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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#961: Barry Reich

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Games, Magic The Gathering, Leisure, Game Design, Mtg, Ccg, Mark Rosewater

4.8743 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this podcast, I interview Barry Reich, Magic's very first playtester.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition. So I'm here with Barry Reich, a long-time magic player. And he's my, in fact, he's the answer to one of my favorite magic trivia questions. So the trivia question is, who are the very first two people to ever play a game of magic?

0:22.6

Now, most people can guess Richard Garfield. That's the easy answer.

0:26.6

But the other person is Barry. So welcome, Barry.

0:29.6

Thank you, Mark. Happy to be here.

0:32.6

So let's, let's, let's go way, way back. So let's talk about your first experience ever with magic, which was the very first,

0:40.3

other than Richard, the very first experience anybody ever had with magic.

0:43.8

So can we tell the story of your very first time playing?

0:47.3

Sure. So I met Richard in grad school, University of Pennsylvania.

0:51.3

He was doing math. I was doing computer science. And we met at the

0:54.9

Bridge Club and hit it off. We both love games. Richard, from the beginning, he was always

1:01.8

into creating games, magic chess, whatever. It was always something interesting. And one day after I knew

1:08.9

him for, I guess, a year, year and a half, he came up to me.

1:12.1

He called me Bit, by the way.

1:13.2

So he said, hey, Bit, I created this little game here.

1:16.7

You want to give it to try?

1:18.1

So I said, sure.

1:19.1

So we went into the astronomy lounge.

1:20.9

We had no windows.

1:22.3

And we played the very first games of magic.

1:25.9

It looked, it was on card stock. It looks, you know,

1:29.8

roughly like it does today with Mena Koss on the upper right and a title and land and creatures.

1:37.6

It was 120 cards. He just chuffled it split in half and we just started playing. And from the very

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