Posted in: Conventions, Dungeons & Dragons, Events, Games, Interview, Lucca Comics & Games, Magic: The Gathering, Tabletop, Wizards of the Coast | Tagged: Lucca Comics & Games 2023, Peter Adkison

Chatting With WotC Founder Peter Adkison At Lucca 2023

While at the Lucca Comics & Games 2023 festival in Italy, we got a chance to chat with Wizards of the Coast's founder, Peter Adkison!

We're currently hanging out at Lucca Comics & Games 2023 in Italy this week, as one of the major events for the convention is celebrating Magic: The Gathering's 30th Anniversary. During this week, they brought out several major names who had a hand in the game's founding and continued success, one of them being the original founder of Wizards of the Coast, Peter Adkison! We got a chance to chat with him in the middle of all the festivities and discuss his role at the time, as well as what he's doing these days with Gen Con.

BC: How are you enjoying being here in Italy and exploring Lucca this year?

PA: I love being back here. It's. It's a delight. In some ways, it's the same as I remembered it from the '90s. In some ways, very different.

How many times have you been?

I've probably been here maybe eight or ten times. Because I was here almost every year in the '90s while I was at Wizards of the Coast from '94 until 2000, and then maybe twice since then.

Obviously one of the big things that's being promoted this year is the 30th Anniversary of Magic: The Gathering, which you had just a little bit of a hand in all of that. How has it been seeing its progression from its very humble beginnings at Wizards, coming up to where it is today?

I think it's it's fantastic. I imagine it's gone through many phases, you know, like someone growing up, we go through phases in our life. I think Magic goes through phases. I think that it's shown remarkable adaptability and resilience, and it's bigger than ever. I mean, that's it's good. And it's it's it's become such an important part of our culture, and it's influenced so many other things that I think people might not even realize the impact it's had outside of the obvious things.

Do you still keep up with the game at all?

No, I don't. I still enjoy the game, but I enjoy playing the game like it was in the '90s when it was a simpler game. Now, the game has become very complex, and I had a hand in that, too. So I bear some of the responsibility for that because, as we decided, Magic needed to be a better competitive game, to reduce the luck and improve and increase the skill as components to winning Magic was to make the game more complex, make the cards more complex, make the game state more complex. But for me, I enjoy it when it's a little simpler. So I play with a lot of old cards. Not to say there are some complex cards in that era, but in general.

Do you have a particular favorite set that you love to play with or really like?

I enjoy the most the original Alpha and Beta, and I like Arabian Nights a lot, Antiquities, I like Legends a lot. There's a couple, then it drops off a bit, although I like Ice Age a lot, I also like Urza's and Ravnica a lot. So I mean, there's a lot of sets that stand out in my mind. I even like Fallen Empires. Yeah, good to know.

The game has expanded recently with Universes Beyond, where they started doing crossovers with Jurassic Park, Doctor Who, and The Lord of the Rings. Dis you ever in your wildest imaginations think that this game would have that approachability to where pop culture was wanting to be a part of it?

We were having these discussions actually in the '90s, we made the decision to not do anything like that because we wanted to really establish Magic as its own intellectual property, its own thing. Not something we license out, more something we might license in. But I think that Magic's at a point in this life cycle where it's perfectly fine to be doing stuff like that, but people like it. You can always set up your play environment to exclude stuff you don't like, so I think that that is fine. Actually, when we decided to buy TSR, part of my pitch to the board was the synergy of being able to do Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering crossover projects, and after the acquisition, everybody in the Magic team said, "No way." And everybody on the D&D team said, "No way." But so a few years ago, when they finally did the Forgotten Realms,  I sent emails to some of my directors from 20 years previous to say, "See, I told you this!"

Speaking of, it's been talked about a lot in different ways on how the acquisition came about. What was it like for you being in charge of the company at that point when you have this iconic piece of tabletop lore now up for sale? Was there any hesitation about it or were you all for it?

All the hesitation or discussion was really around price. There was everybody on my board, and Richard Garfield most importantly, all saying, "Yeah, go get it, Peter. Let's do this deal!" But then it was like, how much is this going to cost? Is it worth it? We had strong, strong support from our board and our shareholders to do that deal.

We talked about licensing earlier, when Magic was really riding high, there were just a ton of games that were just being spewed out like it. I remember both Star Trek and Star Wars both had their own game. What was it like having that kind of influence on the market in general where now everybody was like, let's get an IP and try and ride this wave?

