Alternate Worlds Podcast

An Alpha-card paycheck. A $500 box of Beta. A Black Lotus covered in signatures. Cathy Nicoloff, Frank Kusumoto, Gary Wise, Brian Weissman, Henry Stern, Sol Malka, and Brian Schneider share the stories behind the cards they bought, traded, sold, and kept—and what those cards came to mean. Alternate Worlds is a podcast about games and the people who build and support them. Hosted by former Magic: T...

I’ve recorded over a hundred podcasts at this point, and recently was asked to start thinking about “the Principles” one should take away from Alternate Worlds, about making great games, about building great cultures, so I began building tools to that end this weekend. It’s pretty wild what one can do in this day and age. Which ties into the subject matter here — what’s good for kids, what’s not g...

Simon Armstrong is a gamer, game maker, gamesman, and so on and so forth. Early on, Simon knew he enjoyed coding & making games, so he explored that path & became an early Flash developer at Zynga. Since then, he worked at Warner Bros on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and logged a stint at Captain.tv helping to get Stream Pirates ready for launch. Today, Simon is part of a 2-man shop making Sol Mate...

It is quite fortunate to get to record the Alternate Worlds podcast, and today especially did not disappoint — here we have Bing Gordon, the legendary CMO/CCO from the first decades at Electronic Arts (and legendary VC in Silicon Valley thereafter), Skaff Elias, who helped spearhead Magic: the Gathering through its initial design into eSports, and Mike Turian, current Sr. Executive Producer of Mag...

I met David Bartholow at Cornell University before pro Magic: the Gathering was a thing, and we faced off & supported each other in tournaments for many years afterwards. David was a member of Team Deadguy, one of the top early MtG teams consisting of Chris Pikula, David Price, David Bartholow, Tony Tsai, Worth Wollpert and over time, many others. Deadguy was often positioned as “the good guys” in...

Jeremy Cranford was the Art Director on Magic: the Gathering during my time as an R&D lead, and in my opinion, totally rocked the house. Mirrodin was incredibly stylish and like nothing we’d done before — which one could say about Kamigawa & Ravnica, too. Ravnica, in particular, feels like the first concrete art style & world that maps to what the game has used for the last twenty years. Since Mag...

I met Teresa Johns at Serious Business, the first gaming startup either of us worked at, in 2009. Serious Business was an incredibly talented & well-curated team, and its members have gone on to become prominent VCs, CEOs, CTOs, COOs, technologists, artists, etc. Six months after we joined the company, we were acquired by Zynga, which had a very different ethos and led to very different types of a...

Mark Schneider is a chess master who traveled the country to play in chess tournaments as a teen. He went on to parent three boys, all of whom played with him in the first Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour. The youngest, Jeremy, finished 20th in PT-Dallas Juniors. The middle child, Justin, finished 1st in PT-Dallas Juniors, and Top 8 at PT-Chicago ‘98. The oldest, Brian, is writing this to you now, an...

Chris Galvin ran the first Midwest Regionals for Magic: the Gathering in 1996, and supported 1,300 players so well that when the time came, Wizards believed he’d be a good fit for their organized play department. Over time, Chris helped to support building out important regional events (such as Pro Tour Qualifiers) & the Junior Super Series — the kinds that couldn’t be supported by a normal game s...

Wright Bagwell makes games. He also tinkers, mods, hacks, manifests, errs, shares, and designs. I met Wright at Zynga, where he spearheaded the Farmville 2 design, which went incredibly well (like, incredibly, well). Before that he led the Dead Space series, and before that he made Quake mods, which got him into the industry in the first place. After that, he co-founded Outpost Games as its CEO, l...

Sometimes there’s a man… Pany Haritatos has wanted to make games since he wanted to do anything, and because of this impulse he’s made a ton of games — big, successful, ones — for Kongregate, Zynga, Snap, Series Entertainment and who knows where else. Given Pany’s bent, his games could be anywhere. (And I mean anywhere.) Pany’s learned an inordinate amount about how to run teams and build successf...

Devin Low is a legendary game designer, both in the sense that he’s designed a ton of successful games, but also because he designed Legendary, the highly successful Marvel deck building game. There is only one Devin Low in play at a time. Devin joined us in Wizards of the Coast R&D after playing professional Magic: the Gathering for a few years, and proved to have a great sense for how to wed bot...

