8/2/13 Episode 45: Meet My Dad (Special guest Gene Rosewater)

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

MARK: Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work. Okay. Special treat today, guys! So, my father is in town, and he needs my car. So he’s going to drive me to work today, or I’m driving him to work, so he can have the car. Which means special guest star! My dad! Say hi.

GENE: Hi there.

MARK: So that’s my dad, Gene Rosewater, and so I want to talk about a couple things. First off is, I’m a gamer specifically because my dad is a gamer. And I think one of the neat things about Magic turning 20 right now is that we’re hitting a new generational shift. Where the people that started playing Magic now have kids that are old enough that they’re teaching them to play Magic. And I have people writing me all the time talking about how, you know, how can they teach their kids to play. So I thought it would be neat to sort of explore how I got into gaming by looking at my dad. So talk a little bit about how you got into gaming.

GENE: Gaming for me was a natural thing. It was something that I did when I was a kid, it was something that I did in my family, and it would never have occurred to me not to be a gamer. I loved gaming. It’s just part of my life. It always has been. Even as a young child. Maybe going back to the days of Clue, probably eight years old.

MARK: So, one of the things that was very interesting was, we got a computer very, very early. So let’s talk about that. When did you—when were—what was your first computer?

GENE: I got an Apple II in 1978, that was back when the Apple didn’t have a hard drive, as a matter of fact—

MARK: Didn’t have disks yet, right?

GENE: Didn’t even have a disk. We would say stuff on a cassette tape and load it back in from the cassette tape. No—no memory at all to speak of.

MARK: Right, so (???) for those young’uns out there, so basically when we wanted to play a game on the computer, we got a cassette tape. I don’t even know if you know what a cassette tape is. But it’s what you used to listen to music on. And you would put it in a player, and you would play it, and in like three or four minutes it would go (static noises) and make this noise, and then at the end of it you could play a tiny text game.

GENE: Yeah, and most of the time you had to do it two or three time because it would get fouled up somewhere along the line.

MARK: And remember, when you first bought your first computer, to get an extra… was it 64k?

GENE: Initially I think I had 16k. And I sort of waited because at that point to get the next 16k was $500.

MARK: So, by the way. Once again, we’re talking k. Not M, not gig, not terabytes, k. That’s a thousand, for you out there who might not know. So anyway, I--growing up, we—so we had the—we had a computer early. Earlier than all my friends, like—everybody thought it was this weird thing, they’d come over and see our computer. We also had the very first—or one of the very, very earliest gaming systems for a TV called the Odyssey. Do you remember this?

GENE: Sure.

MARK: Okay, explain—explain how—do you remember how the Odyssey worked?

GENE: The—well, yeah. The Odyssey was made by Motorola, I believe, and basically it was one game. It played Pong. And when it played Pong, what we did was we had a plastic overlay, we’d put it over the screen, and then there would be simply a dot that—and two paddles, and we would play—that would be on the screen, but nothing else was there. Whatever we wanted to have to play on, what playing field we had, was the overlay.

MARK: Right. So you would take out sheets of plastic, and you would tape it on top of the TV. And there were other games, because—pretty much you had a little square you could move around, and so they had games in which everything was taped to the screen and then you would move the little squares around the screen. So anyway, I got in—one of the things is my dad got me into gaming very young, and a lot of things that would go on to be very sort of established things, we got in on the ground floor. I also remember, something else I remember with my dad, is he and I would go to the—to the arcade to play video games. Because at the time, when I was young, back in the—in the eighties, that arcades—if you wanted to play video games, you went to the arcade. I mean, like I said, I think we had a—we had the Atari 2600 for a while, which was a little better than the Odyssey, but it was one of the most simplest early versions of—of at-home consoles, but they were very, very simplistic. And that if you wanted anything more advanced, you had to go to the arcade. And I remember—remember your favorite game? I remember your favorite—what was your favorite game?

GENE: My favorite game clearly was BattleZone.

MARK: Yes.

GENE: And I actually got pretty good at it. Although I probably wasn’t that good. But I thought I was.

