Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You can find episodes and more at thinklikeagamedesigner.com.
In today's episode, I speak with a legend of the gaming industry, Matt Norbeck. Matt has been around the industry for a long time, working on all kinds of games, including for TSR, Wizards. Games Workshop, we learn about how he got his start at a very young age of 17, having his own booth at Gen Con, how he flew across the world into the UK and just knocked on the door of Games Workshop to be able to get a job.
We learn about a lot of the process and what it takes to be a great editor, to be a great freelancer. Matt has over 35 published novels, including countless game books. He's the designer on the Marvel Multiverse role-playing game. He has an enormous amount of incredible background, and he's very generous with sharing a lot of the things that lead to success and a lot of the things that lead to failure in this industry.
We're able to share a lot of those stories and we're able to see how Matt directly empowers emerging designers through the Diana Jones Foundation and other tools. So he's really an incredible. giving person. He is a real exemplar of what is best about the gaming industry. And we talk about what's so great about being in this industry in particular and how supportive everyone is.
So he is very generous with his knowledge here. And so I will get out of the way and let him share it. So without any further ado, here is Matt Vorbeck. Hello and welcome. I am here with Matt Forbeck. Matt, so excited to finally get you on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Justin. It's been a long time since I've seen you. I saw you at GenCut, actually, so not that long. That's right. It's been two whole weeks or three whole weeks. I don't even know. I lost track of time.
Yeah, man. I'm trying to remember the year when it was we actually met. I think it was at Gen Con when you were doing the Geek Dad thing. It was. Yeah. John Kabbalah got me doing geek dad stuff for wired. And, uh, uh, they sent me out and somebody else was going to do it. And they're like, Oh, this guy can't do it. Can you go interview Justin for a new game he's got coming out? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Why not?
which was kind of funny because I was there. I think I had all my kids with me too. So they were fairly young at the time. So they're like, yeah, come over here. Let's do this instead. I'm like, no, no, I got to do this interview for Wired. Sorry, guys. sorry kids got to talk to this Justin guy well now here we are the tables have finally turned and I get to interview you Excellent. Only a decade or so later. So let's get into it, man, because you have such a great, diverse background.
I am very much, you know, the sort of intersection between storytelling and game design. I feel like you kind of epitomize the real essence of those things. I don't fully know how you got started exactly, so I'd love to start with your origin story and then we can jump through some fun projects and topics. Sure. I grew up in southern Wisconsin, which is just a little ways from Lake Geneva, which is where Dungeons & Dragons started. So I started playing D&D when I was like 13 years old.
And then I had my own zine. I started back when I was 16 years old and I had my first booth at GenCon when I was 17. I pulled two issues before we had to fold and it cost me a thousand dollars. was my college money at the time, but it was probably the best tuition money I ever spent because I learned more doing that than I ever did in a classroom. And then I went off to...
I went off to college at the University of Michigan, and Troy Denning was a guy who would mentor me. Troy was one of the creative directors over at TSR, and back when I was in high school, I would drive up. to Delavan, Wisconsin, and playtest games from Pacesetter, which was a company that he and Steve Sullivan and Andrea Hady and Gali Sanchez and Mark Akers and all these guys, all these ex-TSR guys had founded.
that I would go up and play test games with them like once a week for about a year and then before I went off to college. And then I ended up working with a guy named Will Niebling, who was the vice president, first vice president of TSR. And I did sales for him, actually, just running around at different conventions and helping him sell different things for Mayfair and Grenadier and Kaplau.
iron crown enterprises and i kind of worked my way into it from there where i was like hey guys you know i'm working in the booth here with you but i know editing i know design I ended up freelancing for Gary Gygax for New Infinities, which was the second company when I was in college.
And then when I got out of college, I took a flying leap and went off to England just because I wanted to travel and I didn't have any money. But I had a one way. My dad bought me a one way ticket to England as my graduation. And I had a student work fees and I showed up there and I banged on the door at Games Workshop. I said, give me a job.
And they did, which was kind of stunning. Wait, is this a literal bang on the door? Like a literal, I walked up to the door and said hello. I called them up from London from this hostel I was staying in and said, guys, I saw...
add in white dwarf six months ago and i wrote you and you said you couldn't hire me because i didn't have a you know hiring an american's real problem because of visa issues blah blah blah i'm like but i'm here and i have a visa and i'm here for like six months and it's either this or i'm gonna go get a bartending job And they said, come on in for the interview. And I went in for the interview. They said, take this editing test.
go back to London, come back to Nottingham on Monday. And I did. And I had everything I own on my back and two duffel bags. And I said, guys, you need to give me a job today for my dad's best friend's boss's daughter, who I've never met because I didn't know anybody in the entire nation. is going to give me a couch to surf on for two weeks while I go find a bartending job.
And they hired me and I ended up living in the managing editor assignment for us. He had a spare bedroom. So I stayed there with him for a couple of weeks while I found a place to live. I ended up living with a guy named William King, who's a best-selling author. He did Gotrick and Felix, a bunch of stuff. And we were roommates and best buddies, me and Bill for many, many years.
Well, for months there. And then he actually came out to my wedding many years later and my wife sent me out to his wedding in Prague several years after that.
They offered me a full-time position at the end of all this after my work visa expired. And my girlfriend at the time, who was back in Ann Arbor, said, you know, I got another year of college left and probably another couple for... uh for my graduate degree she's getting a master's in social work uh so that's probably not going to work i mean this is all pre-internet really much less facetime and everything else we're writing letters to each other like with stone tablets and chisels right and um
And so I quit. I went back to Ann Arbor. And that's now my wife of 32 years, the mother of my five kids. So it worked out pretty well. I got to tell you, I'm so glad I asked this because I didn't know most of this stuff. The word that just keeps coming up to my mind as you were going through the story is chutzpah. The amount of chutzpah that you showed both as a kid getting a booth at Gen Con and printing your thing and showing up flying to the UK and just like...
expecting that it's going to just work out for you. Where does that come from? How do you get that confidence and ability? What is it that brought you there? Because most people, I don't imagine, are shocked as I am at this pretty impressive and ballsy way to live life.
At the time, I didn't think it was anything special, right? Just like, this is just what I'm going to do. We're going to see what happens. And, you know, it was always like, if this doesn't work, I'll have other plans because I always had, you know, contingencies and something else would happen.
If I didn't get the job at Gabe's Workshop, I would have ended up bartending or sleeping in a bedsit or getting mugged, who the hell that was, right? But I was always just kind of ready to run and go and see what the hell happened.
I think just being open to different possibilities was a lot of it, right? Because I didn't expect to get the job. In fact, it was just like, well, I'm here. I might as well call them. And then I was like running out of money like crazy. I think I had $600 in my pocket. And Brian Ansel, who was the head of the company, he set me up with a loan so I could actually put down a security deposit in an apartment.
