Richard Garfield (born 1966) is the game designer who created card games like Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and board games like RoboRally. Magic: The Gathering is his most successful game and is credited with developing the collectible card game genre.
Biography
Garfield designed his first game as a teenager. He had a wide range of interests, including math 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.
He began designing a game called Magic as a student in the early 1990s. An
"East Coast" group of playtesters, comprised mostly of 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 setup and short games.
Garfield studied under Herbert
Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. Richard 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 playtesters 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 academics to join Wizards of
the Coast as a full-time game designer in June 1994.
"Richard Garfield, Ph.D." is also the name of a card from the joke Magic: The Gathering set Unhinged. This theme had been previously explored with the card "Phelddagrif", the name being an anagram of "Garfield, Ph.D.".
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