The creator of Magic: The Gathering Richard Garfield (pictured) has set up a brand new game studio.
As reported by VentureBeat, the developer has been set up with co-founders industry veterans Skaff Elias, Arka Ray and Jon Bankard. Popularium is working on its first title already – unsurprisingly, this is a card-based strategy title called Chaos Agents which has elements of the auto battler and battle royale genres.
“Ever since Magic was published I’ve been trying to recapture something that I thought was lost after release,” Garfield said.
“When Magic was first designed everyone had their own treasured collection, but those treasures became commodities, and we lost some of that magic.”
He continued: “Since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to that. Now digitally we can bring back that unique collection idea with Chaos Agents. When everyone has the same thing, these experts say that when you want to play well you have to hew to the standard, which is very prescriptive and doesn’t leave much room for discovery and play. In Chaos Agents, expert advice has to be much more general, leaving a lot more room for players to discover something interesting about what they uniquely own.”
This isn't Garfield's first venture into game development. The veteran was one of the minds – along with co-founder Elias – behind Valve's DOTA card game Artifact.
