 Long ago, in the before times of 1990, a small town systems analyst living in Washington was struck with the inspiration to do what no living human had ever thought to do. Make a role-playing game. Unfortunately, this was the 90s, and D&D had already exploded in popularity in 1974, so while he was 16 years too late to be the first on the market, his devotion to this cause would lead him to grab a friend and set out on what would become one of the most profitable tabletop game-related business ventures of all time. His name was Peter Adkison. This is the story of a game he did not create, Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started out as a tabletop role-playing game company founded in 1990 by both Peter Adkison and Ken McLaughlin, with the intention of making something capable of surviving in a world populated with huge blockbuster tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40k. In fact, Peter was such a nerd that the name Wizards of the Coast came from a homebrew game of D&D that he was in. With the Coastly Wizards themselves being mages from a cabal that one of his party members was a part of. Their first attempt at a hit was with a brainchild of Peters called The Primal Order, a religion-based expansion for no game in particular. Instead, The Primal Order acted as a lore book with guidelines on how divine beings could operate in your own campaigns, regardless of what the actual game you happen to be playing was. It even came with rules about how to implement its contents within dozens of other people's games, such as Gerps, Warhammer Fantasy, D&D, and Palladium. As you might expect, this is not an entirely legal concept, and the owner of Palladium sued them shortly afterwards to get the game out of this weird fanfiction, not wanting the lawsuit to destroy his company before it could begin. Peter went out looking for another game to make money for the Coast, and he eventually landed on a man named Richard Garfield. Dick the Cat had been in the tabletop scene for a while, and when Pete approached him, Rich already had a project in mind that he knew would make a lot of money. The game was called Robo Rally, and it was a board game centered around getting a bunch of manic robots with no self-preservation instinct from one end of the board to the other without letting them destroy themselves. As an idea, it was solid. The only problem was that it was a board game, which required manufacturing and actual board and game, but Wizards of the Coast were in the market of role-playing games, which could effectively be played with dice and hallucinogens. Pete took a look at all the pewter and cardboard necessary to produce an entire board game and thought, Oh no no no, this won't do. And so he asked what else Richard had. Richard fumbled around through his pockets until he pulled out an old baseball card, and the universe finally aligned. But first, a little bit about our hero Richard Garfield. In West Philadelphia, born and raised, Richie spent most of his days being flown around the world with his father, who was an architect. Since he was the one American in a lot of places that didn't speak English, he instead engaged with the children by challenging them to honor duels in the form of card games. Hugh Garfield eventually got bored with the same old games and started experimenting with his own, and by the time that he was back in the States, he caught wind of a little-known game called Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, neither Richard nor his friends had Dungeons & Dragons. So in an absolute Chad move, he decided to make his own D&D by taking an old clue board and just making up what he thought Dungeons & Dragons probably was like. He eventually did get his hands on an actual copy, and to his surprise, it was nothing like the random game that he assembled with loose Pluto pieces. He actually appreciated the open-endedness of it, but decided after one page thumbing that it was, and I quote, dreadfully written. Which considering this was the time of AD&D 2nd Edition, yeah. But returning to the present day of 1993, Richard had a backlog of ideas for games that he had gotten halfway through but never finished, just like the rest of us. And he eventually settled on a card game that took inspiration from a previous card game idea of his called Five Magics. Five Magics was a competitive deck game where each deck revolved around one of the five elements, and each element was represented by geographically diverse locations, as inspired by his own childhood travels. Richard took these core concepts, as well as an impactful favorite of his called Cosmic Encounters, and developed them into a game called Magic, wherein one player would assemble their own deck filled with creatures and spells that they buy out of a pack of random cards sorted via five different colors, each color representing both an element and a style of gameplay that every player could connect to. Red was for little monsters that were super aggressive, blue was the thinking man's color filled with mostly spells, green had big monsters but a lot of wind-up time, white was filled with healing and defensive magic, and black was for Death, Death, Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil songs. Originally, the game was supposed to just be called Magic, but since that's not a word that you can really trademark, Richard switched it to mana clash. However, all of his playtesters refused to stop calling it Magic, so he just slapped a White Wolf brand moniker at the end and called it a day. The game was set in the magical realm of Dominia, a universe of infinite potential that could set players up for endless stories, as well as set wizards of the coast up for endless expansions. In the beginning, there were only 150 cards, 30 for each color, and each and every one of them needed their own fancy art piece to go with it, so Peter Adskisen went out into a field and pulled up some Cornish artists for help. But, not having the funds to pay them for their time, he instead offered up actual shares in his wizardly company, which would go on to make some Corns very buttery. Still, Peter was hopeful, and as he looked upon his initial playtesting, he could see instantly how this game was going to be a hit, and he told Richard that, if executed properly, it would make us millions. He was wrong. It would make them more. In an effort to shield their golden goose from the looming lawsuit that was currently being had with Palladium, Richard started up his own shell company called Garfield Games, which was totally an original and separate game-developing company, and not just wizards of the coast with a fake mustache. Without the funds necessary to properly produce magic, the totally legitimate Garfield Games sent Peter out to their local game fair with nothing but a box of magic cards and a dream, but when Peter returned, he returned a conqueror. As a larger company called Wargames West was dazzled by the magic and decided to invest $40,000 