And then they garnish, she did that on my wages for the first several months I was there. But, you know, just they were really kind and accepting and wonderful to me. I've just, I've been very lucky. As they often say, you know, I just, I rely on the kindness of strangers.
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, lucky is part of it. But I think you said something really powerful there. And this is a lesson I always try to highlight, which is like, you know, you had contingencies and it didn't really feel like a risk. at the time. It didn't feel like everything you described on surface level is super scary. But in reality,
you were going to be fine. You got to crash on a friend's couch and get a bartending job. No big deal. Your company folds at Gen Con and it doesn't work out. No big deal. You're fine. And this is really, really key. And then just knowing what your fallback position is. I mean, so many of the times for me, just to kind of my own story, I dropped out of law school to become a game designer.
and moved across the country, but I always could have gone back to law school. I quit my job as a game designer to start my company, and I always could have gotten another job, right? And so those things that sound like the most terrifying things, and they feel it. I mean, I felt... I felt scared when I did it. But in reality, the fear is illusory. And I think that you just sort of seem to know that from an early age or felt.
do you feel the fear in those situations or you just you didn't even feel it just didn't even face you i i didn't think it was anything to be afraid of i mean it was uh Like, for instance, you're talking about quitting stuff. I actually, when I went to college, I had, at the University of Michigan, I lined up a...
a dual degree program where I was going to get a creative writing degree, a BA in creative writing, and a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, right? And because I was good at both these things, I figured, okay, I can, you know.
get both halves of my brain going and about two years in the engineering program it was going to be about five years for the total thing about two years into it i realized that man if i got the engineering degree i would use it and i would tell myself i was going to
you know, write in the evenings, design games in the evenings, whatever. And I was probably never going to do it because I would come home and be tired and I'd want to see my girlfriend or have a beer with my buddies or play some games. And I just didn't think I had enough discipline to pull that off.
So I actually dropped out of the engineering degree and graduated the creative writing degree in three years. And again, I thought, you know, if I screw it up within a certain period of time, I could go back and get the engineering degree. But that's what I wanted to do. And I figured, take a risk while you're young and you have. not very many responsibilities, and you can just try this stuff. I mean...
We weren't poor. I'm a straight white dude. Nowadays, I'm like, well, yeah, I was relying on a lot of privilege that way to be able to pull that kind of stuff off. But it never struck me as something I should be terrified of. In fact, I was more terrified of living a conventional life that I thought I'd regret when I was in my 40s.
Right. I thought I'd wake up one day and hate myself and hate my wife and my kids and resent everybody around me. Because you always read these stories about people having these midlife crises. I'm like, well, let's my dad called it my quarter life. He said, you know, you're going to do this right now and then get it over with.
But I've never regretted it. Yeah, you haven't gotten it over with yet. You're still in it. But it's true, right? That is just a really powerful corollary of the lesson that I want to underscore. When the things that most people are typically afraid of are not worth being afraid of. There's nothing there. And the thing that people don't put enough fear into, don't put enough concern into, this idea that you could live your entire life without ever taking a shot.
to live your dreams and do the things that you're actually passionate about. To look back from your late 40s, 50s, 60s deathbed and realize you didn't actually live your life. You didn't even try. That is the real, that's what people should be afraid of. That's what real fear should look like. No, that's the thing that would keep me up at night, or the idea that I would...
just resent myself and everybody around me and just go, Jesus, I could have done something. And you don't know. I mean, I could have screwed it up. I could have failed. Right. And that's fine. But I'd rather find out when I'm young and have the opportunity. And I don't mind sleeping on floors and I don't mind.
you know, not having any money or whatever. And one of the other things I did is I was willing to live poor. Right. I mean, when I graduated, my parents like, well, that's it, kid, you're out. You know, they paid for my college. And that was a great privilege for me. But after that, they're like, you're on your own. Good luck.
And I was willing to live in just the sloppiest, nastiest apartments, whatever, just because and I moved back to Wisconsin, too, after we started having kids, because I knew that I could get away with living cheaply. That meant that. the risk you, the pressures on you were much less, right? You have to worry about whether your car payments were going well or your mortgage payments or whatever else.
I mean, I bought a series of $500 cars when I was that age, right? And just, you know, they would last for a year or two. And then they, you know, like, well, okay, that one's gone off the junkyard. Let's grab another one. Just because, again, I didn't want to obligate myself to a position where I was going to feel like I had to go off and do something I didn't want to.
Yeah, being able to live cheaply is a superpower. I mean, I think back to my early days as a pro Magic player and getting started there. I mean, I'm sleeping on hotel floors and traveling in the worst situations in the back of a car. I can't even imagine. I don't want that life now, but the fact that I could do it then is a real big power. But it is a principle I carry through life. When my company first started really blowing up and doing really well, I started...
spending accordingly. And I realized that I had put myself in kind of a trap. So when we hit a roadblock and we had a downturn, all of a sudden, I felt it. And I was like, okay, I'm never going to do that again. I'm always going to be a lot more conscious. And then the fact that I can keep my overhead low, especially now I live as a nomad. I mean, I'm here in Medellin right now recording this and my cost of living is...
Two grand a month, maybe. It's crazy low. So you can be a lot more risky and take a lot more chances on stuff you want to do when you know you can keep your overhead low or at least be aware of what that cost is.
Right. And you can sock a little bit away from when the inevitable problems happen. Right. I mean, exactly. Right. I've been a freelancer now for most of my life. And, you know, some months you're making so much money. You're like, oh, my God, I'm on the top of the world. Next month, get nothing. Right. Might be six months till something.
Yeah, that's the thing I mean, it's sort of entrepreneurship freelancing kind of teaches you because, you know, when there's a certain trap of a regular paycheck, right, you kind of become accustomed to a given amount, and then you adjust your lifestyle accordingly. And if you lose that, it's a problem. But yeah, as a freelancer.
Whereas an entrepreneur, maybe you got a huge payday in one quarter and you got nothing coming in the next and you just need to be prepared for that. So yeah, you definitely learn to be a little bit more conservative. And then just realizing like... The things you really need to be happy in life monetarily are not that much.
But the freedom of being able to do great creative work and work with people you want to work with and not take jobs you don't want to take is, I mean, it is a true luxury. That's really the abundance that I've learned to appreciate a lot more over the years. I want to shift topics a little bit here because you have so many aspects of your background. I want to be able to at least touch on all of them. Am I correct? It's 35 novels that you've published?
Is that still accurate? It depends how you count novels, right? Like the Endless Quest books, I don't count even though they're technically novels. I mean, they're novel length, whatever. I've written six of those, other interactive fiction stuff. I've written more nonfiction books than I can count. I actually gave up counting the game design stuff I've worked on over the years. It's somewhere north of 200, I'm sure. I just have no idea where it is.
