Think Like A Game Designer - Peter Adkison — Building Gen Con, Empowering Game Designers, and the Thrill of Gathering the Gaming Tribe (#30)

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Peter Adkison is not just a cornerstone of the gaming industry; he's the force behind revolutionizing it. As the founder of Wizards of the Coast, he introduced the world to phenomena like Magic: The Gathering and reinvigorated Dungeons & Dragons, shaping modern gaming. Now, as the owner of Gen Con and the creative mind at Chaldea Studios, he's melding gaming with filmmaking. In this episode, we explore Peter's unparalleled journey, insights from founding to selling a company, and his continual passion for innovation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Okay, everybody, before we get into today's episode, I just want to share something I am so excited about. As I'm recording this, we are days away from long.

the newest Kickstarter for Stoneblade Entertainment, SoulForge Fusion. Now, for those of you that don't know what SoulForge Fusion is, it is a reimagining of the digital trading card game SoulForge that I co-designed with Richard Garfield, and we have now turned it into a physical hybrid deck game. What is a hybrid deck game you ask? Great question. We've taken the concept of unique deck printing, digital deck printing, and combine that with the jump start or smash-up shuffle building idea. So you can have completely unique decks that are algorithmically generated by new technology that we've developed,

and you take any two half decks that you have and you smash them together, and you play a 100% unique experience. SoulForge as a game has the core elements of your cards level up as you play them, so the cards you play actually transform and get replaced with higher-level cards as you play them. There's strategic lane-based combat, lots of battle, cool creatures, cool spells. There's tons of awesome stuff here, and I worked directly with Richard again on this revamp, this re-imagined. If that's something that sounds cool to you, I can't get into all the details here because I know you're here for the episode, but if you want to know more or you're interested in being along for the ride and seeing some of the design articles and behind the scenes images,

go to stoneblade.com slash soulforge. That's stoneblade.com forward slash S-O-L-F-R-G-E and sign up to find out more. Thanks. In today's episode, I speak with Peter Atkinson. Peter is a legend of the gaming industry. And when I say legends of the gaming industry, I think it really just doesn't do quite enough justice. The truth is that the gaming industry, as we know it today,

would not exist without Peter. Peter is the founder and the first CEO of Wizards of the Coast and was responsible for not only bringing Magic the Gathering to the marketplace, but also distributing the Pokemon trading card game during its height, and eventually purchased Dungeons and Dragons and was able to revitalize that brand. And Peter is now the current owner of GenCon,

which is the largest tabletop gaming convention in the United States and becomes a huge hub for where all new games come out and where communities can come together. And so Peter has touched everybody's life that's listening to this almost certainly in one way or another. And he's also touched my life very directly. He's been a mentor of mine for many years. This interview is actually the first one I was able to do in person,

and I was doing it at Peter's studio at Caldea Studios. He's now making films and doing role-playing games and translating them into dynamic films that he's streaming live on Twitch. We talk about that a bit in the episode. But we really talk about the origins and Peter's interest in gaming and how his first products really were started to be driven

by the practicalities of just making role-playing games as his one true love weren't quite there and how magic got originated and then how that all comes full circle. And he ends up purchasing TSR and becoming responsible for shepherding his true love of Dungeons and Dragons into the modern era. And you can really get a sense of how good a human being Peter is. We talk about what it's like to sell your company when he sold his company to Hasbro. We talk about all the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of being a part of a company that grows and then leaving that company and then leaving that company and then starting another one with Hidden City games and starting other projects.

And so he's got such a breadth of experience. But the thing that I know from having spent so much time with him and I know everybody that's worked with him is just how good of a human being and a soul he is in addition to being a great business person and gamer. And Peter really revitalized my belief in what business and gaming can be. That just because you want to succeed in business doesn't mean you have to leave behind the community and the goodwill and the whole reason why we got into gaming in the first place. And so I am really excited to get to share this talk with you. It's always a pleasure for me to get to talk and spend time with Peter. and I'm excited to be able to now share that with you. So without further ado, here is Peter Atkinson.

Hello and welcome. I'm here with Peter Atkinson. Peter, it's great to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. What an honor. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I usually start these interviews kind of in the conversations

talking about your origin story. And while I want to get to that, I actually am going to start kind of at the end here because this is the first time I'm doing an interview with someone face to face for this podcast. And because we're able to do that because we are in your studio, the Caldea Studios, which is pretty cool. Maybe talk a little bit about that, your latest project and we'll work our way backwards this time. Sure, sure. Yeah, I can walk backwards. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so what I'm doing is called Caldia. It is we're telling a big epic fantasy story.

That's our goal. And Caldea is my old Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which I started back in 1980 and have been DMing ever since. And our goal was to craft a story set in this world, pulled from real adventures that happened throughout the last 40 years, but also adding our own stuff. And the story is a mixture of live action film. And here at Caldea Studios, we do live action films every once in a while,

but it's very expensive to do like a big story that way, you know, has all the complexities of a period piece and then plus monsters of magic. So it's fantasy is expensive. So we do short films that we stick into the story. Most of the story is told through comic book art with a full sound treatment,

voiceover from actors, sound effects, musical score, on all that stuff because sound is a lot cheaper than video. Yeah, so I'm actually really glad we started there now because there's a couple of key threads that I have noticed, and I've known you for a long time now, but I have noticed that run through really your entire career. Dungeon Dragons, of course, being one of them, right?

This was, to use the terminology of Richard Garfield, in terms to the radioactive spider bite, right, that got you excited about games and got you into this industry in the first place. But, you know, you are, you know, were the founder and CEO of the Coast. You are, while you do design games and craft role-playing experiences, used to yourself more as the business person and the, you know, the force behind it.

And I don't know if people noticed while they were listening, but the, you sort of already talked about, well, I want to bring this creative vision to life, but I want, I need to, but it's too expensive to do this way. And so how can I get the most bang for my buck to be able to say, okay, let's tell this story as a mix of live action and, and, uh, and, uh, animation or, uh, comic books. And how can I build something that works within a budget? And, and that's actually something that I think a lot of designers, don't think about, but it's super powerful. And in fact, as I recall, and maybe you can tell this story, right,

when Richard Garfield first approached you to make a game or with a game, he brought you Robo Rally, but you asked for something that was a little bit cheaper to make. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Simpler, you know, like magic to gather. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a saying, could strengths breed creativity, and I'm a big believer in that. And so, and I want to rush in to say,

trying to steal anything from Richard as being the person who designed magic and had the great epiphany of a trading card game but I did give him some constraints to work with I said I want a card game no other components just cards with a fantasy or science fiction theme and he he took it from there and created magic yeah yeah right so that's that's amazing to think about it wasn't it wasn't just this oh blue sky I can make anything I want do whatever I want but that the constraints breed creativity, which is something I have absolutely found. And it's something where I recommend for new designers is artificially put constraints on yourself.

