth anything. She almost

on some level was volunteering. Now it turns out that stock would be very valuable down the road, so she was paid handsomely. But she didn't know that at the time. And so, oh, another interesting, well, we'll get there. So what happened was, they're saying, okay, we're going to make magic. We're going to do this.

And they get all the components. They line up a printer. They line up artists. They start putting the components to make it together. Richard had the game, and Richard had worked with the playtesters to iron things out. Okay, they're starting to put it together. So had the game, and Richard had worked with the playtesters to iron things out. Okay, they're starting to put it together. So the next thing is, they have to let the world know they're making this game. So they go to their lawyer, and they say, okay, we want to call this game Magic.

And the lawyer says, yeah, you can't call it Magic. It's too basic a word. There's no way to trademark that. And so they change the name of the game to Manaclash. And so if you ever see the first solicitation, the first thing that says, hey, we're making a game, do you want to buy this game? It was called Manaclash. But at some point, somebody, I don't know, Scaf or Richard or somebody's like,

look, this game just, everyone refers to it as magic. We should be calling it magic. What can we do to call this game magic? So they went back to the lawyer, and the lawyer said, okay, well, we can't, Magic itself is too generic, but maybe if we put something with it. And so Richard came up with Magic the Gathering.

And remember at the time, people always ask me what the gathering means. Richard's idea was that the way the game would work is they'd take a game, they'd print it, they'd put it out, and then once they sold that game, they'd make a new version of it, and the new version would have a new name, it'd have a new back, and it would be related. You know, like once you learn how to play the first game, you'd know how to play the second game.

But every once in a while, they'd put out a new game. Every couple years or something, assuming the first one was even successful. So the idea was, the first one was Magic the Gathering, we're coming together. The next one was going to be like Magic Ice Age, and then Magic Menagerie, or whatever, you know. So the Gathering was really meant to be kind of like, it's the first one, it's, we're coming together. And that's what the Gathering meant. Now it's come on to kind of

mean a lot of other things, but I mean, I think originally it was just kind of like magic, chapter one. Okay, so they start putting the stuff together. They start putting all the pieces. At some point, I think, was it Beverly? Somebody points out that maybe what they want to do is write something on the cards. They figure out the idea of flavor text that we can add a little flavor to the world. So some of it was actual real world quotes. Some of it were quotes they made up.

Some of that stuff got written. So anyway, they decided on the name Magic. And now, meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast made supplemental role-playing games. I said that earlier. What that meant is they made role-playing material that you could play with any role-playing game you wanted.

So there was one company that felt that they were making a supplemental specifically for them, which was, they felt, illegal. And so this role-playing company sued Wizards of the Coast. Now, Peter was convinced that magic was going to be a big thing. Peter was convinced it was going to be a big thing. And so, what he did was, they made a company, sort of a company to support magic, to make magic, which they ended up calling Garfield Games.

Richard ended up being the president of Garfield Games. And then, Wizards licensed from Garfield Games the right to make magic. So you look at Alpha, early packaging, not only is there a Wizards of the Coast logo, but there's also a Garfield Games logo. And the reason that was there, if anyone ever wondered why there's a Garfield Games, the answer is

they needed to protect themselves from this lawsuit that was going on. The funny thing is, by the time the lawsuit got settled, and they came to Wizards and said, okay, now we're going to buy Magic, Magic had gotten big enough that Magic was bigger than Wizards, and so the stock split. So what happened is,

when the dust settled, Richard ended up being the biggest shareholder in Wizards, because he had the most of the Garfield game stock. Apropos, by the way, since obviously Magic is a huge part of Wizards' success, I think that makes a lot of sense. But anyway, for Richard's sake, it actually worked out really well for Richard. The whole Garfield games worked out really well for Richard. Okay, so, so they print a lot of alpha.

Well, they consider it to be a lot of alpha. And the idea of, well, let me explain alpha and beta, was they had printed the cards, Alpha and Beta was, they had printed the cards, and then the plan was, if they needed to, once they had sold it, what Alpha was, was what they considered to be about six months worth of cards. They assumed it was about six months worth. And the idea was, we'd sell it, and if they sold all those cards, then they'd go back and press and they could print a new one. I mean, a new printing of the same game.

