Greg Costikyan

I've been in the game industry for more than 30 years -- my first job, at 14, was assembling and shipping games in the warehouse at SPI. I've designed more than 30 commercially published board, roleplaying, computer, online, mobile and social network games; my ludography is here. I have, in fact, been something of a pioneer in new and emerging game markets -- I designed the first online game to attract more than a million players (MadMaze, for the old Prodigy COLS), founded one of the first mobile game publishers in North America, and today run two websites devoted to promoting independently developed games -- Play This Thing!, which reviews one independently created game each day, and Manifesto Games, which retails indie games. In 2007, I received the Maverick Award at GDC for "tireless promotion of indie games;" I've also won five Origins Awards, and am an inductee into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame. I've written scads of articles on games; as well as four novels and a bunch of short stories. My piece "I Have No Words & I Must Design" is widely used in game studies programs across the globe, and I've lectured at universities in both Europe and North America; I also speak frequently at industry conferences. I have also consulted to a wide variety of companies on game design and game industry business issues.

More at Play This Thing!

This page doesn't get updated frequently, but I post almost every day at Play This Thing!

Some of the More Interesting Things Here

Death To the Games Industry (Long Live Games) (part two of the piece is here).
My GDC Rant on the iniquities of the game industry, which seems to have established me as the industry's voice of cynicism and despair :).
"I Have No words & I Must Design", an essay about game design that despite publication in the obscure journal Interactive Fantasy, has become one of the things that game scholars reference most frequently, and is used in game studies courses worldwide (this is my 2002 update).
Presentations I've given at conferences over the years.
The SPI Compendium, an archive of information about all products published by Simulations Publications, Inc. during its lifetime.
My ludography.

And lots more content available by browsing the menu-bar links.

Free Games

The following have been released under a creative commons license:

Vector 3, a space combat boardgame in 3D with vector mechanics, originally published in 1979.
Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed, originally published by Hogshead Publishers Ltd., but now released under a Creative Commons license.
Dot Boom, a satirical card game of the dot com era.
Peg Solo, a Blitz Basic implementation of classic peg solitaire.