Like find ways if you don't have someone external force to do that, then make them for yourself, create short deadlines, produce, you know, pitch, find a, there's plenty of these design pitch programs out there where it can say, okay, design a game that only uses 12 cards and has a theme about nature. And just like, okay, the difference of one, even just listening to that, right, your brain starts moving in certain directions as opposed to just go make a game. a game is a much more like much more intimidating kind of process well and and constraints of can we make this economically that's a really practical constraint yes yes it most certainly is and so

so what maybe let's now we can kind of you know rewind the clock a little bit's there so you've you started uh we were working at Boeing I believe at the time and then you decided you wanted to start making games where did you know did you have savings that you put into that How did you decide what your economic constraints were going to be? Well, we knew that we didn't have much money ourselves. I came from a very poor background, Justin. I was raised on a farm in Idaho. Most of my, I didn't know anybody who was wealthy, really,

didn't know even how to raise money. So, but our constraints at the beginning were to just do role-playing game products, role-playing game supplements and to do them fairly cheap, fairly modestly, and kind of bootstrap from there. We didn't know a lot of things. I mean, a lot of things we did not know how to do. But the sense was we had to do this pretty economically. And we raised some money from friends and family

and friends of family and that sort of thing. But, yeah, it was pretty modest expectations for what we wanted to do. So maybe walk me through that process a little bit because to say, hey, I love role-playing games. I want to make some role-playing game supplements to the best of my knowledge. that's not the best of business models. Fortunately, we were completely unaware of that.

Right. Okay. Yeah, it wasn't a great business strategy. It got us into business, which meant that I eventually met Richard Garfield, and then we're able to craft a real strategy around a good game. But no, this was, it was just a passion. It was just like, hey, we want to do this. We want to make these supplements.

We were, I will say, we were well qualified in terms of, of the content, we were all avid RPG players and thought ourselves as RPG designers. And we just kind of dived in. It was more luck than brains, to be honest. Well, I mean, yes, luck is, of course, to have the tier of success that you guys did, that there's some luck has to be involved.

But I think there's a lot of core principles here that are really meaningful and stuff that I've heard echoed from successful designers and business people across everybody I've talked to on this podcast and beyond, that, you know, finding something that you're passionate about is so critical, right, that you care enough to overcome the infinite challenges that are in your future, that you don't know what those challenges are, right? You thought that maybe designing RPG supplements was going to be a fine business, and you

had to hit that wall and be like, oh, no, wait, something, that's not quite right. So what, how do we pivot to be able to do that? And so how, maybe, like, I'm curious how long that path when, what, how long did it take for you to feel like, okay, no, this is. the right direction and then start shifting gears. Right. Well, one thing that happened, I think two things that really kind of led to us shifting and pivoting. One is that the RPG market declined in early 90s from where it was. And so even though we had hired somebody who was experienced in the industry, Lisa Stevens,

who went on to found Paiso, you know, a decade later, based on the forecast that we had, turned out that we were not hitting those numbers. And so we learned that the RPG market was not really a good market unless you have one of the market leaders. And so, you know, Dungeons and Dragons. And when we eventually exited the category, I remember saying, well, unless we had Dungeons and Dragons, this category is not worth being in. Which was a nice foreshadowing sort of thing to say. Yes. Obviously, we did acquire Dungeons and Dragons. And I would have called a vampire to masquerade and a couple other RPGs in that category.

The other thing that happened was that we did get magic gathering with Richard. Richard came up with this hit game and we launched it and it did really, really incredibly well. And so then it was like, okay, then it was kind of obvious. Like, okay, you've got this hit game that's making a lot of money, but you're spending all this time on this line of other products that aren't making money. You know, you just have to be honest with what the data is and walk away from it. Yeah, so yeah, let's unpack data a little bit here because I think this is a very tough thing for a lot of people, right? You said, I heard you say that you made projections for what you expected to sell in the RPG space, and you didn't hit those projections.

About how long from, you know, of that runway did you have before you said, okay, this isn't working? Yes, we had, well, we knew right out of the gate that our initial sales were not hitting projections. but then you think, well, maybe that's marketing, nobody is who we are, that sort of thing. And so you keep at it for a few months and see if numbers come up if the market responds and people start to really like the games. And I would say it took us about a year to really figure out that this is not working. But it was weird, you know, it's challenging in that it was, what do you do when it's kind of working? Right, right. No, that's actually, that is absolutely right. That's the hardest part, right?

I said the same thing when I'm testing a new game design and you're in the core design loop. If you get feedback that's, obviously, if you get feedback, that's great, phenomenal, keep going. But if you get feedback that's terrible, it's like this is not working at all, that's also great. Because you know to abandon that idea and move to something else. It's that wishy-washy middle ground feedback. The game's selling kind of okay. If your playtesters are like, me, it's fine, I kind of like it. Then what do you do? How do you go forward? Do you cut bait? You know, that's that's very tough. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we're kind of for a while in this mode of like, well, it's, it's not enough to go out and get an office, you know, and have company cars or whatever, right?

But as long as we're working in the basement of my house and there's just like four or five of us and everybody's working kind of part time, we're living a dream, man. We got these RPG markets on the market. And one thing is that with the prime order, we always got great reviews. Like, okay, the sales weren't great, but they were good enough that we went back and got a reprint. You know, we sold like 10,000 copies to the prime order over in the first three or four years, which isn't bad for an RPG product that's outside of Dungeons and Dragons. Right. Especially in the 90s.

So it wasn't a clear signal either. way for quite some time so and and then at the same time as you're doing this you decide to to print magic or is it yeah so I you know I think I had an instinct early on from within a few months of release that this strategy of having an RPG every RPG supplements was something yeah that maybe I could do in the base when a house and make a little bit of money and be okay but that if we really wanted to make good money in this industry and really create a business here as opposed to a hobby, we needed to come up with something else.

And so I did start looking pretty proactively at other possibilities in the world of Tabletop Gaming, and that led me to Richard Garfield and led us to magic and so on. So maybe just unpacking that too. What does proactive looking look like? What are you doing? So for me, proactive meant at that time Usenet was like the internet just becoming a thing. and Usenet became this big hangout for people who were in the games. And so it's kind of like forums online for discussion. And so I started hanging out a lot on Usenet as a way to meet other designers and proselyize about what I was doing, look for other ideas.

And I would go to conventions, mostly local conventions in the Seattle area because they didn't have enough money to travel. And that was how I met Richard Garfield. I met Richard Garfield through Mike Davis, who was his partner in Robo Raleigh at the time, and that limited to Richard. Yeah, so obviously, you know, Usenet may not be the modern equivalents, but there's plenty of groups, you know, Reddit, Facebook, there's plenty of Discord channels, as well as, of course, in-person conventions like GenCon,

which we'll talk more about later, I'm sure, are great places to meet and connect and learn more about an industry or connect with fellow people who you might be able to. help you or, you know, contribute and add value to those communities so that you become better known and that you can, you know, better promote your own stuff down the road as well, or people might recruit you for things. So all that stuff makes a lot of sense. And so, so you've, you've asked Richard for this, you know, make me a card game that I can, you know, doesn't have a lot of components that I can play in between rounds of Dungeons and Dragons.

Right. Yeah, I said, I want a short game you can play while you're waiting for your dungeon master to show up. it is amazing to me that story and you very quickly now realize like okay this is there's something special here and I'm willing to invest in getting that done now for anybody out there that's thinking about making a trading card game I've also made several

it can be very expensive right it's a lot of art that's required and you didn't have a lot of money back then so you got kind of creative with that too I believe yes that's right we had a lot of challenges to create the first trading card game art was one of them, although art was also part of what stimulated the idea going to local conventions. In those days, fantasy art did not have a lot of outlets for getting published. Like, if you were a fantasy artist, there weren't many, many ways that you could get your art into the public eye.

