Mike Pondsmith
| Michael Alyn Pondsmith | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 14, 1954 United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Game designer, graphic designer, writer, teacher |
| Notable work | Mekton, Teenagers from Outer Space, Cyberpunk 2020, Castle Falkenstein |
| Spouse(s) | Lisa Pondsmith |
| Children | Cody Pondsmith |
| Awards | 2006 Origins Awards Hall of Fame 1994 Origins Awards Best Roleplaying Rules for Castle Falkenstein |
Michael Alyn Pondsmith (born April 14, 1954), typically credited as Mike Pondsmith, is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines since the company's founding in 1982. Pondsmith is credited as an author of several RPG lines, including Mekton (1984), Cyberpunk (1988) and Castle Falkenstein (1994). He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co-created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
Born into a military family, Mike Pondsmith was the son of a psychologist and an Air Force officer, who traveled around the world with the U.S. Air Force for the first 18 years of his life. He graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in graphic design and a B.S. in behavioral psychology. Pondsmith recalls that he had been designing games even as a child, but it was not until college that he was introduced to the idea of pen and paper roleplaying games when a friend got a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Having a lot of naval wargaming experience, he became interested in the gameplay mechanics utilized by D&D but not in the fantasy setting it presented. His interest spiked, however, when he acquired a copy of Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Dissatisfied with its mechanics, Pondsmith rewrote the game for his personal use under the name Imperial Star. Pondsmith later called Traveller the best roleplaying game he had encountered in the Green Ronin's award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best.
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