And so, and the idea originally was that the first printing, which was going to be two printings, the idea was that for the first year, that there'd be six months and they'd do another printing

that'd be like six months, would be Black Border. And then, after that, it would be White Border. And the idea was they wanted, they really were concerned early on that Magic was not just a game, but a collectible.

And they wanted to make sure that the early versions of it were a little bit more collectible. So they did the black border. So early Magic, first printing said black border, subsequent printing said white border. If you ever see early white border cards, that's what white border means. Okay, so, they go to Cardamondi, they print. Now, there are a lot of problems. If you've seen early magic, like Alpha, a lot of, there's a lot of printing errors

that came from wizard side. There were mana symbols, and instead of being mana symbols were letters. So instead of being a green mana symbol, it'll say G. At one point, they were doing a find and replace and they were trying to change I think they were using card name to mean the name of the card and they were doing a replace

so every time the word discard appears the word card and discard I think is capitalized there were just a whole bunch of mistakes made. Elvish Archers was supposed to be a 2-1 first strike, ended up being a 1-2. Red Elemental Blast was listed as an instant rather than an interrupt, although ironically it would later be a routed to an instant. There were Orcish Aura Flame and Orcish Artillery,

both cost one and a red, when they were supposed to cost one red-red and three and a red, when they were supposed to cost one red red and three and a red specifically. There was what was it? Cyclopean Tomb? There was a card that didn't have a mana cost on it. Anyway,

there were a bunch of, the first printing was okay. I mean, they'd never done this kind of thing before. They made a lot of mistakes. And the first year of Magic, by the way, there were problems with the printing of every... I talked about this in my 1993 podcast. The first everything printed in 1993

and 1994, there were mistakes in the printing. Everything. There was maybe Knight's had a problem, Antiquity's had a problem, Legend's had a problem. There was just mistakes. It took them a while to sort of get their footing and figure out how to do the printing. But anyway, so they print Alpha, six months supply. So the idea was, Peter knew, when they put the solicitation out, they didn't get a lot of feelers. The issue was that they were a tiny, tiny company. No one knew who

they were. And they were selling something that was really out there. I mean, a trading card game, now that you understand what it is, now that you've seen it, okay, maybe you get it. But if you've never, ever seen a trading card game, and they've never existed, you're the first one. No one's ever seen this before. No game store owners ever sold anything like this.

It was daunting. And so it was really hard to explain. In a solicitation, they couldn't really explain what it was. But Peter knew that they had something amazing. So what Peter did is he got in his car, loaded it up with as much boxes of Alpha as he could get in the car, and he drove up and down the West Coast. And he went to every game store that would allow him to visit, and he demoed the game. And what he found was, when you actually opened up the cards and saw them and looked at the pictures and felt them and played the game, you were immediately caught up in it.

That magic's, in the game, magic is what we call sticky. Which means that once you see it, it really sticks with you. That it has a lot of components that are really like just, you know, for a game player can really go, wow, that's really cool. Wow, I love the art. Wow, the gameplay is neat. Wow, just this concept of a trading card game. Very sticky. So as he rode up and down the West Coast, he started selling all the alpha cards. And he also would visit distributors, not just even game stores, but distributors. And he got a few early distributors that really sort of got on board. And so what happened was Alpha, which was supposed to last six months, was sold in three weeks. Mostly because of Peter's, you know, Peter just, one of the things about early Magic,

and I think that Richard gets lots of credit because Richard made the game. The game is amazing, and obviously Richard deserves all the credit for that. But I think that Peter also was another big part. When I used to work in Hollywood, when I first got there, I thought the hard part of being in Hollywood is writing an amazing script. That's the hard part. Writing an amazing script is tough. And it turns out writing an amazing script is very hard. But what's equally as hard as writing an amazing script is getting the person who needs to see the script to make it see it. Getting someone to read your script is very hard. And games was the same thing.

Richard made an amazing game. But somebody had to get in a player's hand to get them to understand it and buy it. And that was what Peter did. And Peter did an amazing job. I think a lot... I don't know if people talk a lot about Peter Atkinson these days. He's moved on.

He hasn't been to Wizards in quite a while. But the early spirit of Wizards was very much Peter's. Peter had... I mean, has. He's not there or anything. He's a very joyous person. And he loves games.