Amazing. And so I've published one book and I've got another one that I've been working on. And to me, it's such an enormous amount of work. It's such an enormous amount of dedication. And so what's the secret to getting 35 to 200, depending on how you count it? How do you churn out such quality content over time? And again, you've got a New York Times bestseller. You've got a Peabody Award. I mean, you're not just turned out direct. You're actually writing good things.
Well, you know, some people don't like Pixar, right? It's fair. It's okay. We get good reviews and bad reviews. Part of it was that I started out doing editing. One of the ways I broke into doing game design was doing editing because nobody in the role-playing game industry wanted to do editing.
they all wanted to be the designer right or the writer and i'm like well i can come in and fix what you're doing wrong here and that worked me into doing uh editing and a development design for tsr and other companies
Well, because I'm very quick at what I do, I can write with a lot of confidence, right? So back when I was young, and I'm not this... fast anymore but back when i was young and hungry i would write 5 000 words a day right just to make sure because i was already a nickel a word right and so in order to be able to cover whatever i needed to be able to eat for you know
For food, rent, beer, money, whatever the hell else I needed, I needed to write about 5,000 words a day. And some days I would crank out more than that. But if you could crank out regularly 25,000 words a week. it doesn't take you that long to write a book. And a lot of that's just learning to write with confidence.
Getting the hell out of your own way, because the real problem is that if you don't, if you second guess yourself constantly, it slows you down. Right. So I have a way I write where I come up with an outline ahead of time. Especially because I started doing game design, you always had to get it approved by somebody before you started work because it was a way to save time because you didn't want to go halfway into a book and have your developer say, no, that's not what we wanted.
You had to give them an outline and said, okay, this is what I'm going to do. Does that sound good? They're like, yeah, go. So when you. have that kind of approval when you start out. You can write relentlessly without thinking about, am I doing this right? Is this what they want? You know that's what they want. So that allows you to get the hell out of your own way and just produce. And that's really been a part of the secret for me is just being able to sit down and get into a flow state.
essentially where i can uh manage to crank out you know when i'm really cooking i write about a thousand words an hour you know i'll work for like four or five six hours a day and then uh and then take it off or you know answer emails whatever else These days, I'm probably not that fast. I'm probably more like, you know, 2,500, 3,000.
a day and taking a little bit more easy than I did. But I also have a lot of kids running around the house still. So that kids do get in the way of efficiency. I've heard. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have no regrets there, but it's just.
Like, I didn't miss a deadline my entire life until, well, we had one kid who was, he's 25 now, and he's actually helped me as a game designer. He's writing on the Marvel game with me, and he worked on his Shotguns and Sorcery 5th Edition supplement with me, and he's doing some other stuff as well.
He just wrote a World of Warcraft Chronicle, actually, for Dark Horse they had set up. And he's doing some great work. But Marty was three and a half years old when the rest of my kids came along. They're quadruplets, right? So we had four kids born in one.
they're now 22 years old and i didn't miss a single deadline until that point but i remember calling up um it was rich baker at ts i guess wizards at that point right yeah it was third edition so i called up rich and i was working on unapproachable east which was a forgotten realms book for third edition
I said, Rich, I'm going to be late with this book. He says, what's going on? You're never late. I said, well, I'm in the hospital with my wife. She's on full bed rest, probably hopefully for several more weeks. because she's pregnant with quadruplets and he says you you take all the time you need wow people have been a lot uh have been very forgiving and understanding for me now fortunately i got to a point
that I was already a known commodity and had established a good reputation before I started complicating myself that way. Because if you can't hit deadlines, nobody wants to work with you because they want to make sure they get quality work and on time. But they're willing to wait a couple of weeks if they need to, to get quality work or, you know, at least work with you. It's something if your kid's sick or you're sick or whatever.
I forget where I heard this from. I think it was Neil Gaiman, actually, but it's always stuck with me. To be successful as a freelancer, it's do good work. Turn in your work on time. Be good to work with. If you're two out of the three of those, you could get work. If you could do all three, you're a rock star. Exactly. Exactly. That's really what I shot. I mean, the other thing is...
Whether or not it's good work is not up for you to decide. You put your best effort into it and it's up for other people to look at your work, your editors, your publishers. the players to decide whether it was good work. So I always just try to concentrate on doing the best I could, hitting it on time and being easy to work with, with things I could control. So I always focused on those as well.
Okay, so now this is really interesting. So pretty much all of this work that you've done is freelance, like work for hire. Is that right? Are there projects that you've initiated yourself? Probably about 80% of it, maybe 90% of it. But I mean, I've done...
like 12 of the novels I did for myself. I actually wrote, I've got three other novels I wrote for a publisher, for Anger and Robot back in the day. In 2012, I did this crazy project called 12 for 12, where I tried to write a dozen novels in a year. And I broke them up into trilogies and I ran a Kickstarter for each one of them and tried to see if I can crank out. They're 50,000 word novels, so a little bit shorter than normal.
And I tried to crank out 12 books that year. I didn't quite get there. I got nine of those books done. I got a leveraged TV tie-in novel that was about 80,000 words done. I wrote nine issues of Magic the Gathering. And I wrote a novella for StarCraft II. So slacking, basically. I often say, if you can set really high goals for yourself and strive to them, even if you don't quite get them, you're still accomplishing a hell of a lot.
Here, here. Yeah, I agree with that. How many projects are you working on at one time, typically? It's often three or four. I try to, if I'm really lucky, I get one, I get to focus, but that almost never happens. And part of that is as a freelancer.
You know, when you start out as a freelancer, you're like, you toss in 10 lines in the water and you're hoping that one of them strikes, right? In the moment it strikes, you're like, yeah, I can do this. And you go and you do the best you can. You turn it on time. And then as you're.
As your reputation develops and your client base develops, you end up getting more and more strikes, right? Eventually, like all of them strike. The real question is, you know, what order are they going to strike in and how are they all going to strike at one? Right. Because a lot of times part of the negotiation is, yeah, Matt, we need you to do this and we think it's going to take this long, but we're not sure exactly when the start date is.
