Michael Alyn Pondsmith is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for founding the publisher R. Talsorian Games in 1982, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines. Pondsmith is the author of several RPG lines, including Mekton (1984), Cyberpunk (1988) and Castle Falkenstein (1994). He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co-created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Early life and education Born into a military family, Mike Pondsmith was the son of a psychologist and an Air Force officer, who traveled around the world with the U.S. Air Force for the first 18 years of his life. He graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in graphic design and a B.S. in behavioral psychology. Pondsmith recalls that he had been designing games even as a child, but it was not until college that he was introduced to the idea of pen and paper roleplaying games when a friend got a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Having a lot of naval wargaming experience, he became interested in the gameplay mechanics used by D&D but not in the fantasy setting it presented. His interest spiked, however, when he acquired a copy of Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Dissatisfied with its mechanics, Pondsmith rewrote the game for his personal use under the name Imperial Star. Pondsmith later called Traveller the best roleplaying game he had encountered in the Green Ronin's award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Early career Before he became a pen and paper game designer, Pondsmith worked in the video game industry as a graphic designer. His first job after college involved designing packaging and advertising materials for the now-defunct California Pacific Computer Company (CPCC). Repackaging Japanese games for the Western world market was the main focus of CPCC in its early days. He later moved on to create designs for the original titles produced by Bill Budge and for the early Ultima games designed by Richard Garriott, all of which were published by CPCC. Pondsmith's job at CPCC ended because of problems the owner encountered, and he started managing a typesetting house at the University of