George MacDonald (game designer)

George MacDonald is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games and in the computer game industry.

Career[]

George MacDonald started work on role-playing games while at college, by adding more detailed super powers to Gamescience's Superhero: 2044 RPG (1977) and ultimately creating his own original system which Steve Peterson typed up, and which eventually became the superhero RPG, Champions (1981).^[1]: 145 MacDonald and Peterson had only enough money to print 1,500 copies of the game and hand-collated the pages, and they sold their new game at Pacific Origins 1981; they were surprised to see it sell very well, selling 1,000 of their 1,500 copies at the convention.^[1]: 145 After this early success, MacDonald and Peterson started Hero Games as a publishing label.^[1]: 145 By 1982, they were ready to take the next step in turning Hero Games into a professional business, and opened up an office and asked Ray Greer to join them as a partner and handle marketing and sales, with Bruce Harlick soon joining them as Hero's first employee.^[1]: 146 Flying Buffalo and Hero Games formed an alliance thanks to a chance meeting between Michael Stackpole and MacDonald at a 1982 convention.^[1]: 38

MacDonald later became Senior Game Developer at SSI.^[1]: 147 MacDonald was the developer on the Gold Box game Pool of Radiance (1988).^[2] MacDonald and Jeff Grubb authored the game module Curse of the Azure Bonds, which was released in April 1989 under Forgotten Realms Module FRC2.^[3]

References[]

External links[]

• George MacDonald at MobyGames
• George MacDonald at Pen & Paper RPG Database via Internet Archive