Майкл Алин Пондсмит: Создатель Миров Ролевых Игр

Game designer

Michael Alyn Pondsmith is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for founding the publisher R. Talsorian Games in 1982, where he developed a majority of the company's role playing game lines. Pondsmith is the author of several RPG lines, including Mekton (1984), Cyberpunk (1988) and Castle Falkenstein (1994). He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Born into a military family, Mike Pondsmith was the son of a psychologist and an Air Force officer, who traveled around the world with the U. S. Air Force for the first 18 years of his life. He graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B. A. in graphic design and a B. S. in behavioral psychology. Pondsmith recalls that he had been designing games even as a child, but it was not until college that he was introduced to the idea of pen and paper roleplaying games when a friend got a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Having a lot of naval wargaming experience, he became interested in the gameplay mechanics used by D&D but not in the fantasy setting it presented. His interest spiked, however, when he acquired a copy of Traveller, a science fiction role playing game published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Dissatisfied with its mechanics, Pondsmith rewrote the game for his personal use under the name Imperial Star. Pondsmith later called Traveller the best roleplaying game he had encountered in the Green Ronin's award winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best.

Before he became a pen and paper game designer, Pondsmith worked in the video game industry as a graphic designer. His first job after college involved designing packaging and advertising materials for the now defunct California Pacific Computer Company (CPCC). Repackaging Japanese games for the Western world market was the main focus of CPCC in its early days. He later moved on to create designs for the original titles produced by Bill Budge and for the early Ultima games designed by Richard Garriott, all of which were published by CPCC.

The first game Pondsmith designed from the ground up was Mekton, a mecha game with heavy manga and anime influences, released in 1984. Pondsmith admitted that he was mostly basing his work on the Mobile Suit Gundam manga written in Japanese, which he had acquired. Not understanding the text, he inaccurately recreated the world dynamics purely from the imagery of the comic books. The game's first public testing occurred at a local convention. The success of Mekton proved to Pondsmith that he could make a living out of game design, and he founded the company R. Talsorian Games (RTG) in 1985. In 1987, RTG released another of Pondsmith's games inspired by Japanese manga, Teenagers from Outer Space, (RPGA Gamer's Choice Award). Teenagers from Outer Space was re released with significant changes to the mechanics in 1989. Games such as Cyberpunk (later Cyberpunk 2020) and Cyberpunk V3 were translated into 9 languages. Castle Falkenstein (Best Game of 1994), Cybergeneration, and Dream Park soon followed. He also collaborated with the Hero Games designers on the Fuzion system.