The Teenager in the Warehouse

Greg Costikyan entered game design through a loading dock.

In 1973, Simulations Publications Inc. fired its unionizing warehouse workers and hired teenagers to replace them. Costikyan was fourteen. He assembled wargames. He filed inserts. He absorbed the culture of the most intellectually ambitious game company in America—Jim Dunnigan’s obsessive rigor, Redmond Simonsen’s graphic clarity, the shared conviction that games could be instruments of serious thought.

Within three years he had a published design credit: Supercharge (1976), a racing wargame he later called “a very bad game.” He was sixteen years old.

What matters about the SPI apprenticeship isn’t the early work. It’s what the culture taught him. SPI believed in iterative refinement, rigorous playtesting, and the idea that game design was a discipline with knowable principles. Costikyan compiled a massive reference tome of every SPI game rule—the first sign of an analytical mind that would eventually write the field’s foundational theoretical essay. Even at SPI, his signature tendencies emerged: a preference for multiplayer social dynamics, humor infiltrating serious genres, and an instinct for accessibility that ran against the grain of hex-and-counter orthodoxy.

Then TSR destroyed SPI. In 1982, they called in a loan within two weeks of issuing it. The company collapsed. Eight key staffers formed Victory Games under Avalon Hill. Costikyan and Eric Goldberg went to West End Games.

The apprenticeship was over. The revolution was about to start.

The Experience-First Revolution

West End Games in 1983 was a small company run by Scott Palter, a leather-goods millionaire who treated game publishing as a serious hobby. Costikyan became Director of Research and Design. The title was grander than the operation, but the creative freedom was real.

The critical shift happened in the space between Costikyan’s SPI wargames and his WEG role-playing games. At SPI, the question was always: how does reality work, and how do we simulate it? At WEG, Costikyan asked a fundamentally different question: what should this game feel like?

The answer changed RPG design.

In 1984, Costikyan and his collaborators released two games that bookended the possible answers. Paranoia, co-designed with Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg, made unfairness the experience. Players served a deranged computer overlord, carried secret society loyalties, hid mutant powers from each other, and betrayed one another as a core gameplay loop. The clone “six-pack”—each character starts with six identical replacements—meant death was frequent, expected, and mechanically trivial. No prior RPG had formalized expendable replacement characters this way. The game explicitly forbade players from knowing the rules; demonstrating rules knowledge was treason, punishable by execution. The rules themselves became a source of dramatic tension.

Toon, published the same year through Steve Jackson Games, made cartoon comedy the experience. Characters reduced to zero Hit Points simply “Fall Down” and return shortly, fully restored. The system was deliberately simple—Costikyan himself called it “mostly arbitrary” and said the theme carried the game entirely. This was a radical statement in 1984: a published designer admitting his mechanics were secondary to the experience they produced, and building the game around that admission.

Both games proved the same point. RPGs didn’t have to simulate reality. They had to produce a specific emotional experience. The rules were scaffolding. The experience was the architecture.

Someone Else’s Dice

The most important attribution question in Costikyan’s career involves a game he didn’t design.

The Ghostbusters RPG (1986) was designed by Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, and Greg Stafford at Chaosium. The game introduced something genuinely new: the dice pool mechanic. Rather than rolling a single die against a target, players rolled multiple six-sided dice equal to their attribute or skill, added them up, and compared the total to a difficulty number. It was fast, intuitive, and fun.

Costikyan served as editor and developer on Ghostbusters at West End Games. He does not list it among his own designs on his personal ludography—a distinction he maintains with unusual rigor. The design innovation belongs to the Chaosium team.

What Costikyan did was take that proof-of-concept and build a cathedral around it.

Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (1987) transformed Ghostbusters’ playful dice pool into a comprehensive cinematic engine. Six attributes. Nested skills. The “pips” system for finer granularity. The Wild Die, where rolling a 6 triggered explosive re-rolls while rolling a 1 introduced narrative complications. A complete, scalable system that could handle everything from cantina negotiations to Death Star assaults.

The distinction matters for the methodology. The dice pool mechanism’s propagation—its influence on Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadowrun, Risus, and dozens of other systems—belongs to Petersen, Willis, and Stafford. The innovations Costikyan layered on top of their mechanism are his.

What Costikyan Actually Built

Strip away the dice pool and the Star Wars license. What remains is still significant.

The character template system gave players 24 pre-made archetypes—Smuggler, Brash Pilot, Failed Jedi, Wookiee—each a complete character that could be customized by distributing 7D among skills. Character creation took minutes instead of hours. The template wasn’t a class; it was a starting identity that players could reshape. The concept opened the design space that would later produce Powered by the Apocalypse playbooks—fixed frameworks that channel player creativity rather than constraining it.

Force Points let any character double all dice for one round, representing heroic moments where ordinary people rise to extraordinary action. This meta-currency—a limited resource that lets players declare “this moment matters”—anticipated the Hero Points, Fate Points, and Bennies that proliferated across the RPG industry in the decades that followed.

The rulebook explicitly taught GMs cinematic technique: cut-scenes, in media res openings, dramatic pacing, and the instruction to “throw rules out if they endanger the flow of the action and the story.” This wasn’t a sidebar. It was the design philosophy, stated plainly and built into every structural decision. White Wolf magazine gave the system a perfect 10/10 score.

The cascading effects are extraordinary. The Star Wars RPG generated approximately 140 sourcebooks across three editions, foreign-language editions in four languages, and a miniatures spin-off. When Timothy Zahn was hired to write the Thrawn trilogy, Lucasfilm sent him a box of West End Games sourcebooks as reference material. WEG products named alien species—Twi’lek, Rodian, Ithorian, Quarren—that became canonical. Pablo Hidalgo, who began as a WEG freelance writer, later became a Senior Creative Executive on the Lucasfilm Story Group. The Star Wars RPG didn’t just model a fictional universe. It helped build one.

