Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280026
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Word spread across the Internet - first one newsgroup, then two, then half a dozen emerged with information about the new invention.
National conventions and local tournaments, magazines and price guides, product shortages and card rationing quickly followed.
And sometime in the middle of it all, Magic came to Roanoke.
MAGIC: The Gathering," a collectible fantasy card game, was introduced in 1993 by a six-employee Washington state company called Wizards of the Coast.
The premise of the game is simple: Kill your opponent with your spell cards and creature cards before he kills you with his.
Public reaction to the game has been a bit more complicated than the game's simplicity might seem to warrant.
Players buy the cards by the pack and by the box. Retailers fight to keep Magic in stock, with manufacturers unable to meet their orders. Competitors churn out card game after card game in attempts to compete with Magic's phenomenal success - or at least to cash in on the frenzy that in 1994 boosted sales of collectible cards to almost $300 million.
"Financially, the game has had a tremendous impact on specialty stores," said Dave Wilson, owner of the Fun-N-Games stores in Blacksburg and Radford, which sell comic books and games. "It's probably rejuvenated the industry and maybe kept alive a couple of stores that wouldn't have made it otherwise."
During the 1980s and early 1990s, comic book and card stores often were outgrowths of their owners' hobbies and weren't operated as real businesses, Wilson said. These shops managed to survive, however, until comic books increasingly were distributed through chain stores such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. Suddenly, the smaller stores could no longer compete.
The collectible card game business is just one part of the adventure game industry, which also includes role-playing games, strategic board games and related merchandise such as books and collectible figurines. The Game Manufacturers Association, or GAMA, in Swanton, Ohio, represents the hundreds of small companies nationwide that produce these games.
"Right now, the game industry is probably healthier and growing more than it ever has," said Lee Cerny, GAMA executive director.
According to GAMA, the adventure game industry brought in $655 million in retail sales in 1994, up 27.6 percent from 1993.
Of that total, approximately 43 percent, or $282 million, is attributable to collectible card games. In 1993, only 11 percent of total adventure game retail sales, or $56 million, came from these games.
Magic: The Gathering by no means is the only game that has met with retail success. Rage, produced by White Wolf Games of Atlanta, and Illuminati, manufactured by Austin, Texas-based Steve Jackson Games, are among the dozens of fantasy, science fiction, adventure and historical card games that have found loyal audiences.
"Just like anything, when something really popular comes out, you see offshoots of it springing up everywhere," Wilson said. By the end of the year, Cerny said, 140 new collectible card games will have debuted.
But so far, no company has equaled the success of Wizards of the Coast, which saw sales of $100 million in its first 12 months and now, by Cerny's estimates, accounts for 50 percent to 75 percent of the $282 million in sales of collectible card games. The company - which employs 200 - produces several games in addition to Magic, but Magic continues to account for a majority of sales.
Among players, Magic: The Gathering is sometimes called "Magic: The Addiction," or even "paper crack." There are more than 1,000 different Magic cards in print, and expansion sets of 200 to 300 cards are introduced periodically. The most dedicated - and most well-to-do - players travel hundreds of miles to play in Magic tournaments and may spend hundreds of dollars a year on cards, building up collections that number in the thousands.
A card called the Black Lotus is currently the most expensive and most sought-after Magic card on the market, Wilson said. This 2 1/2-by-3 1/2-inch piece of illustrated cardboard is selling for upwards of $200 over the Internet, a popular online computer marketplace for collectible cards. An average expensive Magic card may sell for $20 to $30, he said.
High prices aren't limited to rare and powerful cards. Starter decks - packs of 60 cards plus a book on the game rules - carry a suggested retail price of $7.95 but may be selling in stores for as much as $15, thanks to an allocation system implemented by Wizards of the Coast to distribute high-demand cards to retailers, Wilson said.
Some Magic fans buy cards for the artwork - dark, intricately drawn pictures of creatures and fantastic lands. Magic made headlines this spring when a Westchester County, N.Y., school district imposed a 30-day ban on the game because of the "demonic" names and drawings on some of the cards.
Wizards of the Coast later issued a "cleaner" edition, but Lisa Stevens, the company's vice president for new business and licensing, said that even the disturbing cards have a place in the game.
"Magic was aimed at an older audience," she said. "We're trying to convey a fully rounded world, so it has angels, but it also has demons."
Most people who are willing to spend $200 for a Black Lotus are players trying to create the perfect Magic deck. There are more than a thousand different Magic cards in print, all with different powers and weaknesses and interactions to the game, so building a deck of 60 cards that is powerful requires skill, time - and money.
High potential costs aside, Magic continues to draw new players, said Pete Hoefling Jr., who opened Star City Comics in Roanoke and Martinsville with his father, Pete Hoefling Sr., about 18 months ago. When they opened their doors, they carried only comics and no Magic cards. But after fielding customer requests for the cards for almost six months, the Hoeflings decided to branch into collectible card games.
"I finally got so tired of hearing myself tell people, 'No, I don't carry Magic cards,' that I decided to start carrying them," Hoefling said. Now, the stores fight to keep the cards in stock.
