From AtlasGames@aol.com Fri Aug 23 12:53:18 1996 Received: from emout19.mail.aol.com (emout19.mx.aol.com [198.81.11.45]) by osceola.gate.net (8.6.13/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA66364 for ; Fri, 23 Aug 1996 12:53:16 -0400 From: AtlasGames@aol.com Received: by emout19.mail.aol.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id MAA08205 for daili@gate.net; Fri, 23 Aug 1996 12:52:52 -0400 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 12:52:52 -0400 Message-ID: <960823125252_266964892@emout19.mail.aol.com> To: daili@gate.net Subject: Re: First Wave of Interview Questions Status: RO Q. Can you tell us about yourself? A. I'm male, 26 years old, and currently a resident of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I'm a graduate of Carleton College, where I majored in Philosophy with a Concentration in Medieval Studies. Q. Can you tell us your involvment with the RPG/TCG industry? A. My writing career began with an article in DRAGON Magazine in April, 1986. After several years of freelancing for TSR, Inc., I became involved with a company called Lion Rampant. Then, in the summer of 1990, I launched Atlas Games to pursue projects of interest to me (while continuing to support myself primarily as a freelancer). Q. Being the co-designer of OnTE, can you enlighten us on the development of OTE? What insight(s) would you like to pass along to future designers? A. In early 1994 I became interested in doing a trading card game. On the Edge was a natural idea, since we had the rich world of the Over the Edge RPG to draw upon...plus Jonathan Tweet's imagination and game design talents. Most of my contribution to the design happened early on, helping form the basic structure of the game, doing some preliminary playtesting, coming up with the first bunch of card ideas. Jonathan and I were tossing some ideas back and forth by e-mail; I sat down and made a vaguely playable first draft, and tried playing it with some friends in Northfield (where I was living at the time). It seemed promising. I passed it along to Jonathan; we played a few games of that version, noted some of the problems it had, and brainstormed on possible solutions. From that point Jonathan took charge of the detail work...and I had to move on to the business side of the project: artists and artwork, figuring out how to handle printing and production, and financing the whole deal. Q. What future expansions can we expect to see for OnTE? A. Right now what we're working on is "The Chaos Plague." This is not so much an expansion as a stand-alone game based on On the Edge, sort of an alternate reality. It should be playable as a game for 2-4 players right out of the box. Plus, most of the cards will be compatible with regular OnTE (and it has the same card back), meaning standard OnTE fans can take Chaos Plague cards and add them to their decks. Q. Why do you think "Lunch Money" is so popular? Can we expect to see expansions for it? A. I think the majority of Lunch Money's popularity is because it's fun to play. The rules are simple, it goes quickly, and the game opens a bizarre social space in which it's acceptable to describe outrageous things to do to your friends without people getting hurt feelings. I think the graphic feel and text is a draw for some people, but I know it's a turn-off for others. It's certainly a game that people have strong opinions about. I also think that the non-collectability is a selling point in today's market: For $17 you get a game that you and a bunch of friends can all play, rather than each having to buy a starter deck of your own (for $8+), plus boosters, etc., etc. The fact that's it's so easy to learn makes it an infectious game, too, especially at game conventions. I don't foresee Lunch Money expansions at this point. Maybe we'll change our mind about that, but as a small company with limited resources we need to ask if expansions are the best way to invest ourselves, or should we be pursuing totally new projects? For example, if we'd concentrated on doing an expansion for Once Upon A Time (which a lot of people have been asking for), we would not have been able to do Lunch Money. Q. Can you give us some background about Atlas Games? A. I started Atlas Games in 1990 as a means to producing games and game products that I wanted to see in print. At first I had hoped it would be an outlet for a lot of work of my own that wouldn't fit into the lines of major game publishers; as it turns out, I've mostly been publishing other peoples' stuff. But it's been good stuff, so I can't complain...games like OVER THE EDGE and ONCE UPON A TIME screamed "publish me!" and I don't know if any other game company would have done it. I'm sure glad we did. Q. How was GenCon? Can you tell us what Atlas Games was doing during the convention? A. GEN CON was very good for us this year. We ran a ton of demos, and we sold lots of all our products; the top two sellers were Lunch Money and Once Upon A Time. Gen Con is a great time for a bunch of reasons, including the feedback from customers, the opportunity to socialize and compare notes with colleagues in the industry...and the cash it generates doesn't hurt. Q. Why did Atlas Games purchase Ars Magica? A. The reasons were both personal and professional. Personally, I was closely involved with the 2nd edition of Ars Magica, when I was working at Lion Rampant. The first Atlas Games publications were licensed adventures and sourcebooks for the game. I've been fascinated by the medieval period since I was a young boy (living in Ireland for a year when I was 10-11 years old stuffed my mind with ruined castles and monasteries and all sorts of historical detritus that I've never been able to dislodge!), and Ars Magica's take on Mythic Europe has always excited me. I'm very proud to have Ars Magica under the Atlas Games tent. On the business side, Ars Magica strengthens Atlas Games. We have experience with the game, and we have the resources to support it. Ars Magica is a niche game: It has a rabid following, but the following is not huge. I think a problem the game has had in the past is that publishers were trying to make it into some kind of blockbuster mega-seller, investing substantial money in promotion and advertising that the game could never realistically pay back. If managed carefully, I see Ars Magica as a game that can grow at a reasonable pace and make a modest profit. Q. What are the future plans for Ars Magica? A. We've announced the 4th edition as a November release. After that, we expect to support the game with 2-4 new sourcebooks per year. We haven't announced specific plans for what those sourcebooks will be, but there are a lot of great ideas being considered. Q. Can you tell us what effect Internet has had on your company? I have noticed that you are activate on the Internet. Can you tell us why