So we'll get back to you in like two months, three months. We'll let you know. And sometimes they're like, oh, it'll be another two months or it'll be another three months or whatever. And sometimes it's like, actually, we need this a month ago. Can you get on this? And I'm like, well, I'm already working on, well, I guess I'm. doing a lot of overtime now you know um you're juggling back and forth between those
Recently, because I got Marty on board with me, I've got a bit more bandwidth. So if there's something that somebody's asked me to do, I'm like, I can't at the moment, but I have this wonderful son here.
who's got lots of time learning how to do nothing like nepotism get you going um the trick is actually he's a damn fine writer because i uh i go through and edit all this stuff as he goes just to make sure presentable to the publisher and i barely have to do anything i mean part of that's probably because i've been training him since he was from birth
You know, the kids, I would check over their homework before I would turn it in. And, you know, I have a reputation for like just if somebody has me a manuscript, I hand it back to them. It's all coated in red pen and saying, OK, fix this, fix this. It's all like soaking in blood. i might i might send you my book draft then there you go that sounds amazing learn how to do that marty i think took it out of heart and learned how to be a pretty damn fine writer too so
I have no qualms of him getting work. Obviously, I'm there to kick the door open for him, but he's actually the one doing the work. Alright, so there's a couple of threads here that I want to try to tie together to dig in, right? So what I heard you say is that, look, you know, it's not to you whether your work is good or not, right? And you're doing work for hire a lot of times. Not to me whether it's perceived as good. I think it's good, right? Sure, sure.
Yeah. Whether or not it's going to be like rock star good or just. competent oh yeah okay that that that makes more sense to me i agree that you can't control what's success in the marketplace right and like i obviously i don't put anything out i don't think is good because that's what you're doing right everything i put out i think is great but
Turns out not everybody agrees with me, and that's okay. You can't control how other people are going to receive what you do. You do the best you can. You know it works for your taste, but you never know what the taste is. Yeah, that's okay. And then you also, you know, you started out as an editor and one, this is like little, you know, super.
trick for anybody that wants to get in the game industry. Don't go for the most popular job first. Do the job other people don't want to do and then get yourself in the industry and it's much easier to sidewalk your way in instead of trying to go straight for the most popular job. As an editor, it's your job to decide what you think the market's going to want, to take somebody else's creative work and to turn it into something that the market will want. You are the middleman in that situation.
what somebody else perceives as great work into something greater or different or whatever it is. What made you a good editor then? Or what broadly makes a great editor? And how do you cross that bridge between the creative soul that's trying to make the best thing they can and the person that's responsible for getting this thing to the market? Yeah, I think it's a skill that not enough people have, right? It's really demand in the marketplace because of that.
I started out as a copy editor, proofreader, et cetera, right? I remember Don Turnbull gave me a job working for New Infinities for Gary Gygax's company. Don was actually the first guy inducted in the Gaming Hall of Fame way back. And he gave me the job because he gave me an editing test at his place in Lake Geneva that was like a condo on the golf course.
after i've done he says well matthew we're going to give you the job because you apparently you know the difference between lesser and fewer and very few people I'm like, okay, I'll take the job. Being kind of tenacious about making sure you're doing good stuff and knowing what the rules are, right? And then the neat thing about knowing what the rules are is that you know how to break them when it comes time to break them. And if you don't know what they are and you're just floundering around.
Part of doing any kind of game design or even any kind of creative process, you're often working with collaborators who are helping you out. And if you can't explain your choices to them, everything becomes more difficult. You just have to say trust.
But if you actually know what the rules are and why the rules are that way, and then why you're breaking those rules, then you can explain those to people and say, this is what I think is going to work better because we have tried this other way in the past. This way, we need to do something different.
My research, my gut tells me this is the right way to do it. So trust me on this, but you can explain to them how it's going to work, right? So when I was working at, after that, I worked up to doing editing for TSR for Dungeons and Dragons stuff in seconds. And after a couple books started, I mean, we went to editing, to developing a book, which was... actually been originally done by Mayfair Games.
And then Mainfair's roll aids line got purchased by TSR to settle a lawsuit. Before the OGL happened, TSR would always say, hey, you're doing generic D&D stuff. Stop that. We'll sue your ass. And Mayfair's president, Darwin Bromley, was an attorney. He's like, yeah, really? Come on. I'd really like to see you do that. And after like arguing for months and months and threatening lawsuits, TSR finally said, how about we just buy you instead or buy the role-playing game stuff?
So one of the things they bought out of that was Pronomancer, which was actually the first book that Lauren Coleman wrote. And Lauren is now the guy who runs Catalyst Game Labs, right? Does BattleTech and Shadowrun and all that kind of stuff.
And the stuff that he had turned into Mayfair wasn't quite up to where TSR wanted the stuff, so they gave it to me to develop. And that was basically, take what we have here, this diamond in the rough, and cut it and polish it to a point where we can actually publish it as a TSR. So that's how I ended up doing that. Then they said, okay, you did a great job with that. Now we want to have you doing design work where we'll have other people.
But then I went on to found Pinnacle Entertainment Group with Shane Hensley a few years later, where we did Deadlands and a whole bunch of other games. And Shane was the main designer in that, and I was the lead developer. And a lot of that was saying, this is your vision for this. How do we make your vision as wonderful as we can be? Because your job as the developer is not to...
design the game you want. It's to make the game the designer has brought you or is presenting to you the best it possibly can. Right. And part of that was me. Like I even learned this when I was at games workshop. John Blanche was doing an art book. And John's this amazing artist. He does this incredible stuff for Games Workshop. You recognize him immediately if you saw it. And he had an art book coming out called Rat Spike that had some of his artwork in it.
He gave it to me like this is a man who's like 10 or 15 years on me and he's a legend already in the field. And I'm just this junior editor. And he brings me this handwritten manuscript where he's actually drawn it, written it out on vellum. right and hands it to me he's just like almost shaking that he's terrified i'm just going to tear it apart
And I'm like, wait a minute. My job here is not to tell you you're wrong. My job is to take what you gave me and make it the best possible thing it can be. Right. And so we became friends at that point, because, again, I wasn't trying to.
embarrass him or make him feel foolish or anything like that or damage his vision, but to actually make it clearer, right? Your job is to bring focus to that stuff and to make it into a product that everybody's going to enjoy, but still be true to the creator as much as you possibly can. So in many ways, the kind of game developer role and editor role are very similar, right? It sort of sounds like you're trying to do the same thing.
And are there any principles that come to mind? Or if not, then maybe some stories to help illustrate. What would make somebody into a great developer or great editor? What are the things you would look for? How do you approach that kind of problem? Because it's not as easy as it sounds. You're not trying to make your thing.
you know, help refine somebody else's thing. And I think it's, because I have my own thoughts on this from the types of games and how we view the developer role for board games and card games and TCGs. And I don't know if it, I'm curious how much it overlaps with RPGs and books and things like that.
