Richard Garfield
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Richard Channing Garfield, Jr.[1][2] (born 1966) is a mathematics professor and a game designer who created the card games Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (originally known as Jyhad), The Great Dalmuti, Star Wars Trading Card Game, and the board games RoboRally and King of Tokyo. Magic: The Gathering is his most successful game and its development is credited with creating the collectible card game genre. [3][4]
Biography
Early life
Garfield designed his first game as a teenager. He had a wide range of interests, including mathematics and language. In 1985, he received a bachelor of science degree in computer mathematics. He joined Bell Laboratories and worked there for a couple of years, but then decided to continue his education by attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Magic: The Gathering
He began designing a game called Magic: The Gathering as a student in the late 1980s. An "East Coast" group of play-testers, comprising mostly fellow Penn students, formed around the developing game. While searching for a publisher for RoboRally, he found Peter Adkison of newly founded Wizards of the Coast. Adkison agreed to publish his board game and expressed an interest in a game like Magic that would have little set-up and short games.
Garfield studied under Herbert Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. His dissertation was entitled "On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers." But Garfield believed that game design would not offer a steady living and became a professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He had previously been in contact with Magic play-testers from the west coast and his move brought him closer to them and Wizards of the Coast.
Magic: The Gathering became incredibly popular after its commercial launch in 1993. Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer in June 1994. After the game took off, Richard Garfield moved to Kennewick, Washington. There he was known to play Magic: The Gathering with some friends and others from around there.
Garfield was also a primary play tester for the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition bookset.
He still sporadically contributes to Magic: The Gathering, for instance as part of the design team for the 2005 expansion Ravnica and the 2011 fall expansion, Innistrad.
Designing
- Alpha (lead)
- Arabian Nights (lead)
- Revised Edition (lead)
- Tempest
- Urza's Saga
- Odyssey
- Torment (Odyssey concepts)
- Deckmasters 2001
- Judgment
- Ravnica: City of Guilds
- Innistrad
Developing
- Revised Edition
Personal life
Garfield has personally created three Magic cards celebrating events in his life: one for his marriage proposal "Proposal" (this was done by pasting a color photocopy onto another card; Proposal on magiccards.info with a different artwork), and one for the birth of each of his two children (Splendid Genesis [Wiki-Article] and Fraternal Exaltation, both professionally printed; for Terry and Schuyler).[5] Several of each card were given out to friends and associates, and they are considered extreme rarities by collectors.[6]
His wife is Lily Wu, who is alluded to by Wyluli Wolf.[7][8][9][10]
Magic references
There is a commonly-accepted rule among the fan-base of Magic: The Gathering that if Richard Garfield personally alters a Magic card by hand, the change is permanent for that particular card. This has spawned many urban legends.[citation needed] The subject of Garfield possessing godlike powers within the Magic universe is immortalized in his eponymous card, Richard Garfield, Ph.D., from the joke Magic: The Gathering set Unhinged.
Garfield has also been immortalized in the card Phelddagrif, the name being an anagram of "Garfield, Ph.D.".
References
- ↑ http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5662332.html
- ↑ http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/Richard-Garfield
- ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield
- ↑ http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5662332/description.html
- ↑ http://mtgarchive.net/wiki/Richard_Garfield
- ↑ http://www.magiclibrary.net/rarities-garfield.html
- ↑ http://mtg.look-in.net/2003/11/28/wyluli-wolf/
- ↑ http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/feature/80
- ↑ http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/usnat05/blog
- ↑ http://www.allenvarney.com/av_mgcwords.html
External links
- "Just like magic". December 27, 1998. PolkOnline.
- Skaff Elias (Friday, March 8, 2002). "Legendary Difficulties". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- Amigo Spiele. (January 30, 2004.) "Immer für eine Überraschung gut: Richard Garfield: Der Mann hinter Magic".
- Magic Arcana (August 04, 2008). "Checking in with Richard and Skaff". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- Mark Rosewater (June 01, 2009). "A Few Minutes With Richard Garfield". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.</ref>
- Mark Rosewater (July 22, 2013). "Garfield of Play". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.