And so I was noticing that at conventions like NorthwestCon here in Seattle area, there was a lot, there were artists that nobody had ever heard of that were producing great art. And so that was actually part of the idea for magic with the constraints. I said, hey, a card game, I think I know where we could get art pretty cost effectively. And that turned out to be correct. We got the art pretty, although Magic the Gather needed a lot more art than when I was envisioning. But yes, that's true. Yeah.

And so it's, I just, I like kind of telling these stories because, you know, especially, you know, with your story where, you know, created basically the biggest tabletop game in the history of, the world, as far as I can tell, from pure metrics. And it is, you know, not having a ton of money, having to solve, you know, build around constraints, having to, you know, sort of get creative and find where there's these, these, these niches in the market, being willing to kill your babies, right, too, also, like when you realize, like, you know, your love for RPGs far out strips your love for trading card games in general, I would imagine. And being able to say, no, no, this is the, this is the, this is the, this is the past.

path. That's not an easy thing. And I think a lot of people get hung up on this vision that they have of this is what it's supposed to be. This is what I need to build. And if they can't or the market doesn't respond, then they, you know, give up or they keep beating their head against the same wall. What advice do you have for people out there that might be, you know, unsure if they're in that, they're in that wishy-washy phase or they're not sure how to get the feedback they want or when to decide to pivot versus, you know, try to build, keep going. Well, for me, there was this moment where it was a question, am I building a hobby or a business? And that was the question I had to ask myself. Am I going to make decisions based on my personal artistic expression of what it is I want to make? Which, okay, double down on the RPGs and make it work and keep small and maybe you'll be able to support yourself someday. or do I really want to create a business and play the game of business? If I'm going to do that, then I've got to put those personal artistic things aside. Don't forget about your creativity.

Use the creativity to help you come up with ideas and help you weigh in on various decisions that get made. And sure, don't detact from your personal loves. But if it's about a business, then it's like, okay, how do we maximize shareholder value? How do we write smart business plans and raise money? And what are the right businesses to be in and write games to publish and make those analysts? So I just saw it very much as a Boolean sort of question. It's either go left or go right. And I chose the business route.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's not a right or wrong answer, you know, objectively there for people that want to just make games that they just want their own vision to come through. That's cool. But, you know. Well, I think there is a moral obligation if you've accepted money. And so because I raised money to do, initially, RPGs, I felt that I had a moral ethical obligation to the people that invested money to maximize the return. So I felt like the business choice was also the ethical choice from that precept.

If it was, yes, if it was entirely self-funded, then, or maybe if you had one investor that was more like a patron of the arts and just like, oh, I believe in you, Peter. Go ahead and do this same thing. And I did have a couple investors like that who probably would have supported me no matter what. But it was raising money. Now you have a different set of moral guideposts. Yeah, that's also, I think, really interesting. One, I can absolutely relate. Having gone through the process of both crowdfunding games and raising capital for games,

it changes the equation dramatically. The difference of how I feel when it's my own money on the line versus somebody else's money in the line is night and day. Right. I have to now I owe these people. I owe, you know, doing everything in my power to make sure that they get a return on their investment. And so it's something I actually do advise people now. Before you take in money, make sure that your interests are aligned. And I don't care if that's crowdfunding, in which case, you know, you need to deliver something that the backers you're going to love and you're capable of doing so.

Or if it's venture funding and you are, you know, the kind of people that are going to want, you know, 10x or 100 X return or nothing, right? That was the other trick, right? I raised money and people who had raised money from, we're wanting to get, you know, go big or go home. And I would be perfectly happy going medium. Right. I'm happy to just make some money and keep making doing what I do. And that, I didn't realize that until it was a little too late.

I didn't either. I fell for the same thing. Yeah. Same issue. So, so it's a, in many ways, it's a, it's a trap to think I need to raise money. I need to do all of these things. Well, it's interesting. You mentioned the crowdfunding.

We didn't have crowdfunding then. So that was, you know, a fork in the road that didn't enter my mental calculations. Because I think the crowdfunding situation, isn't about maximizing the value of your company. It's about maximizing the value of that particular product, that particular offering, right? Yeah, I love, I love what crowdfunding has done to the game industry. I mean, it just changes exactly.

Like, you can have interest aligned. Like, I, you know, we did the Ascension Tactics Kickstarter last year. And it was not a game I could, it's like, you know, miniatures in general are very like high up front costs. It's not a game I could have justified building, certainly not the way that we did on its own, but with a, with the, you know, backers being able to raise enough. that we could just build the most awesome thing that I could imagine.

And, you know, as of recording this, it's very, very close to actually getting shipped out. And I'm, uh, that it's, it's amazing what it's been able to do. Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. I agree. Crowdsourcing has been a great overall net net, huge benefit to our community. So, yeah, thinking about and, you know, this sort of just ties back to the way you phrased it, which is like playing the game of business. And that's absolutely how I think about it, right?

running a company is, you know, you're trying, okay, I'm trying to, you know, manage the resources that I have and I want to maximize the returns, whether that be for shareholders, for customers, for your employees, right? And there's something else that you mentioned here. And I think it maybe it's good to dig into, which is, you know, it's the ethical thing to do. And I'm going to tell my own little story involving you because I first started working in the game industry at a company that the CEO was not the most ethical person. And I didn't, as I kind of got to know him better and I got to know the space better, I really had a fear that that was just how business was done, right?

People would just backstab each other, right? The classic kind of idea of the Wall Street greedy person. And then I got to know you a little bit better. And you struck me as one of the kindest and most ethically focused people I had ever met and really restored my faith in what business could be like and what the industry can be like. And, you know, there were several other people that were also like this. But how did that come about for you?

Like, do you, when you face these sort of challenges, or you're ever tempted to be like, oh, no, no, we have to go and maximize shareholder or out there and screw people over. Like, it just radiates off of you. And I'd love to just hear more about how that's affected your business life. Well, first I'll jump to that. But I got to jump in and say this idea that thinking that you had to be that way to be a business person, I went through exactly.

that. I went through exactly this thing of like, well, I will never be good, great at being a CEO because I just can't bring myself to be like unscrupulous. I mean, I was raised in a rural farming community. Not only did I not have any business background, I had what I would call anti-business background, which was a family and culture where money was evil, rich people were evil, business people were evil. And so I always just figured, well, this is just going to be a disadvantage to me. But I think actually that wasn't true, it turned out to be an advantage that you, for the long game, as people get to know you and realize that you're an ethical business person, they're more likely to do business with you. They're more likely they're not

going to try and screw you on things. They're more likely to appreciate a fair offer and say, okay, Peter's being fair as opposed to like, what's the hidden thing here, right? And so, but it is absolutely the case that you have an ethical requirement to your shareholders and you have ethical requirements to your community, to your employees, to your business relationships, and all these things have to balance together. And those are, especially when it comes to profit versus employees, balancing the ethical responsibility you feel to all of these parties, is where the hard decisions come, and there's no easy answer.

And sometimes you're going to make a decision that you regret later or which you didn't have to make. You have to think of the long-term. The other thing about protecting your shareholders and the company's value, it allows you to be an employer longer and ultimately employ more people. And so if you have to make a short-term decision that seems to be on the surface of compromising your commitment to your employees in the name of profit, if it's really about the business surviving, it means that you'll be able to do a better service to your employees in the longer term. Yeah, yeah.