Yeah, I think it's actually pretty similar because a lot of times what you're saying is you're taking your knowledge of the marketplace and what you think sells and how things work. And one of the things if you're doing board games, TCGs and everything else is also that.
you understand how things are made right because a lot of game designers especially novice ones show up and say i want to do this uh deck of 48 cards or whatever you're like well that's great except you know decks of cards are printed in 110 and if you got into 55 you can double it up if you're doing 48 that's not a multiple that works you're going to either having cards you have to throw away or we're going to pay a crap load for this stuff
So you know things like the best box sizes, where you're going to get the cheapest things for this, where you can get pieces. I've done game sourcing when I was at Pinnacle, too, for miniatures and cardboard and die cuts and all this kind of stuff. So a developer will know a lot of that kind of stuff and so they can make it not just a game but a product.
Because you have to think about what the end is going to be. You have to have that in mind when you start out. This has got to be a product that we're going to sell to people. We have to know what the price point is going to be. Can we actually afford to make money at this?
Is this a game that's going to cost us $300 to make, in which case we can't make it, right? Or is it going to be something that we can sell for $20 and somebody picks it up, are they going to think that's worth $20? Are they going to think that's actually $5 worth of stuff here? What are you doing? Yeah, I think that's really important. And it's one of these things like I... I wrestle with this sometimes because I think my game designs benefit enormously from the fact that I have
taken on so many different roles. As a CEO and having to manage product and marketing and sales and every piece of the pipeline, I understand how those things impact game design. It means I don't get to spend as much time designing games as I might like. But I think it's really great to be able to have that broader perspective and know what's happening, especially for people out there that are trying to pitch games.
knowing where it fits in the marketplace and where it fits in somebody's portfolio and what the likely price point is going to be because of the cost of goods of that item. That stuff is so helpful when somebody does a pitch to me and it's clear that they know that stuff. I'm going to treat them with a lot more respect and it's going to be much more likely to either be something I accept and bring into the portfolio or if I know it's not a fit, I can...
much better direct them to where it's going to be, right? Right. You can say, well, that's not for me, but you know, these guys over here, they do exactly that kind of game. You should talk to them. And in fact, I'd be happy to connect. Yeah, exactly. A lot of times people are like, oh, you're competing against each other. Man, it's the game industry. It's all arts, really, right? It's not a zero-sum game. We want to be able to support everybody who can.
It is that way. It's hard to explain it to people outside of this industry. It's amazing how much everybody really does want everybody to succeed and kind of has that rising tide lifts all boats. I don't think it's quite the same way in the video game space as it is in the tabletop game space. My experiences there have been very different. But tabletop gaming, role-playing games like this space, it's just one of the most.
Maybe you're not going to make as much money as the video game industry is going to, but you're going to have... such a better life and such a better community that I've just been so grateful to have so many great friends in the space and to be supported when I've been falling down and to be able to help other people when they, you know, find their way. That's the whole point of this podcast, frankly, is just to kind of help.
make other people's paths a little easier than ours were by sharing our lessons and stories and failures and whatnot. I always tell people, you know, you're going to, I want you to make new mistakes. Don't make the same stupid mistakes I did at least. Right. Because it's painful. I was doing Chi-Tag, which is a Chicago toy and game show. They had me as one of the experts one year, and they had this family come up, and they had this dinosaur game they had already produced.
And it was just ugly and didn't fit on a shelf. It was massive. And the cost of goods was like $40. And they were trying to sell it for $50. And I'm like, there's just no way this is going to work. They're like, what do we do? I'm like, man. Donate them to Toys or Tots or something and try something else because you've really made a terrible mistake here.
There's so many errors here at every step of the way. And I wish you could have come talk to me six months ago before you actually went on this because we could have helped you then. Right. Right. That's just it. Reach out to people and talk again. When you're doing games, you're not really competing against each other. What you're competing for is attention from other things like film and video games and people having to drive their kids to school. You're not worried about it.
Whether or not, you know, they're playing Gloomhaven as opposed to the Marvel game or whatever. You know, it's really all, you know, people want to enjoy these things as art. There's so much out there. There's too much, too many things for you to compete with. It's like going to a bookstore and saying, who's my competition?
I mean, for Christ's sake, you're competing with everybody who ever wrote a book, right? Right. Obviously, you can't wrap your head around that. It doesn't work. You just need to support each other as artists who are bringing entertainment. Yeah, well, sorry. So emotionally, I totally agree. But let me try to be the voice of the contrarian out there, which is that, look, there is... every month, every damn day it feels like than there ever were before.
As somebody that's easy for you to say, as someone who's got a reputation and already has access to major licenses and everything. But for the people out there that are trying to get started, they're trying to get discovered, they're trying to get their game. It's actually, of course, it's competition. Of course, how are they supposed to be able to find their footing here in this world where there's more crowd and noise than there's ever been?
But it's like that in every artistic field, right? I mean, it's like saying, if I start up a garage band, am I competing against Bruce Springsteen, right? Sure. I mean, at a certain level, right? But are you crazy? Maybe you're competing for gigs against the other garage band down the street.
But what you do is you're building up your own fan base. You're building up people who care about what you're doing and what your vision is. And that's not really a vicious competition. You're trying to reach out to people and see how you can connect with them. But you don't have a... The idea that Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen are competing against each other, for instance, sure, even at that level, are they?
I don't know, maybe you don't have enough money to go to both concerts, right? But most people will pick one and go, and neither one of them seems like they're hurting. So if you're trying to break in, though, what you really need to do...
The games are an established field now. When I was starting out, they were pretty young. D&D was only like... you know 15 years old at that time right so um you know games were kind of new and the idea that you could break into a profession was kind of a novel thing that nobody really thought about so yeah it was easier to break in than it probably
But now it's like every other established creative field. I mean, you just have to go out there, do the best you can, try to be true to yourself and what your visions are and try to be easy to work with and find people you can enjoy your stuff. You don't have control over a lot of this stuff. And the other trick is if you can't manage to get past.
the gatekeepers who are in your way because they're not buying your game for their publisher or whatever. Man, the tools for self-publishing and doing your own stuff nowadays are so easy to use compared to what they use. right it is a piece of cake compared to like like when i started out we literally did cut and paste
words, right? Like when you when you want to print something up, you put out a big piece of paper like this with blue lines on it. And you had to get a typeset and typeset that would then print out in scrolls and you had to literally cut and paste them down. Oh, my goodness. So you could actually run the ink on the plates, right? So, yeah, I mean, the idea that you can just push a button and have it all generated pretty quickly, whether through AI or just using PageMaker or InDesign or whatever.
It's come so long. I mean, you could just basically come up with an idea. You could come up with an idea, produce it, put it up on DriveThruRPG within a week. And it might not be the best thing in the world, but it's a start. And you can keep going and doing this stuff. You can build communities in ways we couldn't do before because there was no way to reach out to people. You have lots and lots of different ways to do this stuff.