Because success of such magnitude is unusual for the game world, Magic is perhaps an unfair standard of comparison. In fact, retailers have had to redefine "success" in relation to other card games, Cerny said. Now, a collectible card game is considered successful if its sales amount to 5 percent to 10 percent of Magic sales.
If Magic is taken out of the mix, most collectible card games are successful. Even what Cerny called the "dogs" - the lowest sellers among these games - are making $1 million to $2 million per issue for producers, he said. The more popular games - like Illuminati and Rage - often make $5 million to $6 million per issue.
Stevens said the flood of new games doesn't concern Magic's creators. "There are only so many retail dollars out there," she said. Most stores that sell collectible card games already have invested heavily in Magic, and they're unlikely to switch allegiance now - because their customers won't let them.
"People don't tend to quit games they've heavily invested in," Stevens said. "They may dabble in others, but they won't leave."
While Magic and the card games that followed it were taking center stage in specialty stores, the percentage of total adventure game retail sales that came from role-playing games dropped from 28 percent of the total in 1993 to just 16 percent in 1994.
"Some small adventure game companies have seen significant drops in sales," Cerny said. Younger people - those who just a few years ago might have become role-playing devotees - are instead spending their money on collectible card games, he said.
Looking at these numbers alone, the trend seems clear enough: Among adventure game aficionados, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are becoming passe and Magic and other collectible card games are the diversions of the future. But Cerny warns against taking these industry figures out of their larger context.
First, he said, the meteoric increase in total adventure game sales that occurred between 1993 and 1994 can be traced to a one-time event: the introduction of Magic in August 1993. Thus, unless a game of Magic's magnitude hits the shelves within the next few months, another sales jump isn't likely to occur this year.
Industry estimates place expected retail sales for 1995 at $750 million, a 14.5 percent increase from 1994. While this increase is nothing to ignore, it is nowhere near the 27.6 percent jump of the year before.
The increasing prevalence of speculators also has influenced retail sales figures, Cerny said. These speculators, who are interested in collectible card games only as investments and not as entertainment, buy boxes of cards to hold for later sale to collectors. Speculators typically do not invest in games with little sales potential, and so their interest in games such as Magic may be seen as one measure of popularity. But at the same time, these buyers are not players and may misjudge a game's true potential.
The apparent decline in consumer interest in role-playing games also may be overstated by the numbers, Cerny said. The first people to catch on to Magic when it appeared in 1993 were customers who frequented the comic and game stores where Magic first was sold. These were the fans of role-playing and strategy games, and as they investigated the new card game - "dabbled," as Stevens said - sales of these other diversions lagged.
But now that Magic and similar games have received exposure beyond the traditional adventure game community and have been introduced into mass-market outlets such as Toys-R-Us, most of the new money being poured into card games seems to be coming from people who are new to the world of adventure games, Cerny said.
The industry likely will continue to see rising sales for the next two to three years, Cerny believes, but the numbers then should stabilize. Within a few years, Magic-like games should account for 25 percent to 30 percent of total adventure game sales, he said.
Magic has broken through the wall that once existed between role players and the rest of the world - and has created a whole new customer base for stores such as Star City Comics, Hoefling said.
In the past, role-playing and other fantasy games carried a certain stigma in the general population, Hoefling said. Because these games were sold mainly at specialty stores frequented only by devoted players, the rest of the population knew these players only as stereotypes, usually as antisocial male computer hackers stuck in dark basements.
But the publicity generated by games such as Magic has helped show all adventure-game fans in a new light.
"Now, we have entire families - mother, father, kids - come in and fight over who's going to get what card," he said.
According to GAMA statistics, more than 90 percent of adventure game customers are male. But the gender ratio is much closer to 50/50 when collectible card games are considered alone, Cerny said. Role-playing and strategy games tend to be much more popular among men, he said, while games like Magic attract women as well.
The popularity of Magic has led to some supply problems. Wizards of the Coast has not been able to keep up with demand and has had to ration cards to its 70 distributors and, thus, to retailers. Hoefling said stores such as Star City Comics have been receiving just 3 percent to 5 percent of their total orders for the newest Magic expansion set - or only three to five decks delivered for every 100 decks ordered.
Wilson of Fun-N-Games said he and co-owner Angel McCoy order Magic cards from several sources and still can't keep the most popular editions on the shelves. Shipments that arrive in the afternoon usually are gone by the same evening or the next morning.
"We speculated at first," McCoy said. "We thought, 'Oh, this is going to last a year.' But it's still going. There are jokes going around about how addictive it is and how they must put drugs on the wrappers."
Stevens from Wizards of the Coast has heard the jokes, and she laughs at them.
"The first time I played Magic, I said, 'This is going to be the biggest game ever,''' she said. She was the first employee hired by Wizards of the Coast, and so she has been in on Magic from the start. Yet even she never imagined that "biggest" would mean this big, she said.
"You know, there's a welding shop in California that makes more money on Magic cards than on anything else," Stevens said with a laugh. The owner's daughter couldn't find the cards anywhere and begged her dad to stock them. He agreed, and soon all the neighborhood kids were flocking to the shop.
"The demand is insane," Stevens said. "I think I'll forever be intrigued by this game."
by CNB