And that is a very hard lesson that I've also had to go through, right? Letting people go and it's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing. It is the hardest thing. Letting people go is the hardest thing in business. And so, you know, it's just the, you know, especially it feels like in the game industry, but I'm sure this is true everywhere where, you know, you feel like family, right? You're working together towards common goals that you really care about.

You're all kind of like pulling. And there's this implied promise of like, hey, when we all succeed, we all succeed together. But also sometimes we're not all succeeding or sometimes someone is, even if the company is succeeding, somebody is not adding value that, you know, they're taking in their functionally that means they're taking away value from other people. Or another thing that I've learned and maybe we can dive into two is like the power of culture and how corrosive, if there's even one person at your company, that is not, you know, they have a negative attitude towards things.

They're not working as hard as everybody else. Then other people will look at that person and be like, well, why should I work hard? Why should I be positive? Yeah, it's not fair to the rest. You have to fix those problems. And those problems are painful to fix. It's always painful let somebody go or put them on some sort of disciplinary action or what. whatever it takes. But that's, I, while it's painful, I don't feel an ethical quandary over it.

Like that is just something that has to be done for the greater good of the rest of the employees. And so I always, when I'm in those situations, I imagine the other employees standing behind me when I'm having that difficult conversation with an employee that's having a difficult time living up to what they need to do. I just imagine everybody else rooting for me, you know? Yeah. That's how I get through. The other thing that I didn't realize until kind of years later, I remember I was once having a conversation with Tom Kirby, who was the founder and CEO of Games Workshop for many years. And I mentioned something about the game industry in this conversation.

And he says, oh, there's no game industry. I'm like, what? Of course there's a game. He's like, no, it's not a proper industry. And I really kind of found that comment irksome. You know, it took me years later to really come around to agreeing with him, the problem with our industry, tabletop games specifically, not necessarily electronic games, is that somebody finds their dream job in the tabletop games industry and then it doesn't work out. Oftentimes, they don't find another job.

Like, it's not like an industry where you can just like, oh, I work at the Hyatt and I lose my job, I can cross the street and start working at the Marriott. I mean, there's so many stories, so many people I've worked with over the last 30 years. years who worked in the game industry who weren't able to find a second job in this industry. Yeah, but is that, I mean, is that, would the same argument apply that that means the entertainment industry is not an, is not an industry? Right. Like if you're in, if you're an actor, right? A lot of actors try and they never get back, you get one gig and then they don't get to act again.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, you're choosing the flakiest of all. I mean, acting is, is hard. But I mean, but if you're a crew, if you've got, even in this small, uh, Seattle, is a small town when it comes to filming. If you've got a reputation of being a good gaffer, then you're going from project to project. Right, but isn't that the thing, the reputation of being good at what you do,

is that the key here? Because that's where, to me, it's like any industry where, and I've definitely pushed back here because I'm interested in the topic, but like any industry where you're in high demand, right, it's an industry that's appealing to a lot of people, whether that's acting or music or gaming, right there's going to be a lot of competition and if you're not you know consistent and good at what you do

then it might be hard to make a living doing that yeah but my sense is that other industries that are bigger have more of a tolerance for some level some degree of mediocrity I would say and I and I think that there are people that have been really good at writers maybe not game designers I don't know the game design is its own path it's often a solitary independent path but I think employees who find themselves working at a good company like a Wizards of the Coast and have a good salary and good benefits and they lose that job have a lot of trouble finding another company to that's just my own experience of what I've seen. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, and there's been a lot of overlaps now between the tabletop game industry and the digital gaming industry, which of course has grown enormously and still shocks me that both continue to grow enormously. I thought tabletop gaming might have gotten eating. eaten alive by all the digital games that's out there, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Oh, it's so good that it hasn't. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm grateful for it. Believe me, I think a lot about that. I just so lucky that the thing I'm passionate about happens to still be a great passion of many

other people, and that we now can teach people game design and continue to have new people grow and make new things. And there's more games now than there have ever been before. It's like, it's hooray, hurry universe. Yeah, no, I, you know, I cut my teeth in the 90s, right? Wizards for me, my time at Wizards of the Coast was almost exactly the 90s. And that was when computer games were becoming huge. And MMOs were just starting at the very end of that with EverQuest. And that was the fear was that the legitimate fear like, oh, our computer game is going to completely replace tabletop games.

Is this category? Games like Magic, Gathering Dungeons and Dragons as tabletop games, are they going to be completely gone, you know, within 10, 20 years? And it's so nice that that didn't happen. Yeah, it's created this interesting kind of synergy where, of course, now, you know, both Dungeons and Dragons and Magic have online elements and online ways to play, but that has only increased the physical game. And the same was true for my game for Ascension when I was really nervous when we released the app, right? You could buy a game, a box of Ascension for $40 and takes you about 30, 45 minutes to play.

Or you can get the app for free, play it in five minutes. I was like, oh, well, I'm doomed, right? I'm just going to give away my, all the store. And as it turns out, the exact opposite, right? I don't think Ascension would still be around today, if not for the app. And people who play the app then say, okay, cool. Now maybe I'll check out the physical game. Congratulations on that game, by the way.

Thanks. That was great. Thanks. Well, well, you were... Well done. Bravo. Well, done. Yeah.

You were mentoring me through some of that process when we were first getting it in. So I appreciated the help, and it's exciting to... But you mentioned computer games, you know, and not trying to belabor this point about transferability of jobs within our industry. I recently did a segment of Fireside, weekly, interview. It's kind of like a podcast, but we did on video here. And I interviewed a whole bunch of people that I had met who worked at TSR back in the 80s and early 90s who migrated Wizard of the Coast. And most of them were either now not working in our industry anymore

or have moved to computer games. And so computer games has become the safety net, I think, to some extent, for table-top games. Yeah, yeah. There's huge amounts of crossover. In fact, you know, being here here in Seattle for the month, I've met with tons of of my friends who all used to be in the tabletop industry are now making digital games or apps or whatnot. So there's a huge amount of crossover there. So I brought up TSR again and of course this has been I couldn't live with myself if I didn't get to hear this story on the podcast that you know for someone who grew up and fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons and started trying to make games or role-playing supplements but said no you know what this doesn't make sense unless

it's Dungeons and Dragons. Tell me the story about acquiring Dungeons and Dragons. Tell me the story about getting acquiring Dungeons and Dragons. Oh yeah, that's a great story. I mean, that is like a dream come true. That is like, I do love Magic the Gathering a lot, but you were right. My first love was always role-playing games, especially D&D. And so, you know, in the mid-90s, after Magic came out and was a big hit and started to, you know, to approach maturity, we started accumulating a lot of cash.

And so we ended up with a lot of pressure from our board and our shareholders to either start giving dividends to get cash back to the shareholders or go out and buy somebody basically find a way to use the cash or give it up and i didn't want to do that so we were starting we were on the hunt for i just i just want to pause there for a second because i this is exactly tied to into our earlier thing right when you have investors when you have shareholders right their interests now start to push you in directions maybe you don't want to go so that's really interesting that like you got all this money you got to spend it yeah it's just crazy to me well yeah put it's been wisely Put it to use, do a smart acquisition, or a smart build-out of something, you know, like game stores, or give it back to us, you know.