that is? A. The internet is great. I've been hooked in since college, plus Atlas was one of the first companies in the Game Company Support area on America Online. The internet makes communications so much easier (small companies like Atlas rely on a network of freelance writers, editors and artists to bring projects together; we can't afford a lot of full-time staff, nor can we do all the work ourselves) and faster. Plus it's an invaluable source of feedback from customers, and a good way to propagate information about what we're doing. Q. Can you provide some information about the leagues and tournments that Atlas Games is sponsoring or supporting? A. The Conspiracy is a fan organization for the On the Edge CCG that we support. It's fun...people form "cells" of 6+ players. People compete within cells, and at conventions and the like cells compete against each other. A quarterly newsletter publishes the rankings within the cells, news tidbits, and such like. We support tournaments on a more informal basis. Usually a store or convention contacts us; we will supply them with prizes and give-aways. Sometimes we run tournaments ourselves when we go to conventions. Q. What's the 'Burger Box'? Why does Atlas Games think it will do well? A. The Burger Box is a point-of-purchase display box that carries the whole line of OnTE cards: Standard Version Starters & Boosters, and boosters of the three expansions: The Cut-Ups Project, Shadows and Arcana. Buying separate display boxes of each of these items is expensive for a retailer; the Burger Box lets him stock the whole line for a much smaller investment. It also lets the OnTE fan find all the goods in one spot on the shelf (it saves shelf space for the retailer as well). We hope more retailers will give this idea a try. Q. I noticed that you have talked about removing rarities from a future OnTE expansion? Can you tell us about this? And why would Atlas Games do this? A. It's not so much "removing rarities" as simply doing a non-collectable OnTE game, "The Chaos Plague". We'd like a game that stands alone. You don't need to know OnTE to use it...but you can add its cards to a standard OnTE deck, and you can add any OnTE cards to The Chaos Plague. Besides being a neat idea in terms of game design, a way to draw new players and satisfy the old, the non-collectable format makes sense from a business/production standpoint. It's possible to produce far less of a non-collectable game format, because you don't have the high expenses of plastic wrappers, the complication of the collation process (dealing with different rarities), and so forth. It's economical to produce much smaller print runs in a non-collectable format. Q. OnTE has won some awards in 1996. Can you tell us about them? And why they are important? We were named "Best CCG" by GAMES Magazine, the first time they had that category in their "Games 100" listing. That's a pretty big honor, especially considering the competition (games like the "Ice Age" version of M:TG). Another magazine award was from Overstreet's FAN, which named OnTE best CCG, and The Cut-Ups Project as best CCG expansion. It's nice to know that the critics recognize that OnTE is one of the best games around, in terms of play value, strategy, and the works. Other games have come and gone, driven by collecting mania and big promotional blitzes, but On the Edge will still be played years from now, I think, because of its value in the end as a *game*, not as a collectable. Q. Where do you think the industry is heading in the future? What part will Atlas Games play? A. The industry is struggling right now. The CCG marketplace crashed under the weight of too much product bought speculatively. Retailers and distributors have to operate as lean as possible on purchasing new items -- they need to sell through everything, even if that means ordering less than they *might* have been able to sell. This means less purchasing from manufacturers, and it means it's harder for consumers to get anything except the hottest sellers. A lot of manufacturers are really being pinched by this situation, and the result will be more of them going out of business and fewer new games and supplements and expansions to choose from in the coming year. You can see this already over the past year. This environment may change the way distribution works in the business. Games Workshop has done extremely well by cutting out the middlemen and selling directly to stores. I'd like to see distributors stay around and stay healthy, however: While it's invisible to your average game consumer, the distributor is a big reason why the adventure game industry is so rich in quality products. Distributors make it possible for small companies to start more easily, and for hot ideas (like Magic) to grow quickly. If a distributor recognizes a great idea, he can directly profit from helping it reach its potential. Individual companies may get higher sales and better profit margins from selling direct to stores, but in the long run I fear it hurts the whole industry. In general trends, I see a resurgence of interest in RPGs. New games like Feng Shui and Deadlands show a lot of promise and are generating a lot of excitement. We'll be showing off new editions of Over the Edge and Ars Magica this fall, I'm happy to report. CCGs will not vanish, but they need to stabilize. In the near term I'm afraid that the CCG scene will be dominated by high-profile licenses, but the product quality is too often disappointing and that may ultimately drive people from the medium. If you're just appealing to collectors, why not just make regular trading cards? When somebody combines a really great game design with a high-profile license, there will be excitement again in CCGs. As for the part of Atlas: We'll continue to do the games that demand to be published. That's my criterion in the end: When I see a game that I *need* to publish, regardless or whether or not it makes a profit, that's the first requirement. Then making it work on the bottom line (so that we can stay in business, after all, and do more games), that's the hard part. But as long as it can work, we'll keep doing it. Q. How has the demostartion program for OnTE performed? Was it as good as you had hoped? A. We received a lot of positive feedback and drew many new players to OnTE. I think there are more people actually playing On the Edge now than ever before. However, due to oversupply in the marketplace -- remember, On the Edge was one of the earliest CCGs, and when it came out in late 1994 people were speculating like crazy, resulting in a serious glut -- it hasn't done much for sales out of our warehouse. It's really a buyer's market for On the Edge, though, so it's been very cheap for new players to get into the game, since there are mail order places selling entire display boxes for $20 or less. -jn