Tom Lapille logged nearly seven years at Wizards of the Coast working on Magic: the Gathering, then went on to lead game design at Skylanders and Pocket Gems. Tom’s a master of the TCG-making craft, and he’s also continued growing his skills by making 0-to-1 happen in the digital sphere on his recent Episode: Reality Stars . Nowadays he can enjoy being a design director while also aspiring to rega...

Andrew Wolf has been designing games for nearly 20 years, at Pokemon, USAOPOLY, Cryptozoic and Upper Deck. Andrew also happened to make two top 8’s as a pro Magic: the Gathering player, and has a long history of playing games both competitively and socially. One thing that made this uniquely fun is that The Wolfman was in town vacationing, so we met up in person and got to hang out for a bit. My k...

Jon “Swede” Selin is the CEO of Low Drag Labs , where he seeks to reinvent the MMORPG into something that better fits with where gaming is going. Swede is been a gamer since as long as he can remember, and has been hands-on throughout his career. He started out at CCP and logged time on Eve Online & design directing World of Darkness, before shifting to Pocket Gems as VP of Game Design. Swede is “...

Brian Hacker was one of the most successful players in the early days of the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour, and is well-known for his early writing which shined light on how important mana curves were to winning in limited play. His writing was also the gateway that enabled Magic: the Gathering to try and enter the mainstream, via a fun expose on MTV. Brian went on to design games at Upper Deck, a...

Skaff Elias was a major force in helping Wizards of the Coast & Magic: the Gathering start off on the right foot, and is remembered fondly by many. Before his time at WotC, Skaff was a Math PhD student at Penn, and joined the cadre of grad students who helped play & develop Richard Garfield’s earliest game designs (many of whom later followed Richard out west). From there, Skaff joined Wizards of...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Stephen Radney-MacFarland and the TTRPG journey. This episode explores the evolution of tabletop role-playing games through the career of Stephen Radney-MacFarland, whose work spans organized play, game design, Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and decades of Dungeons & Dragons history. Brian and Stephen discuss how RPG publishing has changed, what it was like inside Wizards d...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Lan. D Ho, Legendary Raconteur This episode is both a nostalgic reunion and a thoughtful reflection on how lifelong friendships are formed through shared passions. Brian and Lan revisit the earliest days of competitive Magic: The Gathering , recounting Pro Tours, IRC friendships, legendary deck designs, and the personalities that helped define the game’s formative years....

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Zac Hill, from Games to Good This episode moves far beyond game design into a thoughtful conversation about the future of society, technology, education, AI, politics, trust, media, and creativity. While both Brian and Zac share deep roots in Magic: The Gathering , the game becomes a lens through which they explore much larger questions about how people learn, build commu...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Tronster Hartley, UX Lead at Firaxis Games In this nostalgic and wide-ranging episode, Brian reconnects with lifelong friend and community builder Tronster Hartley to revisit the formative years that shaped both of their careers. What begins as a conversation about Baltimore's bulletin board systems (BBSs) quickly expands into stories about competitive laser tag, early in...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Mike Jimenez, Startup CTO In this episode, Brian reconnects with longtime friend and former colleague Mike Jimenez to explore the early days of social gaming, startup culture in Silicon Valley, leadership, entrepreneurship, and the evolution of technology over the last two decades. The conversation is equal parts nostalgia, career reflection, and examination of how creati...

During the day, Jossie Haines is an executive coach who actively helps technical leaders improve their work lives & personal lives. “Some time ago,” Jossie also happens to have worked on some extremely successful & large/complex games in her time — Cafe World, CityVille & ChefVille. I met Jossie on CityVille, after we raided the Cafe World team for some of their best engineers, and it was great to...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: Adam King & the Game Developer Experience from Console to Social Games In this episode, Brian reconnects with longtime friend, engineer, and game industry veteran Adam King for a conversation that begins with a surprisingly detailed discussion of curling injuries and evolves into a fascinating exploration of game development, engineering culture, product design, live-serv...

Alternate Worlds Podcast: James Laird & the Games Industry Career Path In this thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, Brian sits down with longtime game developer, product leader, technologist, storyteller, and LARP organizer James Laird to explore a career that has repeatedly crossed the boundaries between games, technology, theater, education, and community-building. What begins as a discussi...