We own the money. We're the shareholders. So there was, we were on the hunt for smart acquisitions in the mid-90s. I approached TSR as sort of the most obvious example and was rejected politely but curtly. And then later on, now, apparently the owners really did not like me, but they didn't give me that direct impression. They eventually, the company got into a lot of trouble. TSR got in a lot of trouble in 1990. Boy, the years are blurring together. But I think the end of 1995, 1996, they made some decisions that ended up being really hurtful for them.

And they had some systemic problems in the way their company was structured. turned out to be very damaging for them when they ended up in a cash flow shortage. And so coming into 1997, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They did not give me a call directly, but Ryan Dancy, who deserves a lot of credit for making this deal happen, he was, he knew this was happening, and he was trying to put a investor group together to buy TSR. So he had established good communication lines with the former owners. But he wasn't able to quite pull it together. He wasn't able to get the capital that was needed. And so he eventually reached out to me and reached out to the TSR owners, got them to get past

this. You know, when your company is in a dire enough situation, you become, like, The possibilities that you're willing to entertain become bigger. Yes. And so Ryan, Nancy really connected us and wanted me wizards to finance him buying TSR. And I'm like, well, we're going to pay the money to buy TSR. We're going to own it. And you can come work for me. How's that?

It's like, okay, I'll do that. And so we and bought his company, you know, that was kind of commissioned on the sale. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a nice little bonus deal. Yeah, aqua hire, I think is what they call it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we made everybody whole. We worked out the deal.

There was a lot of back and forth. It was not an easy transaction. It was complex. One of those transactions where the letter of intent keeps getting expanded and expanded and expanded until it's almost the contract, right? And we got it done, I think, in May 1997. and lots of trips back to Lake Geneva, which where the headquarters of TSR were pre-WATSE acquisition,

where the birth of Dungeons and Dragons really happened. And we got it done. It was the most thrilling day of my life was, you know, we did the, we signed everything one night the next morning, okay, I'm the owner, and I'm showing up my rental car, and I sat out in front of the TSR building and just kind of had a little breakdown. down. Just like, oh my God, what have I done? And go in to face these people, wonderful people,

many of which were legends in role-playing and Dungeons and Dragons legends, you know, people like Kim Mohan and Jeff Easley and just so on. And also some really young smart talent like Monte Cook and people that would go on to great things, to go in there and say, hey, I just bought you. It's so weird. I own you now. I own you now. It's so corporate. No matter what your intentions and it was one of the best acquisitions possible in so many ways,

you still feel like something of a corporate raider of some sort. Yeah, your Darth Vader coming in and you hear the noise in the background. But fortunately, they lived in a situation for so long where it was clear that they were in a lot of trouble. I think for most of the employees there, it was more of a white knight situation. You know, it was like it was scary to be bought by the magic company based out in Seattle for a Midwest company that was a RPG company. That was certainly a scary thing. But we bought the whole company and kept it together. We relocated it to Seattle, but we kept all the pieces.

The alternative would have been that if it had been gone into bankruptcy, it would have been broken up. Probably the books would have gone to Random House. Who knows what would happen to JenCon, D&D. Who knows? Right. I mean, bankruptcy is get really messy in terms of what happens. So how do you learn about how to do all these kinds of complex contract negotiations or setting all these things up? It sounds like, I mean, this one may be the hardest one, but it's really intimidating for a lot of people when they're trying to negotiate new deals, maybe not something like buying TSR.

But like, oh, I mean, it was very complex. I mean, you have to have the right people advising you, especially, you know, business accounting and legal, right? What's the business strategy going to be? I had a great legal staff with people that we were hired to help us with the structuring of the details and so forth. And also, I was just finishing a B-school. I had gone through a period of my time at Wizards of the Coast a little earlier, where around 1994 or 1995, when Magic was doing great and I should have been on top of the world, I was very seriously depressed because I realized I was in over my hand.

I didn't know what I was doing. I had people the new words that I didn't, like balance sheet. That feels like an important one. Yeah, it seems important. Yeah. And so I went to business school, and I signed up a local University of Washington, a program that was all done that was tailored around the needs of executives who, so I was in a class with other executives.

In fact, the former CEO of Alaska Airlines just retired. He was in my class at Base School. That was fun. And so that was a two-year process. And then the last quarter of B-School was the quarter I was also acquiring TSR. And so I was feeling confident about my ability to analyze the acquisition from a business perspective and also from a financial perspective with the help. Like I felt like I knew how to enter, to ask right questions with attorneys and accountants in that.

So you recommend. So it's something I've also wrestled. So I went to law school before I became a game designer, which certainly has had its value in contract negotiations. But I have often, I had often wrestled with whether or not business school would be worth it, you know, at a certain point. And I've seen, you know, some value. I've worked actually with the Wharton School of Business and done actually some projects with them on innovation and creativity. And so it's been an interesting question for people out there that are kind of just starting in business.

If you're starting and you're small, it feels like you don't necessarily need to go to business school. But as you start to grow, maybe those skills become more powerful. It was huge for me because, again, I came from an anti-business background, if you will, and had so little knowledge of the different facets of business. But some of it is contracts and some of its accounting. I think there's a lot of nuts and bolts in business school that was very valuable for me because I had just no exposure to it. I know that there's, I mean, it's a lot of details and things, but maybe is there, you know, one to three kind of top line principles or takeaways that you got out of business school that you're like, wow, that was incredibly valuable.

For me, it was, there was one class in particular, which was called competitive strategies. And it was taught by a professor named Charles Hill, University of Washington. I highly recommend him as a professor and his work. He, this class broke down company strategies. And as a gamer, I just ate it up because it was at that moment that I started to realize, oh, this thing of business is, it's just a game. It's like a worker placement game. Like where do I put my resources?

And how are these things going to interact? And there's a scoreboard over here called, you know, shareholder value. There's other scoreboards, whichever ones you want to pick. But that one was the one I kind of lashed onto. And so to really look at the business like a game. and think of it like a game and talk about strategies just felt like I was not it appealed to my gamer heart yeah no I love that I love that and that's what it's obviously I think a lot of our audience going to be able to relate to that mentality I

know for me poker tournament poker theory became a huge part of my business strategy like this idea of you know you know even though you want to make bets that have good EV but you also don't want to put all of your money on the table if you don't have to right you don't want to necessarily go bankrupt, even if it's a good quote-unquote bet, right? The three-to-one on your money, you should be, that's a good bet, but, you know, a third of the time, you're going to lose your, you might lose your money or whatever. So there's a, you know, managing all that sort of stuff in gameplay and, of course,

even my time playing professional magic, definitely taught me a lot about strategy that seemed like it crossed over. And I think it's really interesting to see it come across from the other side, the business school treats it the same way. Another aspect of kind of CEO dumb and management that I am really fascinated about is the difference, you know, it's one thing when it's just, obviously, if it's just you, right, you can manage yourself one way. If you've got a small team of people, maybe up to 10, 12 people where you can, you know, kind of know everybody and know what they're doing. And, you know, there's a certain type of management that's required there. And then you start to scale up again and it gets into the 30s or maybe the hundreds.

and I don't know where where Wizards was when you when you finally left. How big did it get? We had over 1,000 employees when I left, but that's because we had a retail arm and retail has lots of employees. Right. Right. So in terms of the headquarters, what you would think of as, Wizards of the Coast, and making games and marketing and stuff like that, we were around 250.

