Card sharks - success of card game company Wizards of the Coast - Company Profile

Entrepreneur, Oct, 1996 by Dennis Rodkin

In 1990, Adkison, then a 29-year-old systems analyst with Boeing. and some friends had launched Wizards of the Coast. To say they hadn't done well was an understatement: "We probably would have gone out of business within the next year," Adkison says.

RoboRally piqued Adkisons interest, so he contacted Garfield, who was working toward a doctorate in math at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and laid out a strategic challenge: Design a science fiction game whose sole component is playing cards. It may have been the only strategy Adkison could afford to pursue while his fledgling company was on the ropes; It's much cheaper to print paper cards than to manufacture game boards and pieces. Nevertheless, it was the perfect springboard for Garfield's talent.

"In one week, Richard jumped from the little description I had given him to the game that eventually became Magic: The Gathering," Adkison says. "It was a pretty big 'Eureka!'" That's typical of the way Adkison the tactician defers to Garfield the magician. Amiable and not shy about the remarkable success of the company he launched, Adkison nevertheless takes credit only for the business end of Magic's success - which he's quick to point out is meaningless without a great idea. "My sole contribution to the game was telling Richard what kind of game I'd like to see," he says.

Though he now makes and plays games for a living, Garfield still talks like the mathematician he had studied to be.. carefully, slowly and thoughtfully, as if he's working through complex equations with half his brain while using the other half to answer questions. He admits he still can't figure out where his great idea came from. All he knows is that it clicked instantly with Adkison, who asked him to work up a prototype and send it to him so I, could test it out.

"From the first time he described the concept, I knew the possibilities were huge," Adkison says. "It was something that had never been done before in gaming."

When the prototype arrived in late 1991 from Philadelphia, where Garfield was still a student, it was an instant hit around Wizards of the Coast's office. Everybody was playing it," Adkison recalls. They continued to play it for another two years while the game slowly evolved into something marketable. They played even after they weren't being paid to@ the money had run out, and the staff had all been laid off for the interval until Magic@ The Gathering started bringing in revenue.

SPREADING THE WORD

Convinced Garfield had devised a truly outstanding game, Adkison carefully laid the kindling for the fire he thought Magic would set by getting the word-and the product - out all over the game industry. "We already had the distribution channels in place from our earlier games," he explains. "Even though none of our games had done very well, people were carrying our line and knew we had integrity, so when we called to say `We have something we know is going to sell better than anything else we've done,' they worked with us and ordered more."