Mark Rein Hagen

Mark Rein·Hagen at Lucca Comics and Games 2015
Born	Mark Rein-Hagen August 30, 1964 Ohio
Occupation	Game designer
Nationality	United States
Genre	Role-playing games

Mark Rein-Hagen is a role-playing, card, video and board game designer best known as the creator of Vampire: The Masquerade and its associated World of Darkness games. Along with Jonathan Tweet, he is also one of the original two designers of Ars Magica. His work on World of Darkness has influenced the movie series Underworld, True Blood, and otherkin sub-cultures such as Real Life Vampires and Real Life Werewolves.

In 1987, Rein-Hagen and Jonathan Tweet founded game publisher Lion Rampant while students at Saint Olaf College; here they met Lisa Stevens who later joined the company. Rein-Hagen and Tweet designed Ars Magica over a period of nine months, publishing it in 1987. Lion Rampant encountered financial difficulties in 1990, but after Stevens pitched the idea of a merger to Rein-Hagen and Stewart Wieck, they decided to merge White Wolf and Lion Rampant forming a new company White Wolf Game Studio, with the two as co-owners.Of his experience at Lion Rampant, Rein-Hagen recalls: "My father told me when I started my first game company, Lion Rampant: 'Mark, this company is going to fail, you are too young, inexperienced and poor to make it work. But, you are going to learn a lot, and next time you might just get it right.' At the time I didn't believe him, I thought we could make it, but he was right, and because of his words, I never, ever gave up."

While Rein-Hagen was on the road with Wieck and Stevens to GenCon 23 in 1990, he conceived of the game Vampire: The Masquerade which became his main project for the next year, and was published by the new company in 1991.Mage (1993) was based to a certain extent on a game that Rein-Hagen had imagined back in 1989 as something like a modern-day Ars Magica, although this was the first World of Darkness game in which he was not explicitly involved.Wraith (1994) marked his return to the design of the core games in the World of Darkness setting. Rein-Hagen was developing a science-fiction game called Exile to be published in 1997, which was to be owned by a non-profit called the Null Foundation. However, White Wolf encountered financial difficulties in 1995–1996, which caused a falling out between Rein-Hagen and Wieck and his brother Steve Wieck. As a result, Rein-Hagen left White Wolf taking Exile with him. His Null Foundation put out a playtest draft of Exile in 1997, but the game was never fully published. He founded the company Atomaton, Inc. a few years later, which produced his game Z-G in 2001; Atomaton ceased operation in 2003.