Mind Twist Interview with Randy Buehler
Among trading card game aficionados, Richard Garfield is a name that carries with it a mountain of respect, gravitas, and reverence. Essentially, he's the man that created trading card games with his incredibly popular and successful release of Magic: The Gathering back in 1993. Sixteen years later, Magic is still selling and Richard is still working on collectible strategy games, albeit this time with the digital realm in mind.
To make his pixelized visions a reality, Richard teamed up with Mind Control, and the digital studio and creative genius are hard at work on a new project code-named “Mind Twist.” To learn more about Mind Twist, Ten Ton Hammer turned to another transplant from WotC, Randy Buehler, to get to the bottom of this upcoming collectible online game and where Mind Control hopes to take the title.
Ten Ton Hammer: Recently, the big news from Mind Twist was getting you from Wizards of the Coast. Why did you decide to leave? For a lot of people, Mind Control seems like a smaller company, so why did you decide to make that transition?
Randy Buehler: Two reasons. First, while I was at Wizards, I got to actually do some work with Mind Control folks and I got blown away with just how good they are. They really have the ability to move quickly and bring new ideas to life. I was impressed by that.
The second reason is that I am personally very passionate about strategy games and I really wanted to work on new digital strategy games and that is something that Wizards had decided to move away from. Wizards is going to focus on its table top business and they are doing some digital extensions of their two big brands, Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, but in terms of new digital games, they’ve decided not to focus on that opportunity right now. I looked at Mind Control, and they’re interested in exactly the kinds of games I’m interested in and I’ve always been impressed by their ability, so it seemed like a really good fit.
Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think that a company, not even necessarily Mind Control, but a company could really get the same sort of name recognition that Wizards has had through the digital domain? People seem very ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) when they go online and start playing digital games. Do you think that a company could bring and generate that sort of name recognition that Wizards has through the digital domain and digital strategy games in particular?
Randy: I think that if you’ve got a good quality product, it’s actually a lot easier to build a name for yourself now than it was ten or twenty years ago. Because of the connectedness of the web, because of things like social networking, it’s so easy for somebody who likes your game to pass along the recommendation to somebody else that there’s an opportunity now to build a name for yourself that really, ten years ago, when all video games were essentially boxes on a shelf at Best Buy, that you had to have a name then that I don’t think is required these days.
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