Geek Retrospective: It's All in the Cards!

Collectible Card Games are perhaps the most recent of geek pastimes, having emerged in the early 1990s. It's surprising perhaps that it took so long for the concept to happen. On paper, it's a simple idea and seems to be a very easy way to play on the existing trading card industry. However, the origin of the phenomena came not from Topps, Skybox, or any of the companies that made their living on cards. No, the CCG was a throwaway idea from an employee at Wizards of the Coast. Richard Garfield, who was challenged to create a game that would pay for RoboRally, a game he had pitched to Wizards of the Coast. The game had to have a minimal cost to produce, and take 15-20 minutes to play. Garfield created Magic: The Gathering in 1991 as 'Manaclash'. He sold this to Wizards through a shell company, Garfield Games, so that he would get a larger share of any potential profits. However, neither side could have foreseen the reaction the game caused.
 In 1993, Magic: The Gathering debuted at the Origins Game Fair in Fort Worth,Texas. The first run of cards from August ran out quickly enough to need a reissue as a Beta set in October, its first expansion coming that December.Magic was a phenomena- many stores were unable to keep the game on shelves. Like most successes in the early 90's, this led to a glut of others trying their own spin on the CCG phenomenon. By 1994, Star Trek had seen its way with a game by Decipher. In 1995, Star Wars joined Star Trek on the shelves, quickly taking the number two slot behind Magic, even as many of the games in fell in popularity. Wizards sailed along- only getting bigger with a chance license.
The Pokemon Trading Card Game was brought over from Japan in 1999, under license to Wizards of the Coast, and using similar mechanics to Magic the Gathering. As Pokemon became a juggernaut in and of itself, the card game benefited, It became the first card game to outsell Magic: The Gathering in cards. However, this attracted the attention of another Pokemon licensee- toymaker Hasbro. Hasbro purchased Wizards several months later, gaining the two most successful trading card games on the market.
While licenses dot the intervening history, only one other notable lasting franchise launched- Yu-Gi-Oh. Yu-Gi-Oh itself has an interesting origin. It was conceived first for fiction. The game was conceived for the anime, and the show was written without a firm set of rules. The result was a game with a strange set of rules that later firmed into a rather enjoyable game that continues to this day.
Now, the collectible card game is a staple. If a license gets large enough, odds are that a card game will happen. And all this nearly didn't- if Wizards of the Coast had had faith in Garfield's RoboRally, Magic: the Gathering would not exist. Trading cards are a dying breed as is- it's probably a good thing that CCGs came along and gave them a shot in the arm when they did.