MARK: And so BattleZone, for some of my younger audience, was a first-person shooter… you were in a tank, I think?

GENE: It was in a tank. And there were two handles that I would hold onto, and each one would—would activate the wheels or treads on each side. So they can go forward, they can go back. And then you could make one go forward and one go back to turn around. And we’d be shooting at things and they’d be shooting at me—

MARK: (???)

GENE: No color.

MARK: Right.

GENE: It was all green.

MARK: Everything was outlined. So every object, it was just a geometric shape, essentially, that was outlined in green. And so, you know, the planes, or whatever other things were attacking you, they—there was no real detail to them. But it was a fun game. It was a really fun game.

GENE: I liked it.

MARK: Okay, so. One of the things that—so, growing up, my dad introduced me to a lot of different games. And—in fact, one of my favorite games that my dad introduced me to was Diplomacy. Do you remember teaching me Diplomacy?

GENE: Yeah, well Diplomacy was something that actually I learned from my then-brother-in-law, and it was a game of… let’s see, how do you explain it? It’s a unique—it was sort of a unique game. It was a game of territory and you could invade territory and everybody would set up their turn and then everybody would sort of… tell what their turn was going to be at the same time, and we would have to figure out how everything would interact. The idea of the game, of course, was to capture the world. And it was on a European map.

MARK: Right. I think it was between World War I and World War II, and the idea of the game is it’s very simple is, there’s seven countries, each country’s played by a person, and on your turn you make moves. But that’s not the beauty of the game. The beauty of the game is what you do is very dependent on other people. So in between each turn, you go around and you talk to everybody, and you try to convince everybody that you’re their friend, basically. It’s a game of diplomacy. And the game is—whenever I played with people, in fact in college there’s a great story where my dad taught this to me, I love the game, but the game was all about—at some point, you have to betray somebody and stab them in the back to win this game. Because the game’s all about making—you know. Seeming very friendly until you betray people to win.

And so I said to my friends, I said, “Okay. This is what the game is, but it’s just a game, if someone betrays you, it’s not personal, but the game’s all about, you know, having alliances in this, but please. Don’t take it personal.” And like I’m playing with my friends, we had a bunch of friends in college we used to play games, and I stabbed my friend in the back to win the game, he didn’t talk to me for five weeks. But anyway, a wonderful game that Hasbro makes by the way, if you want to go play Diplomacy, it’s fun. So let’s get to Magic, since this is a Magic show.

GENE: Well, the (???) on that was when I learned the game from my brother-in-law at the time, he did leave out one rule, which is “You’re allowed to lie.” So the first game we play, he was telling everybody lies and everything, and we of course were believing him because he was teaching us the game. So obviously he won, but after the first game I understood a little bit more about diplomacy.

MARK: Yeah, the game does teach you about the act of diplomacy, I think. Okay, so let’s get to Magic, since this is a Magic podcast. So I have told the story of me discovering Magic from my viewpoint multiple times. But I would like to tell the story of me getting into Magic from your viewpoint as my dad, how—what is your memory of how I got into Magic?

GENE: Well, of course I knew that you went to a game show, you saw Magic, I probably talked to you within maybe the same day or the next day, and you were just euphoric about this new game that you’d seen, you said to me “This is the game of the future. I really have to get involved in this game.” And—and so because you thought it was so great, I believed it. As a matter of fact, at that point, probably you were more involved in games than I was. And so you were becoming my game mentor at that point.

MARK: So what happened was, I went out to visit my dad, and so, to refresh everyone’s memory, I bought some—I went to a convention, Alpha was out, I bought I think a starter and two boosters? Or three boosters? And then I realized I liked the game. So when Beta came out, I knew that if I wanted my friends to play I had to get it for them, because I knew Beta was going to sell out in a day. So I bought a whole bunch. I bought like two boxes of boosters and two boxes of starters. Starters, by the way, for those that have no idea what I’m talking about, when Magic first began, you could buy sixty cards in a box. That’s how you were supposed to start the game. And then they had boosters that you played—you bought additionally. We don’t do starters anymore but at the time they did. And so I bought a whole bunch, and then I went to go visit my dad, and I brought him some Magic packs. So what do you remember of me bringing you Magic?