into this little card game. Due to their investment, Magic the Gathering was released in August of 1993 and became the bane of bad business owners by immediately turning into a huge success almost overnight. Peter had been drumming up support for the game by taking his wife on a road trip to GenCon and stopping at every hobby store they could find on the way. Initially, the owners were all like, what the hell is this? This isn't baseball? And told them to leave, but all those hobby store owners started talking to each other, the wave of interest washed right past PD so that by the time that they arrived at their beloved board game convention, an excited crowd was already there to meet them. Peter, in all his showmanship, pulled back on the velvet curtain to treat all his newfound fans to... an empty parking lot, since the shipping truck was running late. Richard Garfield showed up at about this time wondering what the heck happened, and the two spent an entire day anxiously awaiting the arrival of a game that they could only hope will sell well. Luckily for them, the shipment finally arrived, and cards poured out the back of the truck onto a voracious fanbase to beat. In the span of a four-day convention, despite losing one entire day to the whims of a truck driver with Wanderlust, by the end of GenCon, all 2.5 million cards had been sold, and within the next two months, Richard and PD had completely sold out their entire stock of 10 million cards. To say that MTG was a hit was the understatement of the age. Wizards was having such a hard time holding on to their stock that they were legitimately refusing to advertise their own game out of fear that the demand would completely overtake their supply and crush them in the resultant black hole of capitalism. Right away, the company got to work on making more cards, and in December of 1993, MTG came out with their first official expansion, Arabian Knights, which brought the Infantysmal 150 cards up to 242. Initially, Richard didn't really comprehend the enormity of what he was tasked to create with Arabian Knights, since at the time, MTG was just a really popular game, and making an expansion was seen the same way as making an expansion for any other game. He was just making optional rules that you could ignore if you didn't want them. With that mindset, he planned to create purple and black covers to differentiate the cards and make it easier for people to get into the game without having to buy everything. But instead, fan outcry was immediate and decisive. Expansions would become a part of the core game, and that was that. Instead, to mark the cards as a different expansion, Richard put a tiny little scimitar on the side of the Arabian Knights' cards, thus creating the very first set symbol of Magic the Gathering. In addition to adding more cards to the pool for players to grab at, Richard decided that it would be a good idea if those cards did new things as well, and so he threw every new idea that he could think of into the expansion, from cards that let you steal your opponent's cards, to abilities that could be activated by either you or your opponent, to powers that rely on coin flips, to creatures that heal you when they deal damage? Truly, this was the Wild West of MTG. And to keep up with the popularity after one expansion came another, and then another, each one adding hundreds of new cards with new rules, and even coming with a storyline for fans to follow, explaining why the focus was shifted to a specific plane of existence and that plane's heroes. In an effort to organize the chaos of having multiple new sets of cards released per year, specific sets were released in blocks of three, all designed to take place in the same plane with fewer new cards released at a time, just so that they could manage the immense popularity of their new game. For half a decade, Magic the Gathering was the ziggurat of wealth within the TTRPG space, with tournaments being set up throughout every tabletop convention under the sun. It was commanding respect from games like Warhammer 40k, even the game that inspired it all, Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, in 1997, TSR, the company that made D&D, tried to fight back against MTG's popularity with their own collectibles game called Dragon Dice. We all know how that story goes, and Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR soon after, when the company crash-landed into financial disaster. And speaking of financial disaster, you can't have such immense success without finding yourself surrounded by copycats, and Magic the Gathering was soon accompanied by dozens of other collectible card games, all trying to collect their own slice of the pie. A lot of them fell into obscurity, but one of the big competitors, a TCG for some dumb new show called Pokemon, was created by a Japanese company called Media Factory in 1996. And while they initially had Wizards of the Coast selling the game in the U.S. for them, Nintendo chose to cut ties in 2003 once their foot was in the door, since Wizards was, you know, their main competitor. Three years later, another weird anime show spawned its own card game called Yu-Gi-Oh in 1999. And while Magic was able to keep its hold on the states, Yu-Gi-Oh grew to eventually conquer the entire eastern seaboard, becoming the most popular card game outside of North America. Despite the increased competition, Magic wasn't showing any signs of slowing down, and at the turn of the millennium, their power over the free market drew the attention of an ancient beast, the soulless one. In 1999, Peter Adkison sold Wizards of the Coast to the soulless one, and Richard Garfield absconded soon after. Since then, Magic the Gathering has been on a steady path of success, releasing block after block, and eventually putting out not one, but two web services to play MTG Online. One of which you may catch me play every so often at twitch.tv. Now, this is where the official history portion of the video ends. Since their acquisition by the soulless one, nothing monumental has happened to match the Gathering as a product, which is, I guess what happens when competent people are running a company, things get boring. And since the soulless one has been careful not to rock the boat on its flagship product, picking apart tiny moments in the 20-year timeline would kinda be tedious. But, luckily for you, I feel like the story of Magic's development cycle is more suited to when I eventually cover the in and out-of-game lore of the individual blocks of Magic themselves. So, stay tuned for a whole slew of MTG lore videos that can give you the insight you need to keep up with those random netbeards who won't shut up about wanting to tap Liliana. Until then, that'll about do it. Thank you all so much for watching, let me know about the next history video that you'd like me to cover in the comments, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can keep acting as a glorified text-to-speech device. But yeah, dabby out.