Frank Chadwick

Frank Chadwick
Frank Chadwick in 2005
Born	United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Game designer

Frank Chadwick is an American multiple-award–winning game designer and New York Times Best Selling author. He has designed hundreds of games, his most notable being the RPGs Traveller, Space: 1889 and Twilight 2000, and the wargame series Europa and The Third World War.

Frank Chadwick formed the ISU Game Club at Illinois State University with Rich Banner. The club focused on wargaming, but the three students also started designing games for fun and convinced the university to fund a new program called SIMRAD ("SIMulation Research And Design"), which was intended to help instructors produce specifications for simulation games. They used their club funding to design war games. They also formed a small educational games organization in response to a project by the university to bring new ideas into the system. After failing to win this project, the Chadwick and Banner, along with newcomers Marc Miller and Loren Wiseman, continued to work together, forming Game Designers' Workshop. When ISU stopped funding SIMRAD after 18 months, they founded Game Designers' Workshop on June 22, 1973 as a commercial outlet for their creativity, initially headquartering the company out of Chadwick's and Miller's apartment.

There is little doubt that, even in the rather busy pantheon of (wargame) industry heroes, Frank Chadwick is a Zeus amongst the Ajaxes. He is one of—if not THE—finest game designer working today. Since GDW's emergence in the mid-1970s, Chadwick has been GDW's main designer, producing a body of work remarkable for its breadth and width. ... ever resourceful, Frank C covered his simulated butt with the out-of-sight success of his Desert Shield Fact Book. Its reported, six-figure sales will probably bank-roll the company for the next decade. And, as if that weren't enough, he has steered GDW (admittedly with the astute help of others) from a small-town, Third World company to its status as one of the major simulation and RPG publishers in the market today. Frank is also president of the industry professional association, GAMA, so GDW's tentacles reach out to almost every cave in which hobbyists can hide in. If dice produced olive oil, there is no doubt that Frank Chadwick would be wargaming's Godfather.