Torpex Enlists Richard Garfield For Next-Gen Game

Game developer Torpex Games has revealed, via information on its official website, that it is currently staffing up its studio in the Seattle area, and is now working on the early stages of a "next-generation console game involving great big guns" in conjunction with Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias of Three Donkeys, LLC. Garfield is the seminal board and card-game designer who is responsible for inventing Magic: the Gathering trading-card game at Wizards Of The Coast, which was acquired by Hasbro in 1999 for $325 million. Elias is another former WOTC employee, and is the game designer notably responsible for helping to create the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour. The pair's names attached to an original next-gen video game product will be cause for interest from both the card game and video game communities. Torpex Games itself was founded by Bill Dugan, who was most recently the executive producer at Activision's Treyarch studio, on the "Spider-Man 2" console game for PlayStation 2, XBox, and GameCube, and started in video games in 1986 as a scripter on the classic Interplay RPG Wasteland. He previously worked at both Wizards of the Coast, where he presumably interacted with Garfield and Elias significantly, as the executive producer on games including Magic: the Gathering Online.