Okay. All right. So huge, huge numbers. And there was a period where my company got up into the 30s and I realized I, was not ready to manage even at that tier. Like I had just this different style of management that's required managing the culture, managing through metrics. And I'm curious how that transition was like for you

or what tips you might have for people who are starting to kind of juggle bigger teams and how do you work with that? Well, you know, it's always having, when you're hiring a course, the skill set of the employee, prospective employee, is really critical. And of course, social fit and all these other things and work ethics, there's so many factors that you look for. At the executive level, hiring people that can manage an area of the

company, like a manager or a director or an executive, becomes even harder because the social skills are more demanding, the management skills they have to have. And there's the management skills that are needed at each level organization to be in the size of the organization shift. And so I read a really interesting article boy and I'm hopefully it would be some work to figure out what it was but there was an interesting diagram about what are the skills at a supervisor needs what are the skills that a mid-manager needs and what are the skills and executive needs and turns out these skills are pretty hard to interview for and so we had a lot of churn at the executive level and management level trying to find the right person for the right job and then I think for the

CEO level like yourself I think for me it really came really started to work well once I had a really good number two and and then it was like well what does the number two person have you don't want to give them all the responsibility because you know if your only report is the number two person it's too easy to clip that off and you're not needed anymore right so what are the responsibilities that a that a senior executive has in your in your organization and what are the responsibilities you keep for yourself and there's not turns out it was very liberating to find out that it wasn't one solution for that it really depends

what's his or her skills and what's your skills and what's the best marriage of those two things? Yeah, absolutely. The way I like to look at it is I always think, I always ask people, either when I'm hiring or even periodically when we kind of do reviews, it's like, what are your superpowers, right? What are the three? And when I say superpowers, I mean, you know, typically it's around three things that you love to do, that you're good at doing and that people need done, right? That are like, you know, valuable skills for them. You know, when you find the sort of circle of those Venn diagrams, that's where your superpowers live. And any time that you can spend doing things within that sphere of your superpowers, phenomenal.

Any time you spend doing anything that's not within that fear of your superpowers is a cost. Not that you can't, right? You still have to do things. But you want to minimize how much time you're spending that are outside of your super sphere. And I found that to be a really powerful way to frame it because it's easy as a CEO or anybody that's a game designer, or somebody's starting things out, right, to want to do everything. And if it's just, you know, you don't have any budget to hire anybody and it's just on your own. You know, that's sometimes that's what you got to do.

You got to do all the heavy lifting and figure it out. But over time, being able, realizing that the more you can hand off something to somebody else when it's not going to be your superpower, even if they're worse at it than you. That's actually the tricky counterintuitive insight, right? Like you could do something at 80 percent and somebody else can do it at 60 percent. But if it frees you up to do the thing you can do at 100 percent, that can still. that can still be a really good trade-off for you, which is something that took me a really long time to figure out as well. So I want to transition into another topic, which I love,

well, it's close to my heart because I go every year. It's something I recommend that everybody attends who's interested in gaming, which is Gen Con. Woo-hoo, the best four days in gaming. So you are the owner of GenCon now. I don't remember the exact story if you bought it back from Wizards about how long ago, so maybe we'll start with that story.

Yeah, yeah. I said, Jen Con, first of all, I love this business. I love Jen Con. I'm glad it warms my heart, but you say you like it so much. Sometimes I say I love this convention so much, I bought it twice. What happened is, yes, when we bought TSR back in 1997,

Jencom was the icing on the cake. Of course, we were after Dungeons and Dragons, but it was always like, oh, and Janecom. con that's that's really cool too and so when I sold the company to Hasbro you know I sold all of it right you know so the next day I own nothing right right but on my way out the door I told Vince who was my number two I said hey at some point Hasbro was going to realize that for them some of this stuff is off strategy maybe they know already and they're being nice and they're not telling us and when that

day comes and they start to divest anything here that they don't want it let me know because I've got all this money, maybe I would be interested in buying something, and I would be an informed buyer. And so, yeah, it was about a year later that I got this call from Vince, and he said, you know, he listed, yeah, we're selling four businesses, you know. Are you interested in the magazines? No. Are you interested in retail? No. Are you interested in the online store? No. Are you interested in Jankon? Jankon? Well, how much?

So, yeah, so we made a deal and we got Jen Con and that was in 2001. And I have partners. I'm not the sole owner, but I've been the largest shareholder ever since. Yeah, that's really exciting. And I want to dig more into Jen Con because I think it's got a unique place in gaming culture. But I also just, we kind of fast forwarded through the Zelda Hasbro. And I got to know like what a, A, Like what made you decide that it was time to sell, right?

This was like company you built from the ground up. And then maybe we'll get into like what that day felt like. Yeah. Well, it was, I think for me, as I got into this business to make games and to, yes, I wanted to play the game as a business, you know, play the game business game. There you go. But I never, Wizards got to the point where I didn't see any way. that made sense business-wise to make games other than big hits like the India Magic.

I mean, like, we would do other games, and especially once Pokemon came along, because a lot of people forget, Wizards. We had Pokemon for several years, and worldwide, and we were making a lot of money. In fact, Pokemon was so profitable that Magic was small in comparison, which made D&D really small. And so to come out with a new board game, you know, whatever Richard's newest game was. There was nothing I wanted more than to say, yes, let's publish this game.

In fact, I did. Richard came up with a game. There was no question. We're going to publish it. I don't care what you think. But there was a point where it clearly became that we were publishing games or wanting to publishing games that were tiny, infinitesimal amount of business compared to that. And so the lesson I had to learn was that every business has a level,

that it operates at efficiently. And Wizards had gotten to the point where it wasn't efficient for us to do games that were less than $30 million a year. And we used that number because it barely let D&D qualify. So if this was not going to be a $30 million a year business, we're not going to do it. And because we were efficient at doing $100 to a billion

business. That's where we were at. And so I did. I didn't want to be running a company that couldn't do just whatever sorts of games. And it's just, this is also just a fascinating insight that I'm guessing is going to be really counterintuitive to a lot of people that are out there because it's like, hey, you could make this game and it would make you $20 million. And it would cost, you know, maybe it costs whatever, some less than that to make. That as a business, if you're at a certain scale, it's a, it's actually a bad idea to make that game. Right, right.

Because those resources could be spent in. instead to increase the growth of these bigger properties or make these bigger launches. And that's like crazy to think about as an aspiring, you know, business person designer, whenever I was like, I'll take that business, no problem. Yeah, yeah. We would have like, you know, I remember one of the wake-up calls was we'd have a staff meeting where we get all the heads of all the business lines together and there were like 20 of us. And afterwards one day our attorney, our house counsel, and he was very single.

senior person who I really respected a lot. And he said, you know, we go around that table and the person who's running magic gets the same amount of time as a person that's running the Dueless magazine. I'm like, you know, is that a really a reflection of our priorities? And first of all, thank you for being balls enough to tell me that. And you're absolutely right. So it's a matter of priorities. It's a matter that you just can't be efficient. And in the other, example from my number two that I hired who helped me run the company. He was a retired Boeing executive, and he said that Boeing went to the same thing. And they scratched every business that wasn't making $100 million a year in revenue.