I'm not sure who loves games more between Peter and Richard. They both love games in different ways. I mean, Richard loves I think the design of games Richard's fascinated with. How games are put together. How they're made. Where

I think Peter really is caught up in the emotional creation that games make and the interplay between people. And anyway, they were a perfect pair because they loved games. And between them, they had this amazing game that both of them understood was this amazing thing and worked really hard to make it what it became today. So anyway, okay, so he gets out there, he's on the road selling this thing,

and he's doing a good job. So meanwhile, Origins is a convention that takes place every year, usually in July, or maybe, I haven't been to Origins in years, maybe it's slightly earlier nowadays. In fact, I think Origins might be slightly earlier. But anyway, back in the day, back in the time, back in the 90s, Origins was in July.

It was run by Gamma, which is the Game Manufacturers Association. The people who make... The association of people who make, physically make games. And this is back in a time where we're not even talking really video games. This is sort of like people who make board games

and physical games you sell in stores. And so what happened was Peter came to Origins. I don't think they sold it at Origins. I think what Peter did was he showed it off, and he might have given some samples away to make people understand what he was selling.

And then at Gen Con was the first time the game ever went on sale. And Peter, the entire company, probably was 40 people, but the entire, all of Wizard of the game ever went on sale. And Peter, the entire company, probably was 40 people, but all Wizard of the Coast went to Gen Con. In fact, for the first, I don't know, maybe five, six, seven years,

like early times when I was there, almost all of the companies would just go to Gen Con. Even when the company got pretty big, we'd all go to Gen Con. But anyway, so they went to Gen Con, and magic was the talk of the Gen Con. It was the thing. It was the hot item. It was the thing. It was the hot item.

It was something that everybody was talking about. So, between the selling of Alpha on the West Coast and the premiere at Gen Con... So remember, when magic first came out, it was a West Coast phenomenon. Like, there's very, very little alpha anywhere but on the West Coast, because that's where it got sold. And

the East Coast, after the summer and the hype and Gen Con and Origins, and eventually it starts to spread. People start to hear about this phenomenon. It's becoming a true... I mean, the funny thing is at the time,

I don't want to assume it was a fad, because it was just, it acted like a fad, it was just growing so fast, it was like, holy moly, this thing is crazy, so they went on press to make beta, which was the second half, in theory, the second half, they actually ended up being a lot more carbs, so they decided to say, okay, we need to print six months so obviously what we printed that was three months so I guess we need to multiply by six or whatever

we want to make enough that this will be six months so they made what they thought was six months supply sold out in a week

a week so to understand by the way so I had been working for those that I've told this story before I was working

in the game store heard about it saw it for the first time at San Diego Comic Con, bought it for the first time at a local convention in Los Angeles over the Labor Day weekend, and then I was hooked, but I hadn't bought that much at the convention, because it was like a game, how much you spend on a game, so I was like, okay, beta's coming out, I need to get my hands on beta, and I decided what I needed to do, because I knew it was a hot commodity, is I needed to buy a whole bunch so that I could sell it to my friends, because I had no one to play with. So I found a store that carried it, a store that was near UCLA, in Westwood, it's called. And I talked to the owner, I

said, you're getting beta? He goes, yeah. And he goes, I'll tell you what, if you want to get this, show up early. I got a decent amount, but a lot of people were asking about it. If you want this, show up early. So his store opened at 10 a.m. I got there, I think, 7 a.m. maybe. And there were people who got there at 6 a.m. I wasn't the first one in line. I was three hours early and was not the first person in line. In fact, I mean, I was like the fourth or fifth person in line. And so doors opened. I went in. I got my two boxes of boosters and two boxes of starters. And later in the day, I'm like, you know what? Should I have more? And I went back in later that day. Like, it opened at 10 a.m. I must have gone in, I don't know, 4 p.m. Gone. Gone. And so early magic, just so people

understand, early magic was like the thing that you had to find. You had to know about it. And when, even expansions, for example, Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, you had to know when it was coming out. Because if you weren't there the day it came out, there's a good chance you were not going to get it. Now, there were pockets of some random bookstore that were ordered and not understanding what it was, and because it wasn't a game store, no one knew it was there, and so it languished on the shelves.