You really have to have a passion for it, though, because it is going to be frustrating and it's not going to be easy. Whether or not your thing strikes gold and there's a rocket out of the gate, that is honestly a lot of luck. You know, even like going back to when Magic the Gathering came out. I remember I knew Peter before Magic came.
and he showed me the cards at the Origins before the game debuted. He goes, what do you think, Matt? How's it going to sell? I said, I don't know, Peter, what do you think? He's like, I think we'll sell out the first print run. There's no way to predict a kind of... once in a generation success like that, right? And you can't make a business plan around that. That's just like, oh yeah, that's like buying a lottery ticket being a business plan. You just can't make that.
Yeah, you dropped a lot of wisdom in there. I jumped over a couple of different places. So I'm going to just highlight a couple of things here. One, I think... This idea, you didn't quite use this phrasing, but this idea of being a category of one is something that's always stuck with me. Look, you're not competing with the world. This is a artistic...
journey that you're on. And at some point, you're the only one that can make the game that you make. You're the only one that can write the book that you write. You're the only one that can make the sound that you make. The Yo-Yo Ma quote that I really love. This ability that you... I find that the creative work is not about so much what you're putting into the world. It's how you're refining your own voice.
By constantly iterating and putting things out there and crafting things, you are refining. in a sense, who you are and how you express yourself into the world. And at some point, that will resonate with some audience. And that is kind of the dance of the creative life.
Does that resonate? It's more true for game design than anything else, right? Because game design is probably the most iterative art in the world, right? You start out and it always sucks. It doesn't matter what you do. The first draft always sucks.
It doesn't matter how much you have this platonic ideal in your head about how amazing it's going to be. And you put it down and you're like, yeah, it doesn't work. And then you're like, OK, what do you do? You fix it. And you just keep fixing it and fixing it and finding more problems and fixing it. And then you have new problems. You fix those.
I mean, the first time I do a board game or anything like that, I basically just sit down and design it and walk around the table myself and play every position because I'm too embarrassed to show it to other people at that point because I know it's terrible.
And then when I think it's good enough, I'll bring my family in and I'll play it with them. And then when they think it's good enough, then I'll bring in outside people and start sweating it out there. But it really is just an iterative design.
You need to keep your ego out of it, right? Because a lot of people, they get feedback like, well, no, it's not like that. You get very defensive and you think people are attacking you. But they're not attacking you. They're trying to describe what's wrong with your work. And your work, it's like...
You know, it's like somebody come up saying you missed a spot on the lawn over there. It's just your work. It's not you personally. Oh, I screwed that up. You're right. Thank you for pointing that out. Should be your response. Not screw you. I did it right the first. Yes. Now, the worst thing you can do is argue with your playtesters or argue with the publishers. This is the worst behavior you can do. Exactly. You thank people for their feedback, and then you sit back and say, were they right?
right and then if they were right how do i fix that right yeah a lot of it's my humility and just iterating iterating Yeah, no, the ability to find a way to divorce your ego from the outcome is probably the hardest part of the creative life in general, right? How do you find the way to do that and keep...
bashing your head against the wall of reality until you find your way through. And the principles are not complicated. It's just a sort of emotional regulation or that ability to then... And then you train your discernment to know when...
feedback is just, okay, this is the wrong lens from the wrong person, or this is the real problem. And another Neil Gaiman quote that's one of my favorites is when you're, he's a reader, but it works for any part of your audience, when you're going to tell you something,
something's wrong, they're almost always right. And when they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. And if you get a consistent feedback of a problem, it's a problem. But the craft of design is figuring out how to solve it.
Another one for that is I say that Act 3 issues are actually usually Act 1 problems, right? It's something that's underlying that unless you're a creator, you're not going to be able to figure out how to fix it, right? That's where a developer comes in. These are people who are either... you know, creators themselves or, you know, creator adjacent so they can take a look at that and say, okay, I see what's wrong here.
And I think it's because of this thing very early on. And if we can fix this basic problem, then it'll ramify out from there and you'll have the problem solved, right? That's where a really good developer event. Yeah, that's great. And that's where... I need to get another great editor for my book. It's always a trick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing. How do you find a great editor? Because being able to find someone that you have to trust their instincts and their... willingness to be a vessel for your voice or to help refine your voice and not just put in their voice.
That's tough because it really is this sort of collaborative relationship, almost like getting married here where you need some complimentary relationship. What do you recommend for somebody like me that's trying to find a great editor for my work?
Well, I think part of that is just finding somebody you like to work with, that you have the same kind of goals, you have the same kind of tastes, right? If you're trying to work with somebody who has tastes entirely opposite your own, you're going to just butt heads and nobody's going to be happy because at the end of the day, they're going to want something different than what you want to.
If you're working with big publishers, a lot of the time you just say, I'm going to trust you because you're a professional. But when an editor gives you feedback, half of what you're doing is going through and saying, do I believe in this feedback and do I want to make the change they suggest? And there's this magic word that you have when you're writing books. It's called stet. It means leave it as it is. I meant it that way.
Right. So if somebody has gone through and said, boom, you just write S T E T stat. And that means, no, no, screw off. I did this on purpose. And you often have to figure out where to... Where to draw the line? Where do you want to have your fights? What battles do you want to fight, right? And sometimes it's like, okay, they want me to change the name of this character because it's too close to another character in the book and it makes it confusing.
Sure, what's the big deal, right? But if they want you to change the basic nature of this character that you think is really going to... resonate at the end of the book. And you really, it means a lot to you personally. You can say, no, I think this is actually really important. This is why. But then part of that is you having to define to
Come up with a logic to defend your own choices, at least in front of your editor. And then maybe you have to refine what you're saying in the product, in the book or game, whatever it is, so that the... consumer doesn't have the same issue that your editor does right because if your editor looks and says man it seems like you're doing this you're like no no that's not what i meant at all
problem is it doesn't matter what you meant it matters what's on the page right you have to fix what's on the page so it becomes what you Actually, I did a book for, I did a Mutant Chronicles novelization, right? Mutant Chronicles was a film, but it originally was a... Tabletop role-playing game came out from Target Games in Sweden back in the 90s.
And I had actually worked on the game way back in, like, 92, 93. And then when the movie came out that Fred Malmberg produced, he's one of the guys who owns Conan now. Actually, they sold it to Embracer. So he's working with Embracer now. um he hired me on to write the novelization for the book or for the film and i had a great time doing it but i remember they turned it over to the proofreader and the proofreader went through and uh
They just found so many errors. And I was like, wait a minute. No, no, no. I'm a pretty good editor myself. You're wrong. And I went through instead of like about 80% of the things that they had said. I'm like, I hope they're not pissed off. I think you're wrong. I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
They had hired a freelance proofreader to proofread the book. I got an apology letter from the guy who hires the proofreaders. He's like, normally I wouldn't do this, but he's absolutely right. This was an atrocious job. Oh, that must have felt good. It did feel good. It was like some kind of vindication. But sometimes you just have to stand your ground and say, no, I'm pretty sure I'm right here. Don't be a jerk.
right you just have to say uh after further uh inspection whatever further reflection i'm pretty sure i'm right um and you have to be able to justify yourself if somebody comes up says no i'm pretty sure you're wrong That's, you know, my dad was an attorney actually. And so I'm usually pretty good at formulating arguments and then spitting them back. Being trained that way, right? Actually, we share that background. I sold a copy of the Marvel game to an attorney at Origin.