GENE: Oh, I don’t remember how much it was. It was just certainly enough for me to make a deck or a couple of decks, and I started learning Magic, but of course the main thing I learned is before Mark left and went back home, he said he wanted to trade with me. So he picked out all the cards he wanted, and of course I knew he was going to play Magic a lot more than me, so I didn’t have any problem with that. And it wasn’t for a long time until I realized that he took my Emerald Mox, he took my—

MARK: Wait wait wait, now let me defend my Mox Emerald! So here’s what happens is, my dad opens up a Mox Emerald. I never—I’d never seen a Mox Emerald, and at the time I didn’t understand it, because I’m like “Isn’t this a Forest? Why wouldn’t I just play a forest?” I didn’t—it took me a while to understand why it was good. But I hadn’t ever seen it. I didn’t own it. And at the time, I had two Fungusaurs. And so I traded my dad a Fungusaur for the Mox Emerald. Swear—now I swear to God, I thought I was being nice. I thought I was doing—because Fungusaur was awesome! Every time it took damage it got bigger! That I understood was really good. And so I made this trade, and it wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to like rip off my dad, I honestly thought I was making a very fair trade. In fact, I thought it was in his benefit, because I didn’t get why Mox Emerald was good, and I knew that Fungusaur was awesome, so…

GENE: And what did you—when—what did you trade me for the Black Lotus?

MARK: Now, the Black Lotus—so, what happened is, I got my dad into Magic, and many years later, I don’t know, four or five years later, my dad is not playing much, because he—he didn’t live in a place where he had a lot of people to play with, and so I’m visiting one day and my dad says to me, he goes, “Look, if you want to take any cards, feel free to take cards.” So I look through his collection and he’s got a Black Lotus. And I’m like “Are you sure?” And he goes, “Yeah, yeah, whatever you want to take.” So I took his Black Lotus.

GENE: It’s okay.

MARK: But he’s a good dad, so… Okay, so. Okay. So what’s your memory of me starting to work for Wizards?

GENE: I pretty much know the story. I know that it started with your just wanting to get involved, and I know you talked to people, and my memory was that you talked to people at Wizards and there were four or five different people who said “Sure, I want you to come work for me.” It all started when you started doing the puzzles. The puzzles in the Duelist. And everybody was really—loved them, people at Wizards loved them, but also the people who were reading Duelist loved them, it became the—the premiere piece in Duelist. And I think that was your, your inroads into getting a job at Wizards is the fact that you could do that, you could create it, and you convinced them that it was good, and it was.

MARK: So here’s my memory is, so I—my plan, when I graduated college was, I was going to go to Los Angeles and write for television. That was my plan. And I—like I said, obviously people know, I did a little of that, but this opportunity came up where I could work for Wizards. Where I was freelancing for them, I said to them one day when I was up in Seattle, “I’d be willing to move to Seattle.” Or I thought I’d want to move to Seattle. And they’re like “Well, if you want to move here, we’ll give you a job.” And so I was very torn about “Do I pursue what I had planned to do, or do I make this deviation and do this different job that I thought I would enjoy, but it really was a giant change from what I thought my life was going to be?”

So I called up my parents, my parents were separated, so I called them individually, and I asked each of them about what they think I should do. And so I called up my mom, and my mom was not sure. She’s like “Oh, I don’t know, you’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to do what you’re doing, you know, you’ve had some success. Maybe you want to stick to it. Maybe this isn’t the right play.” And I called up my dad, and I say, “You know, I’m thinking of going to become a game, you know, work at a game company,” and you said, “That’s awesome. You should do that.” So that—my parents had—I mean, my mom eventually got on board, but I mean she was, she was much more skeptical, where you were—the second I proposed the idea, you thought it was an awesome idea.” So… do you remember that?

GENE: I really don’t, actually. I don’t remember saying that. But I can understand myself feeling that way, absolutely.

MARK: So, let’s go  a little bit—so now—I mean, you play—you—I know you play Magic on and off, because you kind of live somewhere you don’t have a lot to play, I know you’ve played on Magic Online a little bit.