And you would search for those. And when you would find one, you'd be like, hey, how much for a pack? And then they'd say, you know, normal price. You're like, yeah, I'll take all of them. Okay, so Alpha, boom, out the door. Beta, out the door. So at this point, it becomes clear

that they have a runaway hit on their hand. And remember, they had planned to, like, the idea was this original Magic the Gathering, you know, the first one, was going to be, like, you know, at least a year in the stores, maybe two. And then it was like, oh, that might not happen.

This is going so fast. I was like, okay, well, we're going to print the whiteboard version of this, and that will print what people can get. And then we'll make some more cars. And they had to quickly rush. And, you know, Richard had to quickly put together a Raby Knights.

And Richard had asked the other people he had worked with, his other playtesters, to start working on sets. Because he knew eventually he'd need them. But it was much faster than he thought. And Wizards was hiring people and a lot of the playtesters started coming to work for R&D. So, um,

Scafalias and Jim Lynn and Dave Petty and Joel Mick, Charlie Coutinho, all of them started going, you know, Richard, obviously, Mike Davis, you know, R&D was built up of a lot of the people that Richard had known from his putting the set together. And the industry was noticing what was happening. So, in 1993, there was one trading card game, the first. In 1994, there were 100 trading card games, 150.

I mean, it just exploded because people were like, I see this, this is the hot new thing, we're doing it. And what happened was, if you look at Wizards, so on the back of a Magic card is the word Deckmaster. What happened was, Richard and Peter, they understood that a trading card game was not limited to one game. In fact, Richard was very excited about making more trading card

games. So the idea was they wanted to have a branded trading card game trademark, and that's what deckmaster was supposed to be. So Richard, after magic came out, put out a game called Jihad, which would later be renamed Vampire the Eternal Struggle.

It was based on the role-playing game Vampire. Richard then made a game called Netrunner that was based on the role-playing game Netrunner. You notice a lot of these early licenses were based on role-playing games. Richard would later make one based on Battletech. So a lot of the trading card games that Richard made were based upon

role-playing games early on. But, if you look to the industry, the role-playing games started getting much bigger licenses. You know, within a year, I think, there was Star Trek, the trading card game. Star Wars, the trading card game. Eventually, there was Lord of the Rings. Like, you

name a hot property. You name a cultish hot property, and they made a trading card game out of there was a Lord of the Rings. You name a hot property, you name a cultish hot property, and they made a trading card game out of it. There's a Highlander trading card game. Any property they could find, they were making trading card games. And they were taking existing games. Spellfire, for example, was D&D being made

into a trading card game. Illuminati was just a game. It was a card game that they turned into a trading card game version of it. They made Illuminati the trading card game. Illuminati was just a game. It was a card game that they turned into a trading card game version of it. They made Illuminati the trading card game. And so there was just a lot of trading card games made.

So much so that it was almost overwhelming, you know, the number of trading card games that had been made. It was out of the gate really fast. And there was just,

in every genre you can imagine, superheroes, science fiction, horror, yeah, whatever it was, you name it, people were making different stuff. And Magic early on, the first year, Magic won a whole bunch of awards. You know, it was just, it was the toast of the town. And it started spreading. So remember, Magic came out in Alpha, and it was a West Coast thing. And by the time Beta came out, it was the toast of the town, and it started spreading. So remember, Magic came out in Alpha, and it was a West Coast thing. And by the time Beta came out, it was also an East Coast thing. And then by the time Unlimited started happening, they were getting contacts from other countries.

In fact, the first country I think to contact them was Italy, because the first non-English product made was, I think, Italian Legends. Legends was made not just in English, but later was made in Italian. And soon thereafter it was German and French

and Spanish and Portuguese. Eventually, you know, Asian languages get jumped in. There would be Japanese and Korean and Chinese eventually.

You know, but it was just taking off. And one of the things, I've talked about this before, that Magic would do a printing, sell out immediately, and then the next time they do a printing, they double the numbers or triple the numbers or quadruple the numbers.

And then the next thing would sell out immediately. And like I said, there was a good year where it was hard. If you were a Magic player, you had to be on the ball to get your product, because product disappeared overnight. You know, product would, like, you had to know when and where to be. So, and one of the things, hopefully, like, in trying to talk to the origin story of Magic,

is that Magic was, in a lot of ways, this cool lightning-in-a-bottle thing, where it just, i think what happened was richard had a neat idea that just might have stayed a neat idea except he happened to run into somebody where his neat idea just perfectly fit the parameters of this other person which was peter who's like i'd love to make a cool game, but I just, I can't make something other than something I can make cheaply, which cards were. And so it was, like, I think there was a lot of things

that happened to make Magic kind of hit. And once Peter got his hands on it, like I said, to Peter's credit, everybody involved understood really quickly that Magic was a special game. That Magic was, you know, in fact, there's a special game. That Magic was... In fact, there's a funny story. I'm not sure if I've ever told this story.