Oh, that was fantastic. You're always worried about competition like any entrepreneur would be. Like, yes, I'm glad to see all these trading card games. But as long as we're number one, that's really great. So, it was exciting to see the whole industry get excited about a new category. I was old enough to remember it as an industry professional, but when roleplaying games came around, it was just all war games, right? And roleplaying games came around, and that brought in the hype. The hobby of miniatures came into its own with Games Workshop in terms of not just historical miniatures, but basically science fiction miniatures broadened the hobby. And then trading card games were another layer. And to my mind, all these different facets of the hobby made the hobby more resilient, more interesting. Because people who were into games could evolve and stay in our industry as opposed to just burning out of Warhammer or something. So it was a validation of what Richard [Garfield] created that so many people were excited about it and wanted to do something similar.

Were there any projects that you can remember where you guys thought it would be a really good idea, and then it got canceled before it saw the light of day?

Well, that's the story of being a game. Lots of projects like that. When we started down the path of creating Magic, we were worried as the tiny company that nobody ever heard of about competition from bigger game companies. So we went out and got licenses to do not-Magic expansions like we were just talking about, but new trading card games based on those licenses. So we dealt with them, the White Wolf properties, then Vampire: The Masquerade, we did with Netrunner from Art House, and we did with Battletech from FASA, and we had for a while licensed to do a Middle-Earth game. But as we started competing against ourselves effectively, we realized that Magic was really where we could put our emphasis, and we should be doing fewer of those games.  I think the period of focusing got us to back off from doing other trading card games. Also, we got out of roleplaying for a while. When Wizards of the Coast started, the first product ever produced was a roleplaying supplement called the Primal Order. So we got out of roleplaying games too, until we had the chance to buy the number one roleplaying game.

What you're doing these days? Are you just enjoying retirement and the feathers in the cap, or working on other projects?

Well, I do enjoy the feathers. It's hard not to be proud of the projects I've been able to be involved in. A year after that sale, I acquired the Gen Con tabletop game convention in Indianapolis from Hasbro, and I've owned it ever since. So that's a surprising amount of work, and I don't run it day to day anymore. I used to. It turned out I wasn't really good at it because it's like a big party for gamers, but it's really all about logistics underneath, which is not my strong suit. Thoughts about space planning and registration systems and stuff like that. So I have a great guy that runs it for me named David Hoppe. But I am hands-on running the Gen Con Twitch channel, so I've been enjoying the last year or two learning the world of streaming.

That's cool.

I'm playing games on the internet. It's fun.

Are you enjoying it?

Yeah, it's a very small audience compared to the big names out there. But we've got the Gen Con brand. I do a show called Peter Vs. The Machine, where I play strategy games, and I've been playing Sid Meier's Civilization, which is one of my favorite games, and then also adaptations of board games like Ticket to Ride and Settlers Of Catan and games like that. I'm also a big RPG nut; I love roleplaying, it's the reason why we bought TSR because I'm so in love D&D. So I've been running Dungeons & Dragons and Burning Wheel on streams as well, so I DM and play strategy games.

Is there anything else you would like to plug or promote while we're here?

I would love to plug our Twitch channel! We have about half a dozen shows that we rotate with throughout the week. Roleplaying games, board games, we have news and news talk and chatshow called Table Takes. It's on Friday afternoons at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. My show, Peter Vs. The Machine is at 9 a.m. Pacific Time on Twitch. And the roleplaying game show that I do every other week is called Act Rookie, which is on Wednesday nights at 6 p.m. Pacific Time.

Since we're on the topic, I'm curious: is there ever a point where you might want to expand the channel to have constant daily content from original creators?

Yeah! I'm definitely in the mode of trying to find good content. So, if you know anybody who wants to be on Twitch, or has a program on Twitch but doesn't want the hassle of managing a Twitch channel, send them my way.

Specifically for tabletop, or are there any other areas you'd like to explore?

Our focus on TikTok and Twitch is stuff you might turn on. So that is primarily tabletop games, but it's also cosplay; it's also art. We had for a while a live art sort of show, but I'm not really looking into getting into video games in a big way. Although I have been playing Civilization on my show. We have a Vampire: The Masquerade show and stuff like that. So, mainly tabletop RPGs. I'd like to get more board games and minis. I'd love to have a big Warhammer stream. But Magic, I don't have a Magic stream. It would be great to have a Magic stream.

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