Michael Alyn 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. His games include Mekton, Cyberpunk, Teenagers from Outer Space, and Castle Falkenstein.
About Mike Pondsmith in brief
Michael Alyn 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. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. His games include Mekton, Cyberpunk, Teenagers from Outer Space, and Castle Falkenstein. He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role- playing game. He 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. His first job after college involved designing packaging and advertising materials for the now-defunct California Pacific Computer Company. He later moved on to create designs for the original titles produced by Bill Budge and for the early Ultima games designed by Richard Garriott, all of which were published by CPCC. In the early 1980s, Pondsmith designed the game Imperial Star for his personal use under the name Imperial Star. In 1986, Mekton was re-released as a proper roleplaying game with Pondsmith and Mike Jones credited as authors. In 1987, Pondton II, a new edition of Mekton featuring mechanics based on the Interlock System, was released. In 1989 Pondsmith released another of his games inspired by the Japanese manga Teenagers From Outer Space. He has also worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co-created several board games.
He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children, who he met at the University of California, Davis in the late 1970s and 1980s. He and his wife have three children, a son and a daughter, and a son-in-law, both of whom live in New York City, New York and Los Angeles. He had a brother and a sister who live in San Diego, California, and he has a daughter who lives in San Francisco, California and has a son who also works in the video game industry as a graphic designer. His wife and daughter have a son, who also lives in California and lives in the Los Angeles area. He died in a car accident in 2009. He now lives in Santa Cruz, California with his husband and two daughters, and has two step-daughters, who live with him in the San Diego suburb of Santa Cruz and the City of San Diego. He used to work as a typesetting technician at a university typesetting house. He wrote Mekton based on Mobile Suit Gundam manga written in Japanese, which he had acquired. He admits that he inaccurately recreated the world dynamics purely from the imagery of the comic books. He called Traveller the best roleplayinggame he had encountered in the Green Ronin’s award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best. : 207 According to Pondsmith, there was not much to do in the area of video game design in the early 80s due largely to the constraints of available technology.
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This page is based on the article Mike Pondsmith published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 13, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