And I didn't think about it, but he's like, I'm just buying this game because you're so enthusiastic about it. I'm like, that's great. He says, I found he was a law professor. And he goes, you talk like an attorney. I'm like, oh, shit. Oh, that's why, because I've been trained that way. My mom's dad was an attorney too, so I'm like...
Oh, yeah, I got it from both sides. Okay, that's what's going on. Yeah, both my parents are attorneys, so I learned a lot about how to argue and present my case. If I could argue my way to a later bedtime, I was able to get a later bedtime. So I learned it very young. Nothing like being cross-examined as a child, though. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm scarred in other ways, but it's been useful.
All right. I want to make sure I carve out time. I want to talk about Diana Jones, and I want to talk about the Marvel role-playing game. Okay. You got an order you'd prefer to talk about those in? Whatever's good for you, man. I'm happy. All right. Let's talk Marvel RPG because I have worked on Marvel games in the past. I have... Well, I've played RPGs. I've dreamed about making an RPG. I have some designs, but I haven't actually made it. But this is an original mechanic.
role-playing game for the Marvel Universe, right? So... I've had people listen to the podcast know I've been wanting to make an RPG for a long time. At first, I didn't believe there was any money in it, and so I walked away from RPG.
That's not quite the case anymore. I think as we're recording this, there's an $11 or $12 million RPG live on Kickstarter for the Brandon Sanderson game. There's a lot of the world has changed, and the role-playing game world is... I am... I have been consistently pressured to not make a new RPG game system, but to make a 5e or whatever, maybe 6e soon, side handbook, whatever.
What are your thoughts on that transition? And then you can kind of maybe weave that into the story of the creation of the Marvel RPG. Yeah, I think if you have a system out there that's already open that does what you want it to, there's no shame in you. Because for one, you're going to tailor it to whatever the hell you're doing. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we did... I have this property called Shotguns and Sorcery based on some novels I wrote for myself.
and some stories and uh we did a cypher system edition of it we had rob schwab come in and do the the rules for it then we did a fifth edition source book for it then my son marty came into the rules for that and we had rob doing development because he had been on the fifth edition and fourth edition teams um
There's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, one of the neat things about doing it, especially if you are tapping something like 5th edition, 6th edition, you're tapping one of the largest installed user bases of game players. for that kind of game period right and nobody tops dnd as far as the number of people already know how to play So you don't have to teach people how to play a new game. You have to figure out how to get them to wrap their heads around something new.
It's already right there. Now, as a game designer, though, it's kind of like, well, yeah, but where's the fun? I want to do the fun part, you know? Yes, that's exactly where I'm coming from. I want to make a game. I don't want to just blame somebody else's sandbox.
Because what you're doing now is you're basically tacking your own setting onto somebody else's game design, right? And you can refine the game design, you can do different things with it, but it's core, it's somebody else's game design, and it's... One that's been there for 50 years on and off in different forms, right? So the lure of that is to say, why don't I do my own thing? And why can I do my own thing better?
There are some trouble you can get into there pretty quickly, right? Part of the problem is that One of the first things we do with the Marvel game is sit down and say, who are we developing this game for? Who are we designing the game for and what's the best way to get it? So for instance, we decided that the two audiences we want to go to were the... because it's the largest installed user base of role-playing gamers in the world. And also people who are RPG-curious Marvel fans.
Right. People are like, well, I'd like to play a role playing game, but man, you know, dwarves and elves and. robes and wands it's just too geeky for me but you know spandex and capes yeah so that's cool so but that's what you some people they just you know they look at fantasy and go no no it's too goofy But as far as the thing and the Hulk beating the crap out of each other, that's perfect. So that's part of the audience we want to go for. So because of that, when we built the new system...
What we decided to do is come up with something that wasn't the same system, but it uses a lot of the same vocabulary. So you don't have to come up with a whole new model in your head about how does this work and what's going on. If you play D&D, it's kind of like stepping to the side and moving into our system, which we think works better in a lot of different ways.
because you know it's tailored to marvel superheroes as opposed to you know people kicking down doors killing orcs and looting the bodies but you don't have to relearn a whole lot of stuff for that. I was one of the guys who was on the team for the previous Marvel game, which came out from Margaret Weiss Productions. That was a Cortex rule system that Cam Banks did, which is a great game, right?
But I think one of the problems with it was that it was a game that was more for sophisticated role players who already been playing games for a while. It really got deep into storytelling. If you're a talented storyteller and you're sitting at a table with a bunch of talented storytellers, it is a freaking amazing game. It really hit its design goals well.
I don't know that every D&D player is ready to step up to that, right? And particularly every Marvel-oriented D&D player. So one of the things we did, we said, okay, we're going to try to do something that's closer to... beat the crap out of each other combat that you see is the high point of just about every Marvel film or television.
as opposed to getting into the weeds of how a comic book works. Because again, the people, the larger user base, people who enjoy Marvel as a property, like Marvel films, is a much bigger number of people than people who read Marvel comics. Right. As much as I adore Marvel comics, I've been doing Marvel stuff for decades now. You want to try to go for the largest number of people you can sell something to. Otherwise, you don't get to make more.
right looking at you a line of products if you're just doing a one-off sure you do whatever the heck you want but if you want to do a whole line of products that continues for a long time you want to have a large number of people purchase it so you can keep making it right otherwise you got to close the doors and go do something So just from a surely mercenary point of view, trying to shoot for a larger market was a smart move for us.
Sure. Well, just knowing who your target audience is and knowing what you're likely, you know, do you want to serve that target audience? There's no shame in that. I mean, I love D&D, but it's not my favorite role-playing game of all time. I would rather play like Fiasco or something like that. But I also know that a lot of people are not going to be able to wrap their heads around Fiasco.
A lot of D&D players will never get to that place where they want to do that. The other problem is a lot of times if you're a game designer, you start designing not just for your market, but you design for your peers. You want to show off to your friends and the other people in the industry and say, look how I did this really clever thing, which is awesome. But that really clever thing may not be the most saleable.
