This is an initiative in collaboration with Wizards of the Coast.
From that study of the past, present and future of Magic: The Gathering in which I embarked at the beginning of our Magic Chronicles, one of the topics that I am enjoying as much as playing the game is to continue to delve into his story. I knew that after so many years I was going to find a good handful of curiosities, but I did not imagine that they would be so many.
Nor that, as in the two stories that concern us today, two of my favorite hobbies of recent years were to collide so hard. I did not expect at all that Magic and videogames keep safe stories as surprising as these.
The Cursed Games of Magic: The Gathering
We are in 1997 and the video game world is about to experience a unique moment: the collaboration between the mythical Sid Meier and Wizards of the Coast to shape the Magic’s first big video game. A jewel of which already we talk at the time and that paved the way for other widely celebrated games like the Pokémon Trading Card Game.
What I did not know then is that the creators of Magic did not want to risk everything to a single card and, in fact, that first license to create video games not only delivered that mythical title, but three. Beside Microprose, another emblematic company and on the rise at that time would be in charge of offering two more games.
Having shown an excellent hand in licensing, Acclaim Entertainment had a free hand to create his own version of Magic, and far from being left with only one option, he opted for two paths that seemed to ensure remarkable commercial success: the successful PlayStation and the arcade industry.
The idea was a good one, of course, and both Magic: The Gathering – BattleMage What Magic: The Gathering – Armageddon they were revolutionary enough to attempt to bring Magic to another level, but bad luck and quite a bad hand when executing the first of them did the rest.
In fact, there is little to say about the PSX version. A game that tried to move the world of Magic to the one of the strategy in real time and that was criticized in its launching. Nothing to do with the reception and legacy of the other two games that you will see below.
Magic: The Gathering – Armageddon para Arcade
If the mere idea of a game of Magic In arcade machine format it already seems crazy to you, when you see what they had prepared you will hallucinate even more. Nothing to place cards on the machine to play in digital format, this was actually a fighting game that was controlled with a giant sphere.
With different areas dedicated to each of the mana, the idea was to place your character in one of them and take advantage of the powers of your color to, for example, heal your creatures in the case of white or launch fire in the case of white. Red. Not only did it seem like a good idea on paper, but the few who tried it They claimed to be facing an excellent game.
Why only a few? Because the game wanted to live up to its name and was the trigger for the apocalypse in Acclaim. When the manufacture of the machines had just started, the parent company closed the company’s arcade division in order to deal with financial problems.
The arcade world was starting to pale in the face of the explosion of consoles and, although games like Dance Dance Revolution, Crazy Taxi or Virtua Tennis were about to give it a last push, the easiest way seemed to be that of home software.
Four copies of that machine were created before shelving the project and the company. One was sent to a large Namco arcade in California, another went to the Disney World arcade in Orlando, and a third ended up in the offices of Wizards of the Coast before falling into private hands. His whereabouts of the fourth are unknown.
Magic: The Gathering – Trading Card Game para Dreamcast
If they had bad luck with the previous one, in Wizards they probably had a good season pulling their hair after seeing what happened with this one. The stick with BattleMage Y Armageddon largely overshadowed the success of the Magic: The Gathering from Microprose And as a result, they decided to slow down the leap into the world of video games until they saw a better opportunity.
That opportunity would come from the hand of Sega for a Dreamcast that, when the deal was closed and development began, it seemed to have everything on its face. The next set of Magic: The Gathering It would follow in the wake of Sid Meier’s title with a more classic format and, with a hand-in-hand development between the United States and Japan, it would be launched first in the Asian country and then in the rest of the world.
Three months before its distribution on Japanese shelves, Sega would announce the cessation of production of Dreamcast. The game would eventually hit stores with a satisfactory reception, but the debacle of the Japanese invited the parents of Magic to stop its possible distribution in other countries and the game remained a mere rarity.
Luckily, that launch caused two actions without which today we might not have access to Magic Arena. On the one hand, it generated enough expectation for Wizards of the Coast decided to embark on yet another adventure soon after, the development of Magic Online.
On the other hand, the interface and the care in the presentation and animation of the cards would serve as a starting point for the game that would catapult the presence of Magic in the world of video games years later. From the ashes of that Magic: The Gathering for Dreamcast, a Phoenix called Duels of the Planeswalkers would be reborn that would open the way to the online games that we can enjoy today.
