17 Facts About Richard Garfield

Richard Channing Garfield was born on June 26,1963 and is an American mathematician, inventor and game designer.

Richard Garfield oversaw the successful growth of Magic and followed it with other game designs.

Richard Garfield created a variation of the card game Hearts called Complex Hearts.

Richard Garfield was born in Philadelphia and spent his childhood in many locations throughout the world as a result of his father's work in architecture.

Richard Garfield is the nephew of Fay Jones, who, already an established artist, illustrated one Magic card for him.

In 1985, Richard Garfield received a Bachelor of Science degree in computational mathematics.

Richard Garfield's thesis was On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers.

Adkison asked if Richard Garfield could develop a game with lower production costs than RoboRally, with the idea of making such a game more portable and easy to bring to conventions; Richard Garfield thought of an idea that came from combining a card game with collecting baseball cards and spent a week creating a full game from that rough idea.

Richard Garfield had been creating card games since at least 1982, starting with a card game called "Five Magics" that was inspired by Cosmic Encounter, and his work with this new card game built on his existing older prototypes.

Richard Garfield thus combined ideas from two previous games to invent the first trading card game, Magic: The Gathering.

In June 1994, Richard Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer.

Richard Garfield managed the hit game wisely, balancing player experience with business needs and allowing other designers to contribute creatively to the game.

Netrunner was Richard Garfield's CCG based on Cyberpunk 2020, where he included an element that made it an asymmetrical game, so that the two players each had entirely different cards, abilities, and goals.

In 1999, Richard Garfield was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame alongside Magic.

Richard Garfield eventually left Wizards to become an independent game designer.

Richard Garfield has shifted more of his attention to video games, having worked on the design and development of Schizoid and Spectromancer as part of Three Donkeys LLC Richard Garfield has been a game designer and consultant for companies including Electronic Arts and Microsoft.

Richard Garfield taught a class titled "The Characteristics of Games" at the University of Washington.