Magical thinking.

I’m told there is a manga series in Japan based on Magic: The Gathering. But instead of doing a story about planewalking wizards dueling in a fantasy world, they retooled Magic for a Pokemon approach. The manga is about a boy who plays Magic, and his father is a champion Magic player. Dad goes to America to compete in a Magic tournament there, telling his son that the best players in the world are the Americans. When he returns, he tells his son that he found out why they are so good: they actually summon the monsters off the cards into the real world. So the kid and his friends run around with their decks in their pockets, ready to take them out and start unleashing monsters on their enemies. The creatures actually emerge directly from the cards as they are played and do battle.

Disney tried to do Magic in their context too. When I worked at Wizards of the Coast, I was part of the Magic team. This was sort of the steering committee or brand team. My role was minor. I’d created the job of “Continuity Coordinator,” which meant I built a big database of characters, monsters, locations, and other story elements that did not involve actual gameplay. I was on the Magic team because they often dealt with licensors–comic books, computer games–and wanted me around to advise on content issues.

Some guys from Disney’s television animation group came out once to give us a presentation. They wanted to make a Magic series for their afternoon animated shows, the block that included stuff like Duck Tales. To our surprise, they had a whole show concept together, complete with gobs of character designs, paintings of locations, the works. This seemed very impressive until they described the show. It was to be about a teenager in modern Earth, an orphan, who is brought to a fantasy world by wizards. They reveal that his parents were wizards killed by an evil guy, and he was hidden among the mundanes to protect him. But now it’s time for him to become a wizard and fight the evil guy. To help and protect him, they give him a sidekick: a gruff bearded seven-foot guy. The guy was a barbarian who feared magic and wizards. Our sneakers-wearing kid cracked wise, moaned about how he couldn’t get a good pizza, and fought evil with his sidekick.

They’d accidentally invented Harry Potter a few years early. But their version sucked.

There was more. Because they felt Magic was too complex and the imagery too adult, they proposed that Wizards create a new, kid-oriented version of the game with simpler rules and art and content from the television series. Disney would publish it, market it, host tournaments at Disney World, and on and on, all for 8-12 year olds.

They’d accidentally invented Pokemon a few years early. But their version sucked.

After the meeting we discovered why they had the complete series concept together with all that art: it was a show they’d come up with on their own, and their bosses told them it sucked. They decided to try and attach a successful license to the existing show concept and then pitch that to their bosses. Their show wouldn’t actually have anything to do with Magic except the logo.

And that sucked too. So after a week or so we turned them down. But not before I took a call from a counterpart functionary at the Disney TV team, asking questions about our content. I ended up spelling out “Urza” and “Mishra” over the phone to her, trying to explain the planewalking concept, and other arcana. It was a doomed conversation.

Anyway, just some random Magic anecdotes I was thinking about.

More of the same: UA2, DG computer game. I saw the latest version of the Dark Young yesterday at Flying Lab and it’s even better. Now they’ve applied the slime filter or something to the darn thing and it glistens with muck quite beautifully. The skin texture is now bump-mapped, which is sort of a way to add more polygons to the 3-D model without adding more polygons to the 3-D model. It lets you complicate a polygon’s surface so that it has depth–bumps, pits, and the like–but you don’t have to actually model all the new shapes with polygons. You just have a graphic that “reads” as three-dimensional to the rendering engine. Anyway, it looks great.

Tomorrow two of the Flying Lab guys are coming to my house to record some dialogue and sound effects for a demo we’re working on. I’ll be voicing one of the characters in the demo. I scripted the dialogue for it so the demo plays out as a clever homage to HPL’s story “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” with a cell phone headset connecting two DG agents instead of the field telephone that connected Carter and Warren in the story. (But no, I skipped the “You fool, Warren is dead!” line.) Lovecraft fans who watch the demo when it’s online will get the gag, and hopefully they’ll realize that means we get the gag, too, and be more excited about the project as a result. It’s all about the buzz.

On UA2 I think we finally have a complete draft of the global-level section, which covers magick, adepts, and avatars. Today I started writing the first chapter of the cosmic-level section that describes the Statosphere, the Invisible Clergy, Godwalkers, ascension, artifacts, and other cool stuff. Still a long way to go.

I have a dresser now. It’s the first dresser of my adult life. When I went to my freshman year of college my parents bought me one of those wire-grid storage units with the sliding baskets, and that’s been my dresser for, uh, almost thirteen years now. How pathetic. My friends Ray and Christine are unpacking in their new house after moving here from Chicago and dropped a great dresser on me that they didn’t need anymore. It’s actually made of real wood through and through, instead of the lovely fiberboard stuff I usually buy. My cat Trouble immediately jumped on it and began walking back and forth, looking for corners she could rub her scent on.

I got the special smut edition of my column done for Tablet and as a bonus, I got to write a retrospective of Jan Svankmajer’s films. In the course of doing that I found an amazing web site devoted to his work in many mediums, not just film:

http://www.illumin.co.uk/svank/

On Thursday I’m going to a press screening for Scotland, PA. It promises to be a comedic retelling of Macbeth set in 1975 white-trash Pennsylvania. Christopher Walken is in it. Looks fun.

And now it’s almost 3am. Time to go to sleep.