GENE: I got real involved in Magic online for a while. And then after a while it lost some of its lustre because of the dynamics of what happens online. And I still have a lot of cards, a lot of virtual cards online. But I don’t play that often anymore.

MARK: Oh, oh, but—but here’s an interesting story. My nephew, my sister—I have one sister who is a year younger than me, named Alysse. And Alysse has a younger—has a son, named Josh. And he’s my nephew. And Josh recently—I don’t know. Six months ago, nine months ago, got really, really into Magic. And I—I know you had a chance to play with Josh.

GENE: What happened was, he—he had some older friends who gave him a deck. Which was really a killer deck.

MARK: Yeah.

GENE: And so most of my cardboard cards were old. I went all the way into virtual. And so I had old decks and I went to play with Josh, and he just beat me up because he had some really good—he had one good current deck. But we played, and he got started, and he’s going gangbusters now. He really understands the game.

MARK: Yeah, because I talked about—when we started, about the generational shift. I mean Josh, in my mind, that’s the next generation. Like my kids, I’ve introduced to the game, none of them have sort of taken it up. I mean, they all know how to play, and I’ve played with all of them, but none of them—like Josh is definitely, you know, got the bug, and is very excited, and he’s playing at FNMs, and in fact my sister just called and is like “He wants to learn about what PTQs are.” And like where Grands Prix are, and it’s fun. He’s really getting into it. So, let me ask you this, which is, do you have any good stories—I know my mom has some of these stories of meeting—of people finding out that you’re my dad? Interacting with Magic people?

GENE: Well actually, the one that comes to mind first is, oh, I—six, eight years ago, took a trip to Italy. And we were in Italy and we wanted to get online to do some email. And we went into a little store and I turn around and there’s a Magic poster on the wall. And so I’m hooking up for this to go on the internet, and I’m talking to the guy that runs the store, and he’s a Magic enthusiast. As a matter of fact, he is jumping off the wall while I tell him that Mark is my son, because he knows. As a matter of fact, he gave me a card and he wanted me to autograph the card as Mark’s father. And so it was like overseas notoriety. And this guy refused to take any money for the internet, he’s like—I was a celebrity in his store because Mark was my son.

MARK: Yeah, so one of the stories that’s funny, I don’t have my mom on the show, so I’ll tell this story for my mom—so one of the things my mom enjoys is she has no end of—she loves when she meets Magic players, telling them that she’s my mother, because they always get really excited and she loves to do—I know you don’t do that as much but my mom gets a real kick out of it. And I figure she’s my mom, so we’ll give her that, that she gets—she gets to be proud of me. So, it is fun, like I said, I get to be a big fish in a little pond, in that little tiny world I get to be a celebrity, so I think—I think my mom enjoys that quite a bit.

Okay, so, what… what is your favorite Magic set?

GENE: Well…

MARK: I know you’re from old—old times, so…

GENE: Yeah… probably most of the cards, or most of the decks that I would really talk about right now are so old that people don’t even remember where they came from.

MARK: Well, I mean I—I’ve done shows on, you know, I just did a show on Mirage, so I go back there. So what set really speaks to you?

GENE: Actually, when you say Mirage, I thought Mirage/Visions was a great, great expansion. Probably one of my favorites. That was, back then, that was an expansion that I really enjoyed. But you know, I played back in the days of Ice Age and Tempest and even before. My first cards were Mark’s first cards, so it was Unlimited…

MARK: Yeah, no, they were Beta. Your first cards were Beta.

GENE: It was the Beta. You know. And certainly Aladdin and Legends, and some of the early, early stuff. But I lived in an area that was—there weren’t a whole lot of Magic players around. I had a good friend that I did introduce to Magic. And we would actually play a lot with each other and we’d actually go to conventions once in a while. So I really don’t—couldn’t even tell you exactly what I was playing with back then. But I ended up with a lot of cards. Because I live in—I live up at Lake Tahoe. A nice place to visit.

MARK: Yep, it is.