Yep. Yep. I've heard the same story from Activision, where they're exactly the same. I know people who've worked on game projects, they launched it, and it did, you know, $20 million, and it was killed immediately. Like, it's a terrible, terrible mistake. Yeah. And it was like, wow.

Yeah. And you're sitting here. And so envisioning my future was, you know, I stayed around long enough to get a third edition D&D out. That was a passion of love. And that was a great exercise. It worked out really well. But once I got out the door, I saw, you know, the future of my time here is figuring out what's the best packaging for Pokemon at Walmart. And, you know, and how do we not, how to make money at D&D other than coming out with a new edition every five years, right?

And I just like, I don't want to do it. I just want to go. I got a bunch of money. I can sell this, have some money, go off and play for a while and figure out what I want to do next. Sure, yeah. And so now I just want to get the feeling that day, you're going through the negotiations, you're going through the negotiations,

you sign the paperwork, the Hasbro's, purchase the company, you walk out the door with God knows how much money. What does that like? What does that feel like? Yeah, it's very surreal. And I didn't walk out the door right away. I decided to stay on at Hasbro to run Wizards of the Coast as a division within Hasbro. And so what I actually put my mind to was playing a different game.

I said, okay, I'm going to play the game of being the head of a nicely profitable segment of a $4 billion public company and see what that's like. That's not as fun a game as a game. It wasn't as much as fun of a game, and it wasn't something I was particularly good at. In those days, all my, the experience that I had all trained me to be a good CEO. It had not trained me to be a good executive within a larger company. And I just wasn't in the mood, I guess, at the time, to try and figure that out. I wasn't hungry for it. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, that hunger and passion is really, that's the key. It's that underlying theme for all of this stuff. So if you had to compare the. So the excitement level of, you know, you sold wizards and you've got, you know, you never have to worry about money again versus buying TSR. Yeah, buying TSR was much more exciting than selling wizards. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's for sure.

But it was, you know, what was exciting about the sale to Hasbro is we had all these shareholders who suddenly got a bunch of money. I mean, Wizards, because I never had a lot of money, any money, really, and because I never found a big investor. to really finance the company. A lot of the financing for Wizards of the Coast and Magic the Gathering, initial print run, was paid through equity. Equity to artists and designers, developers, everybody, anybody who worked at Wizards

in the early years got equity. And in the latter years, got options. And so what was so happy, so fulfilling, was seeing all these people get a whole bunch of money and like people saying, hey, I bought it, house with that money, you know. Yeah, you know, that that that was very, very rewarding. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, being able to really provide for these, all of these people is, uh, is, it's pretty incredible. And, you know, I do want to circle back to Jen Con, but,

but I just, you know, not only is that impact that you've had directly on, of course, the people that worked there and the money they got, but that, you know, when you think about the scale of impact, that magic and, and, and, and you're shepherding of Dungeons and Dragons, even of things, It's like the number of people whose lives have been completely, like, altered and, you know, communities built and families built and, you know, friendships, lifelong friendships. I mean, I'm only one of many stories. My entire life was changed by magic and getting to travel around the world in the pro tour and make lifelong friends and create a career in the industry. Like, and so many different businesses, the entire tabletop industry wouldn't be what it is today without the stuff that you've done. That must just feel incredible to be able to have made that tier of contribution.

to the world of gaming. It does. That's really the blessing of the whole thing. And it's, yeah, that's a very wonderful feeling. And that's a feeling that never goes away. You know, you can sell a company and still, you don't sell the memories of having gotten there. Right.

And so, yeah. Yeah. And so that I think lets us come back to GenCon because, you know, in many ways I view GenCon as this, you know, sort of pillar and celebration of the gaming industry in general, right? Everybody gets together and whatever type of game you love, whether it's RPGs or TCGs or War Games or 18XX games or it doesn't matter, whatever it is that you love,

you can find it there and you can find a group of people that are just so passionate about it and we'll play it 24 hours a day for four days straight, barely sleeping. And, you know, I have been going to, geez, I don't even know. I mean, every Gen Con since I became, you know, Certainly since I've been in the industry and several years before that. And it's still where I go to meet up with my friends and get to see people I haven't seen in forever. And it's something that I advise, and I've talked about this on the podcast before,

where if you're a new designer or you're somebody that wants to get involved in the industry, I don't know of a better place to go and meet with publishers and pitch your game or listen to talks from your favorite designers and get connected. There's just no separation, especially coming off of the pandemic year. We've learned this very much. We try to build digital tools for this, but there's no separation for that in-person gathering with people that are all passionate about the same thing. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about this upcoming Gen Con and the things that are coming here

and what you see for the future of that. Yeah, so I'd like to say something about the history and then come to the present. Gen Con, to me, is the gathering at the tribe, you know. And that used to have even more meaning. a long time ago when the tribe was small, you know, and there weren't a lot of other shows and social media and Twitch and everything else to bring us together. But it still has that role in my mind. It's, you know, the first time I went to Jen Con walking in the exhibit hall and see all these game companies to go to a place and realize that, you know, there are thousands

of us, now tens of thousands of us in one place who all enjoy these types of games. You know, these types of games don't have the stigma they used to have. But back when these games did have a lot of stigma, it was so empowering. You felt included. You felt like you find a home in this. And so that's what I've always loved about Jen Con is everything you said is absolutely true, but that sense of belonging and that sense of being in the middle of things. And just so that anybody listening doesn't think I just say this because I own it.

I mean, this is how I felt about Jen Con says way before I owned it. I mean, I grew up as a kid wanting to attend. I mean, I was a poor family in the West Coast. It was way too far away. I couldn't actually go to Jen Conn. I knew I couldn't. But for years, it's what I dreamed of eventually doing, right? And then the first time I went was in 1992 as an exhibitor.

Yeah. And that was so exciting. So when I had the chance to acquire it, it was like a dream come true. In some ways, it's more special than Wizards was. in the odd way because with JNCon, what I like, this fits my nature too, is that everybody is my customer. Like everybody in the entire gaming industry

is a customer of mine at JNCon, right? And so even though there are other shows, and yes, on some level I'm competing with these shows, I don't feel it that way. I feel like I'm really there for everybody. And so as far as JNCon this year, one thing we had to figure out the pandemic was how to do,

Gen Con virtually. So Jen Con 2020 was an entirely virtual convention. And we're all sick and tired of virtual conventions at some level because we're anxious to all get back face to face and so are we at JenCon. But we did learn some interesting things doing a virtual convention. For some people, irrespective of the pandemic, first of all, there's a number of people that can't travel like I was as a young boy living on the West Coast. There are people now who can attend Gen Con if it's virtual. there's a segment of people who aren't comfortable being in crowds who don't want to be around a lot of people and for whatever reason. And so our vision for Gen Con now is to do both, to do our physical event in Indianapolis,

but to take the virtual piece of that very seriously and run it, overlay the two, so that it's really two events as one event. And it's exciting because for a long time we've been in this thing, oh, we got this great convention, but we're kind of maxed out. Like it was weird to have a business where you kind of say, why are we spending money on marketing? We can't hold anybody else. We maxed out the city of Indianapolis.

But now what I feel excited about growth opportunities again because we could, in addition to having 70,000 people or whatever in Indianapolis, we could have 700,000 people online ultimately. So there is, it's an exciting, the pandemic has broadened. our thoughts of what is possible with Gen Con for the future, and that's very exciting. Yeah, that is exciting.