So I play Magic. And I'm a game player. My dad taught me to play games. He's a big game player. And I remember that I went to the game convention where I bought Magic for the first time. I learned how to play. I then went home and read the rule book.

Someone had taught me, but I was kind of confused. time. I learned how to play. I then went home and read the rule book. Someone had taught me, but I was kind of confused, and I was trying to learn myself. And I finally kind of got the hang of it. And I remember calling my dad, and I was so ecstatic. My dad remembers this, where I said, I just played this game.

I go, this is the future. This is like, I said to him, I go, this is like the next Dungeons & Dragons, ironically is what I said. Because Dungeons & Dragons, ironically is what I said, because Dungeons & Dragons was a game that just, it came out and completely revolutionized the game industry in the same way where, like, role-playing didn't exist, and then a couple years later, like, all these role-playing games existed.

It just was this new thing you had never seen before, and just people took to it. It's funny now that Wizards' two biggest products are Magic and Dungeons & Dragons, because they are, in a lot of ways, very similar in the way they function. And I remember saying to him, I'm like, this is the thing.

This is not just a random game. This is going to pave the way. And one of the real neat things is, if you look at the evolution of games since then, Magic has spawned, or influence is probably a better word. Magic has had a huge influence in the creation of other games. You look at the deck-building games like Dominion and that kind of style of stuff, that was very heavily influenced.

Donald Vaccarino, or Donald Lex as I know him, someone I knew from way back when who was very big into Magic back in the day, and you could just see the influence of Magic on that game, I mean, very much. Or something like Seven Wonders, which is built around drafting, and there's a whole bunch of games now in which it takes the component of drafting, and very much you can see how that sort of came from a lot of the influence of magic. I've talked a lot about how George Phan and making Plants vs. Zombies, which is a video game of just the mana system,

that it's funny how if you look around and just see the footprints of magic and making Plants vs. Zombies, which is a video game of just the mana system. It's funny how if you look around and just see the footprints of magic and design all around, that it's a very influential game. It's funny because I talked recently in a podcast that I talked about being in the GDC, and I said that one of the things that's fascinating is magic is very, very popular among people who make games,

and the reason is that it's a primer in game making. That it's a game that says to you, the game player, hey, you can make a game. Let's make a game. And I think one of the reasons that Magic sort of took off like it did was it's not one game. I talk about this all the time. That it really says to the person who's playing the game, what kind of game

would you like this to be? And it gives you a lot of control in a way that most games don't do that can be daunting, but once you understand it, it's amazing. That if you want to play a certain style of play, you can. And if you want to play a different thing,

you can. Early on, for example, I'm a Johnny thing you can like what early on for example i'm a johnny and like one of my early experiences with magic is i had great joy just making crazy wacky decks and showing them off and just a lot of the reputation i had early on was marxist creative guy look what he can do and that was a lot of fun for me that people used to love to play my decks because they were you know i used to make, ironically, one of my things in the early days, because I wrote an article about the duels about this, is I used to make two decks to play against

each other, so that when you come, I go, okay, you know, here's this experience. Ironically, I was doing early duel decks, where it was like, okay, here's an experience, pick your deck, and these two decks are fine-tuned to play against each other, and they would do crazy, weird things, and there'd be a lot of one-offs, and they would just be fun things to play, and I think a lot of the things that endeared me to magic was that magic allowed allowed itself

to be the game i wanted it to be where somebody else could play it and it got to be the game they wanted it to be magic is a chameleon that ways and i think that's one of its greatest strengths is that magic has this flexibility to be the game you want it to be. And it can be different games for different people. But anyway, my friends, that is the story of how magic came to be. So a little coffin to my side.

Hopefully you guys enjoyed kind of hearing magic's origin story. I think that every... I love telling a good origin tale and so today was your chance to hear magic

but I'm now parked in the parking space so we all know what that means we mean this is the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys next time