GENE: And on three or four occasions, Mark would bring the entire R&D team up to my house and they would come up and it was wintertime, they would ski, but they would spend a week, and they would sequester themselves, and they would be working on a new expansion. And they’d bring thousands of cards with them. And when they would leave they’d just leave them all there. So I generated a lot of cards. Back in the day when they were coming to my house. And that happened three or four times.

MARK: So what my dad is talking about—the big one is Invasion. I would say the core of Invasion design was done at my dad’s house. And then one time, by the way, we had a trip where so many people went to visit my dad from R&D that we realized if the plane crashed, it would have decimated Magic. Like, everybody—everybody you can imagine was on the plane. I think Jim Lin was the only person that wasn’t on that plane. Like, Magic would have been in the hands of one person if something had happened. So, here’s something people might find interesting. So you—in the player—I have a thing called player psychographics, where I talk about the kind of players people are. And you are what is known as a Johnny. Do you know what a Johnny is?

GENE: Absolutely. I’m a Johnny.

MARK: So my dad loves fiddling with decks. So explain what you enjoy when you play.

GENE: I like to do a deck that sets up with a combination of cards and, to get it to set up, so that once it’s there, I’m pretty much in control of the deck. Of the game. It probably happens one out of four times, maybe, one out of five times. So I lose a lot. And that’s okay, except if I’m playing that online, what happens is, as soon as I get my deck set up, the person on the other end usually quits. So I never get a chance to see it go to the end. And that was a frustration for me playing online. If I’m playing with somebody across the table, at least they have the courtesy or whatever you want to call it of waiting until I see my deck do what it can do.

MARK: Yeah, so it’s fun—one of the things I’ve always enjoyed with my dad is, sometimes I’ll talk to him about combos, and I’ll say “Have you ever seen this combo?” And he’ll go “Oh, that’s pretty good,” and I remember one time I told you about… what was it? Did you play with Mirrodin? Did you play—

GENE: (??? overlapping) I like Mirrodin.

MARK: So I think I told you about the Isochron Scepter/Final Fortune combo. Is that one you built a deck around? Oh, that’s right, with the angel? I think you did this. Where the Platinum Angel keeps you from losing the game, and Final Fortune lets you get an extra turn but you lose next turn. So what you do is you put a Final Fortune under an Isochron Scepter, and then you get an Angel out, and then you just take infinite turns. I think you built that deck.

GENE: I don’t remember that particular deck.

MARK: I remember that. I remember that.

GENE: Yeah, the Scepter was killer. People did not like to play against the Scepter. They would disappear.

MARK: And a story I remember you telling me is, how you were playing somebody, and they put out an Isochron Scepter, and then you clone it, you copy it, and then they quit the game because you had an Isochron Scepter. But you just copied their Scepter.

GENE: Of course.

MARK: So. We’re getting close to work. Is there anything—I’m going to give you a chance to sort of—any story about me and Magic that you might think is a fun story to tell people that we haven’t talked about? Do you have any good…

GENE: We’ve touched on an awful lot of stuff. You know, nothing is really coming up for me as like “Oh, a fun Mark story.” I mean, I—I do have, by the way, he said that his mother, Mark said that his mother likes to say “Oh, my son is Mark Rosewater,” I like doing that. I don’t get a lot of opportunity to do that. And usually if I just meet someone who plays Magic, I don’t jump in there, but if there—if I find that they’re really, you know, really dyed-in-the-wool, core Magic people, I will throw out Mark’s name. Because usually they know him, and that’s like—that’s cool. That’s my son.”

MARK: Yeah, I know, that’s—I—because like I said, people always ask me about Mom, does it bug me that my mom does that, and I’m like “No! She raised me! She earned it! She earned it.” And any, any “that’s my son” thing she wants to do is fair game. Same with you. So. And one of the things that I really, I took is that I do think my love of gaming directly tied—because something else about my dad is, he—you’re very playful, and that even—even outside the context of games specifically, my dad was somebody who always would sort of take things and turn them into games. You know.

That I—like I remember on Halloween, you know, we’d come home with our bag of candy and my dad would blindfold us, and he would cut up candy and try to make us guess, you know, which candy was which thing. Now I later learned that was your way to eat my candy, but I did have fun doing it.