And you may have narrowed your market very dramatically to people who care about that really clever thing. I have definitely fallen into that trap of trying to be too clever for my own good. Yeah, I've done it myself dozens of times. I mean, I'm not preaching from on high as if I'm unstained by this. I have committed that sin many, many times. And because I've done that and I've seen the sales for those things and I've had to move on to other things like, well.
Let's try not doing that stuff. Let's try something different. Okay. Yeah, no, again, that's the main value, I think, of conversations like this for people is them to... make new mistakes or at least make these, you know, oh yeah, I remember. Matt and Justin were talking about this. I mean, maybe I won't be. In general, always simplify. Simplify, simplify, simplify. We always try to be too clever. Okay, so then this is...
I want to make sure we've got time to talk about the Diana Jones Awards, because at the very least for me, that's the main reason I get to see you every year. But it's a lot more than that. So why don't you explain what that is and your role in it, and we can chat a little bit about it.
Sure. The Diana Jones Award is an award that's given out by a semi-secret group of industry people, not entirely secret these days, a number of us are public about it, that is given out to the most excellent thing in game. And we don't care. We don't have any criteria other than that, which means we can give it out to a game. We can give it out to a designer. We can give it out to...
Irish gaming convention charity auctions won it one year. You know, we can give it out to whatever the heck we want to, right? This year, the United Paizo work. which is the first union in tabletop games. We can get out to charity bundles, whatever we think is the coolest thing. And we basically take it, we discuss it, we have some nominees, we get down to a list of like five finalists.
And then we announce those and we vote on those. And we have a party at Gen Con that we give out the award at. So originally started, the James Wallace had this trophy that had wandered into his hands called the Diana Jones Award. And it was actually a pub trivia trophy that got traded back and forth between TSR UK and Games Workshop.
And it was created actually after TSR UK was shut down. And the guys there had burned a copy of the, a bunch of stuff apparently, but burned a copy of the Indiana Jones role-playing game. And the only part of the logo that was left said Diana Jones. And they took a bunch of pieces from the game, including the ones that are like these little Nazi counters that had Nazi TM because Lucasville insisted that everything on the entire thing had a TM.
And they stuck him all in a plexiglass pyramid on a wooden base. And then that became the trophy that they traded back and forth until at one point, apparently Games Workshop just took it and went home. It never went anywhere. But then somehow it fell into James's hands. So he decided to start this mailing list. of game designers that were going to vote on this thing. There was only like a dozen of us in the early days. And James, that year, it was 2001.
It was my 33rd birthday and my 20th Gen Con in a row because I've been going since I was a little kid. And I decided that since White Wolf wasn't having a party on Saturday night, I was going to have my birthday party. And I bought three barrels of beer and six crates of pretzels to have a beer and pretzels party at the historic Turner Ballroom in Milwaukee.
And James says, can I give out the award at your party? I said, wow, yeah, sure. Why not? So Peter Atkinson won that year, and he was really flattered by it. Peter's been a big supporter of ours ever since. And then, you know, it was such a big hit that everybody said we should do this every year. I'm like, yeah, you're right. We should. So the next year I didn't pay for everything. I basically pass around a hat for beer money and say, you know.
How many, anybody want to chip in? And I held the party there for the two or three years we were still there. And then we moved to Indianapolis and we keep doing it. And we basically just get sponsors to toss in like, you know, a couple hundred bucks for a beer ticket. And nowadays, we've actually moved over to a bigger venue in Indianapolis where we...
We actually have to do a room rental, that kind of stuff. So, you know, it costs a bit more money than just passing around the hat these days. And in addition to that, you know, this is about 24 years running, which is crazy. But about four years ago, I think it was Ken Hike came up with this idea. He says, you know, since we're doing this and people are paying attention, we should maybe do some good with it.
So we came up with the emerging designer program, where we actually find people in the first three to four years of their design journey, wherever they happen to be, for doing any kind of game. And we often try to focus on marginalized people, but anybody and everybody is welcome to apply or be nominated.
And we narrowed it down to about four people. And then we bring them out to Gen Con. We bring them out to Gen Con, give them a room, give them a badge. We fly them in from wherever the hell they are in the world. We bring people from the UK, from China, from anywhere else. And we give them an honorarium of a couple thousand dollars. We give them a gift package that gives them like all the different tools they need for doing game layout and design and game crafter pitches and stuff.
So basically try to give them an elbow up or a leg and an elbow up to get into the gaming industry. And then we introduce them at the party. We have a table that they get to show off their games at Gen Con the entire weekend, all four days. Just try to introduce them and get them networked into the entire larger community that shows up at Gen.
And so far, it's been a pretty successful program. Like I said, we've managed to bring in, you know, we started out with one person. Then a couple of years ago, we became a 501c3 nonprofit, which was crazy, which means I'm now the president of a nonprofit organization in addition to everything else.
And the bundle of holding really came through for us. They do basically tabletop role-playing game PDFs, kind of like the Humble Bundle, but strictly speaking for tabletop games. And Alan Varney was one of the guys who started it. I helped them start it up, actually. When they first did it, they didn't have a PayPal account, so they ran the first through bundle of holdings through my PayPal.
And when we came to 501c3, they made us one of their nominated charities. And so they gave us like 40 grand last year, right? So that's really what we've been using to bring in all these people and do so much good. Our overhead is like zero because we all do it for free. We just want to help out. and we're having that's amazing what a great what a great way to be able to give back and uh and so for anybody that uh either let's say there's
Because people listen to this from all over the world. If they know someone or are someone that would think to be nominated as an emerging designer, how would they go about that process? Or if they're someone who is a part of the industry or wants to support your work, how would they go about that?
Well, you go to dianajonesaward.org and there's all the details on there. And the two guys running here are Camden Wright and Aaron Trammell. Camden's a great game designer in his own right. And Aaron is a professor at UC Irvine who's been doing a lot of great stuff over there. Those two guys.
they're basically in the marginalized community themselves. So I'm like, I let them run stuff. I just write checks, right? Because I figure it's the old established white dude. It's not my job to tell you who needs to be brought in. I want them to go out and find these folks and then bring them. And really, Aaron and Camden do all the hard work on that. They do amazing.
Fantastic. Okay, so we'll include that link in our show notes. And then for people that want to find more of your stuff, Shameless Self-Promotion, where do they go? Go to Forbeck.com, F-O-R-B-E-C-K.com. It's got my socials up there, I think. And you can email me at Matt at Forbeck.com. You can find me anywhere else. I'm pretty approachable. I just hang out here in Wisconsin to make games.
What a lovely life, lovely career, lovely contribution. And it's grateful to have our friendship now over a decade. and to finally be able to dig in and learn a lot of really cool things that I did not know about you. So thanks so much for taking the time. And yeah, hopefully I get to see you before NextGenCon, but definitely at least see you then. That'd be wonderful. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast
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