The Impossible Game

Paranoia deserves separate attention because its innovations operate on a different plane than mechanical design.

Dan Gelber conceived the original prototype—a dystopian world controlled by a computer called Alpha Complex. Costikyan and Goldberg approached Gelber, got his notes, and developed the full manuscript. The attribution is clean: three co-designers, all consistently credited, no disputes.

What the three of them built was the first widely published RPG to make inter-player conflict the central design goal. Secret society memberships, hidden mutant powers, and split loyalties mechanically incentivize betrayal. This wasn’t backstabbing as a side effect of play. It was the game.

The clone six-pack decoupled character death from player elimination—an innovation later described as “the video game approach to character lives.” The rules-as-forbidden-knowledge mechanic turned the rulebook itself into a source of dramatic tension. Together, these innovations created a game that has been continuously in print for over forty years across seven editions, designed by at least five different lead designers. Paranoia was inducted into the Origins Awards Hall of Fame in 2007.

The formalized PvP concept influenced the trajectory of competitive RPG design from Vampire: The Masquerade’s political scheming to modern traitor-mechanic board games. It opened design space that dozens of later games explored. But no game directly copied Paranoia’s specific mechanical architecture. The innovations were noticed, celebrated, and left in place.

The Strategist’s Detour

Pax Britannica (1985, Victory Games) demonstrates that Costikyan’s design thinking extended beyond role-playing.

The game modeled the geopolitics of colonial-era Great Power competition—not through tactical combat but through economic pressure, diplomatic negotiation, and the Bellicism track, a rising tension meter that ended the game for everyone if it peaked. This was an early implementation of the “doomsday clock” concept: players had to balance individual ambition against collective survival. It won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Pre-20th Century Game.

The game has known balance issues between the Great Powers, and the negotiation phase can produce king-making dynamics. But the design ambition—simulating imperial overstretch as an economic and diplomatic phenomenon rather than a military one—was genuine, and the Bellicism mechanic was a specific innovation that later strategy games would build upon.

The Vocabulary Builder

After leaving WEG in January 1987 and a brief venture with Eric Goldberg, Costikyan’s career shifted from pure design to theory.

“I Have No Words & I Must Design” (1994) argued that the game industry needed a critical vocabulary analogous to literary criticism. It proposed a definition of games built on five essential components—interaction, goals, struggle, structure, and endogenous meaning—and adopted Marc LeBlanc’s taxonomy of eight game pleasures. The essay predated the formal establishment of game studies as an academic discipline by nearly a decade.

It became one of the most cited texts in the field. Ron Edwards cited Costikyan’s framework as foundational for The Forge, the online community that catalyzed the indie RPG movement and produced GNS Theory. Game design courses worldwide assigned it as required reading. Jesse Schell later blurbed Costikyan’s MIT Press book Uncertainty in Games (2013) as capturing uncertainty, dissecting it, and “miraculously bringing it back to life.”

The theoretical contribution matters for the methodology because it documents something the games themselves demonstrate: Costikyan’s experience-first design approach was original, coherent, and influential enough that other designers built upon it as a philosophical framework. The essay didn’t just describe what he had been doing. It gave the field a language for understanding why it worked.

The Craft Arc

Costikyan’s tabletop career traces a clear evolutionary arc.

The SPI period (1976–1982) produced competent wargames with occasional flashes of humor and social complexity. Supercharge was bad. Swords & Sorcery (1978) had what the SF Encyclopedia called “a strongly satirical flavour, full of puns.” The Creature That Ate Sheboygan (1979) won a Charles S. Roberts Award. These were learning years—the fundamentals of iterative refinement, the discipline of shipping finished products, the discovery of his own sensibility.

The WEG peak (1983–1987) was extraordinary. Paranoia, Toon, Star Wars, Pax Britannica—four distinct games in four distinct formats, each driven by a clear vision of the experience it should produce. All five of his Origins Awards come from this compressed period. The improvement from SPI to WEG is dramatic and unmistakable.

After 1988, Costikyan’s tabletop output essentially stopped. Violence: The RPG of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed (1999), published under the pseudonym “Designer X,” was a satirical statement about violence in games, designed to be deliberately unpleasant. His later career moved primarily to digital games (Disney Playdom, Loot Drop, Boss Fight Entertainment, and since 2019 Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds) and industry criticism. His famous 2005 GDC rant earned the Maverick Award in 2007.

A Toon second edition was announced in December 2025, reuniting Costikyan and Warren Spector forty years after the original.

What Remains

The Paranoia Computer. The Wookiee template. The instruction to throw rules out if they slow the story down. A box of West End Games sourcebooks that built an Expanded Universe. An essay that gave game designers a shared language for talking about what they do. Fifty years of professional design across every format the hobby has produced.

Costikyan’s legacy is layered in a way the methodology has to untangle carefully. The dice pool’s propagation belongs to someone else. The theoretical influence runs through essays, not mechanics. The tabletop peak was compressed into half a decade. Strip all of that context away and what remains is still a designer who changed the RPG conversation at a fundamental level—who proved that games could be about producing experience rather than simulating reality, and then built the intellectual framework to explain why that insight matters.

The methodology measures the work. The work is substantial, innovative, well-built, and influential. It just isn’t all his, and his greatest insights propagated through philosophy as much as through mechanics.

The credits are complicated. The contribution is not.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1976.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1976.

The credits are complicated. The contribution is not.