GENE: Of course, they had the blindfold on, you know, I could do whatever I wanted. Right.

MARK: But one of the things growing up that I always loved was, you always found ways to, you know, to turn things into games. Also something else that you taught me is the idea that just because a game has rules doesn’t mean that you can’t change the rules. That if you don’t like the game, you know, change the rules. Make the game what you want the game to be.

GENE: I think I have enhanced many games. Just by tweaking the rules. I don’t know about changing them, but tweaking them. Make a little bit of a change, and as long as everybody knows the rules, it works better. You know. Most of the games I play have been tweaked. Yeah. And I have a wonderful partner who loves to play, and the two of us—she is a great gamer, and we—we are always looking at how to change the games.

MARK: Yeah, and one of the things that’s neat, philosophically, one of the things that steered me toward game design in general is, I love having the mindset that games aren’t this locked thing, that—that games—that you the game player have some say in how you play the game. And that one of the things—I mean, one of the reasons I love Magic is, Magic is on some level, it’s a series of tools, and a series of rules, to allow you to play. But Magic is super, super flexible. That if you want to play, you have a lot of means and ways to affect how you’re playing. You know. And that that’s something that you, the game player, have control of. And that’s something that Magic does really well. Because I meet a lot of Magic players, but many, many of them are playing very different games. You know. And that playing Draft or playing Commander or playing, you know, Emperor, or playing—I mean, there’s a hundred and one ways to play Magic or a thousand and one ways to play Magic.

And I think that that entire mindset of games being this flexible thing rather than being a locked thing, I got from you. And that, you know, I definitely remember growing up, you were like “Yeah, that’s a dumb rule. Let’s change that rule.”

GENE: And something else. And I think that I had—I think I had some influence here (???) both you and Alysse. But my philosophy sort of of life, at least about where you would go in life, was simply this: find something you love to do, and get someone to pay you to do it. So here you are, you were a game player, you loved playing games, and you went out and you found a way to get someone to pay you to play games. Exactly what I espoused to.

MARK: Right. And that’s when I called. I see, the reason you were so excited is like, “Here’s what I want to do, I want to go make games for a living,” you’re like “That sounds awesome. You should do that.”

GENE: Right.

MARK: Yeah, in fact I wrote a—I wrote a—I did a speech at Rachel’s career day about finding your dream job. And then I wrote an article about it. And maybe one day I’ll do a podcast on that. But anyway, I talked about the three things—you hit on two of them. The three things of a dream job is it has to be something you’re good at, something you enjoy, and something someone will pay you for. And game design, luckily, I hit all three of those. So. But like I said. I owe a lot of gratitude to you, I’m very thankful for  all you did to encourage me to play games, to encourage me to get into games as a career, and it’s fun because whenever my dad comes to town we always play games. We usually play some Magic, but we also play lots of other games.

And it is neat—like, people always ask me how much Magic I play outside of work, and the answer is “Not a lot,” mostly because I have my family and you know, I just don’t have a lot of spare time. But when my dad visits is the one time I actually get to play Magic. And it’s fun because we’ll always play whatever the latest thing is, and my dad is not as caught up as I am, so I always get a fresh set of eyes to sort of see what he thinks of the latest set. So later this week—he has not played Return to Ravnica yet, or any of the block yet, so he’ll get a chance to—although you played—you played original Ravnica, didn’t you?

GENE: Original, yeah. I had that online.

MARK: So we’ve returned this year, and so we’ll get a chance to—to—oh, I’m about to park my car, I don’t need to park my car, because my dad’s taking my car. Anyway, so we are here at Wizards, so it was fun talking with you, obviously I get to spend all week with you, but it was, it was fun having you on the show, and I—like I said, I—I try to make this podcast, I try to mix things up, and when I realized I had a chance to interview my dad I thought that was awesome. So I hope you guys all enjoyed what I’ll call “Meet my dad!” Anyway, it was a lot of fun, thank you for being on the show.

GENE: Thank you for having me on.

MARK: But now it’s time to go make the Magic.