Few tabletop-game designers have had as much influence on videogames as Richard Garfield – even if you ignore everything but his single most famous creation. That game was conceived in the early ’90s when a nascent RPG publisher told Garfield it couldn’t afford to publish a boardgame he’d designed called RoboRally. “I quickly came up with this concept of a trading card game – which was not cheaper, not by a long run,” he tells us. “But it was so exciting to Peter Adkison, the president of Wizards Of The Coast, that we made it work.”
It was a smart decision. That card game was, of course, Magic: The Gathering, a three-decade success story that made Wizards’ owner $1bn in 2022 alone. Magic’s impact on videogames is such that not only does the game have obvious digital heirs in the likes of Hearthstone and Slay The Spire, but has also been cited as an inspiration by more unlikely developers, including Hidetaka Miyazaki.