And I think, you know, so for somebody that wanted to attend Gen Con, either physically or virtually, especially in most of my audience here, people who are, you know, aspiring game designers or people who want to get into the industry, and they wanted to come to use GenCon as a tool for that. What advice would you have for them? Right. Well, it's a fantastic way to network, of course. Meeting other people, there are events at GenCon that are tailored towards people trying to make it into game design. There are playtest events where you can take your game and get a play tested. I think also walking around and talking to exhibitors and finding out you may not be able to get sort of a meeting where you're presenting a game to whoever does acquisitions of games for that company.

that may not be possible. But talk to people who are in the industry about what are they looking for in a game? What are the trends they see in gaming? What do they accept submissions from game designers? What are they looking for?

Somebody who might close down a conversation that looks like a blatant attempt to get your game published. Sometimes you can circle around that and find out interesting information from people in the industry. industry and you can certainly find people who are willing to play your game and give it a try and give you feedback about it and then just and see what's on the market it's not always easy to get

a sense for everything that's on in the market by going to your local game store or just watching Kickstarter releases walk around the exhibit hall see what's there and and see what people are excited about yeah so so being able to make contacts in the industry, being able to learn about the industry and learn about the current state of the market, being able to play test your game, being able to meet with other designers or listen to talks and learn about it are all key principles here that are valuable. And then let's take it from another angle. There's also on the exhibitor side, and, you know, again, these principles don't just apply to Gen Con. I just find Gen Con to be one of the best places to do all this stuff. on the exhibitor side,

so the very first copy of Ascension was sold at Gen Con 2010 is a pre-sale there. And I had, again, I had no money back then. I had vested everything that I had, all my savings on making Ascension happen. I got a little 10-by-10 booth and I applied for the marketing promotion.

So I got an extra 10-by-10 bonus doing just guerrilla marketing wherever I could. And it was, you know, it caught fire. I mean, it was like one of those things where we had had people in the halls playing the game, downwind the game to us. other people, like, just, you know, and it was just one of those magical moments.

If somebody wanted to try to recreate something like that for themselves or thinking about exhibiting, what advice would you have for them? Plan ahead. Getting into the Jen Con Exhibit Hall these days is harder than I would like it to be. Maybe not this year, because there's a bunch of companies not coming, but it is something where good to raise a flag and say, I'm interested in being an exhibitor, you know, about a year out. going to Gen Con 2021 and talking to some our staff about Gen Con 2020. That is not too early.

Yeah. But also in terms of assuming you can get a space, you know, keep your footprint down. It's really expensive. Figure out ways to try and be modest on how you spend for decoration. That is like your booth, you know, your tables and your chairs and all that stuff like that. And your electricity. all the, there are things, they're hidden costs. We don't, I shouldn't say that, but we certainly not our intent that they're hidden,

but they're not necessarily obvious to somebody who's never exhibited at a trade show before or a consumer show that it costs money, way more money than you think it should because these are companies that expect to get paid and there's unions involved and all this sort of stuff like that. Oh, I wish I'd never learned the word drage before in my life. Drey, oh, me too. Yes, okay, so GenCon costs too much. You heard it here first. So let's now, you know, I think we're running short on time,

but I actually want to know a little bit more about what, you know, what Gen Con, like what the secret sauce is and not, you know, in the sense that somebody necessarily would replace Gen Con. But if, you know, there's plenty of people out there that want to put their own gatherings together, right? How do I gather the tribe and be successful, whether it's going to be a local convention or online convention or just building something that helps build community and Jen Con has just been this stellar example of it that you've shepherded for many years. What advice might you have for someone that was going to try to you know build their own convention or get get people together and start start really supporting a community in that way? Yeah well if you want to do like

you know the best way to compete against a big player like Jen Con or any industry is to do what they're not doing provide something that they can't provide and what we can't provide is an intimate sort of experience you know I I think that if you're trying to build a huge show, go head to head with Jen Con. That's one thing. But if you're saying, hey, I want to start a convention. I happen to live in this city that's a mid-sized American city and there really isn't anything in here or I think I could do better. I think what you really have to offer there is an opportunity for intimacy, like a small community where everybody can know everybody and really good customer service and helping connect people with other gamers.

people want to be part of a community. And Gen Con has managed to, there is a community there, but it's a huge community, and it's made up of a lot of little communities that do have more of that feeling. And that's really what you're selling. You're selling the chance for people,

for gamers, game designers is a different category, but like for gamers who are your bread and butter, your exhibitors are going to be interested in coming if you have a lot of gamers. So don't think so much about, how do I get exhibitors to come? Think about how do you get the gamers to come? How do you make sure they have a good time?

Gen Con, one thing that Gen Con does really well has taken a very complex registration system that we've developed over years where anybody can submit an event and anybody can register for an event. So we're playing this matchmaker service of helping people run events and help them find people to play the events. events. A lot of conventions don't have that. The really good game conventions do, but a lot of conventions like comic book conventions perhaps that have gaming as kind of a side light, don't have that. So find a good way to really create a community and pair, let gamers pair up and get together and play games. I think that's at the heart of what Jen Con has done well, going clear back to the 60s.

Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. I love the, I got to throw in. I love the legacy of Gen Con. The fact that Gen Con is so old that it was initially marketed as a war gaming convention because none of the other categories existed yet. Right. There were no role-playing games yet.

It was started by Gary Guy Gax, who co-authored D&D with Dave Arneson, but he didn't come out with D&D until six or seven years after the first Gen Con. It was there as a war gaming convention. And everything that's come along in our industry since then, trading card games, miniature, well, miniatures are part of wargaming, but say fantasy miniatures and a different type of miniature than historical miniatures. All these categories, the explosion of board games,

Jen Con has been there on this ride, LARPing, costuming, and to some extent anime too. We've been home to all these different categories. We've evolved as these different categories were created. That's one thing I love about Jen Con is we don't have to compete against any of these things. We just feature them. Yeah, no, that is nice to be the hub where everybody else gets to live. We don't have to be innovative.

We just feature whatever is. Let other people innovate. We'll just be here. It's like, you know, during the gold rush, you want to be the one selling shovels. You're here. Come on down. I don't need it. No, that's great. Well, you know, and I've been having, as we built the community around things like game designer,

you know, we have, of course, the podcast and the book, but now I've been teaching an online course since November and getting people together. But now that the world's opening up again, I've been starting to think about, hey, wouldn't it be awesome to have us all, you know, get in the same place and do that kind of intimate gathering? So if anybody out there listening thinks that would be a good idea, you should, you know, message me on Twitter and let me know. But we'll see. That's certainly going to be a very different kind of thing than Jen Con. I have been really excited to get to have this conversation.

Oh, thank you for having me. What an honor. Yeah, well, you've had me. I'm literally in your studio here and have been enjoying being together here. I always love our chats. It's great to actually get to share this. You're such a, you know, you've been a powerful mentor to me and an icon in the industry and continue to drive and all of this forward. So it's great to get to share this with everybody. and for anybody that wants to follow up and check out more of your stuff, whether your current projects, of course, GenCon, everything, where should they go? For JenCon, gencon.com on the web for my Caldea stories, YouTube.com slash

World of Caldea, C-H-A-L-D-E-A. Awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure. I'm sure we'll have many more chats ahead. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.

If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own. own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever fine books are sold.