Axion Now Events, the UK organizers of competitive Magic: The Gathering events in the UK have taken a look back at the development and history of this enduring trading card game (TCG). Originally developed in the late 1980s by a math professor, Richard Garfield, it was published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993 when it sold over 10 million cards in the initial six weeks after its release. It has since become one of the most popular games ever created and can now be found in nine different languages. It is played by over five million people around the world.
The precursors to Magic: The Gathering
Garfield’s interest in TCGs began when he was just a teenager and started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Later on, when he was working on his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, Garfield created a board game based on fantasy themes and strategic elements. This game – called Five Magics – was never published but it did influence his later development of Magic: The Gathering.
The experience Garfield gained developing Five Magics and other game prototypes in the early 1980s resulted in a board game called RoboRally in 1985. RoboRally was a fun game where the players controlled robots racing around a factory floor filled with hazards and obstacles. The game involved controlling the robots’ movements using cards so it needed strategic planning skills but also the ability to deal with unpredictable situations when navigating around the factory.
Garfield pitched RoboRally to Wizards of the Coast, but they decided it would cost too much to make and asked him if he could design a simpler game that would be cheaper to produce. This result, which is now well-known, was the first incarnation of Magic: The Gathering. At the time Garfield was still a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and he used fellow students to test the new game.
RoboRally was also eventually produced by Wizards of the Coast once they saw the success of Magic: The Gathering but not until 9 years after it was originally created! There’s a life lesson there for all designers and creators.
What happened next?
The rest, as they say, is history and one of the most successful trading card games of all time continues to go from strength to strength with new formats being developed to this day and professional championships taking place across the globe.
It’s hard to believe it now but Richard Garfield initially had concerns about the feasibility of making a career out of game design. So he originally became a professor of mathematics, which certainly wasn’t a bad alternative. Eventually, though, following the commercial success of Magic: The Gathering, Garfield left the world of academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer. He continued to develop a variety of games over the next decade with Wizards of the Coast before co-founding Three Donkeys, a game design, development, and consulting company specializing in unique solutions for both digital and board game designs.
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