Quick, what do:
Dungeons & Dragons
Magic: The Gathering
Diskwars
and Mage Knight have in common?
They enjoy or enjoyed commercial success by the GTF (Get There First) Principle.
All the Get There First Principle says it that if you are the first one to really enter the market with a unique product that creates a new genre of product, you are much more likely to enjoy success. It’s somewhat akin to “The Next Big Thing” but a little easier to narrow in on.
Dungeons & Dragons is the first modern role-playing game. Gary Gygax took a miniatures wargame, but changed it so that instead of focusing on a whole army, you were focused on one character that represented you. Dave Arneson gave it a world to play in, and D&D forever rewrote the landscape of fantasy. 5 editions and 30 years later, it’s still number 1. It’s influence on gaming as a whole is immense as well- nearly everything else on the list owes something to D&D (which admittedly owes a lot to J.R.R. Tolkien.)
Magic: The Gathering is the first collectible card game. Designed by a math professor as a cheap game for Wizards to produce to get itself out of a financial hole so it could publish Robo Rally, Magic combined elements of a strategy board game with baseball cards. Many, many other CCGs were launched after Magic, but none has come close to being as popular or profitable in the long run. 10 years, many expansions, and over 8,000 cards later, the game is still going strong.
Diskwars was an attempt to combine the collectibility of Magic with a different game play experience then a card game. It featured pog-like cardboard disks with stats and artwork that depicted a unit in your army that was used to battle against others in a wargame that featured a physicality that Magic lacked. It was popular at first, and spawned several similar products (including one of my favorites, Red Alert!, that used the Star Trek license to make a simple starship combat game) but eventually died out, possibly due to the coming of…
Mage Knight was the first modern collectible miniatures game. Borrowing from both Magic and Warhammer, the game combined a collectible/customizable aspect in army building with the tactics of a miniatures game to present a brand new game. More importantly, it knocked down the traditional barriers to entry of miniatures games: the figures were plastic and so were much cheaper to buy, and they came prepainted so you didn’t have to purchase anything else to play. Though there were some missteps in making the game, it created a genre that many others have picked up- the Dungeons & Dragons miniatures game (which made sense given the built in fanbase) and Heroclix (with a built in fanbase of comics fans)- and those two successor games have gone on to be very popular.
There are other examples of the GTF Principle that have not gone so well: for example, Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison is marketing a game called Clout Fantasy, a collectible poker chip game. It has the customizable aspect of Magic but adds a dexterity element in how the chips are thrown onto the playing field. The game is currently struggling to find an audience, even if critical reviews say it’s pretty fun.
What do all these have in common? Yes, the GTF Principle, but that’s just another way of saying be innovative. Though the games vary in complexity, they all have a compelling core concept, and that’s what cemented them in our conciousness. This is not a surefire path to success- you have to have a good game, and there has to be a market for your idea.
But if you’re designing a game, it’s a good idea to say from the start that what you are creating is innovative, and set out the ground rules for what kind of game you’re creating. It’ll ground your throught processes a bit more from the millions of floating ideas out there. And who knows? Maybe you’ll Get There First.
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