Popularium In The Press

From Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield comes this intriguing mix of auto-battler combat and battle royale multiplayer structure. With various distinct win conditions, you’ll have to gather shards in the map to fine-tune your character between turns and strategically decide what objective, skills and enemies you’ll take on.

Chaos Agents was featured in Game Con Canada’s post event coverage by MobileSyrup, highlighting our time at the show and the incredible response from attendees. The article also includes comments from Co Founder Jon Bankard on the growing indie scene and why Game Con Canada was such a memorable experience for the team.

Legendary game designer Richard Garfield, creator of the global phenomenon Magic: The Gathering, appears on ABC Listes in a rare in-depth conversation alongside acclaimed filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. In this feature, Garfield reflects on the origins and lasting impact of Magic: The Gathering, the game that reshaped modern collectible gaming and established him as one of the most influential designers in the industry.

The discussion also turns to his newest project, Chaos Agents, developed under Popularium. Garfield shares insights into the vision behind the game, its development process, and what players can expect as it moves toward launch and continued expansion.

From foundational design philosophy to the future of interactive entertainment, this conversation brings together perspectives from games and film, offering a look at how creative worlds are built and sustained over time.

From Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield and the team at Popularium comes an autobattler-royale called Chaos Agents. The game arose from Garfield’s desire to present an “unsolved metagame” to players. The team loved the accessibility of the autobattler genre, but wanted better multiplayer features that encouraged more engagement and prevented what felt like a long wait for an inevitable conclusion. The solution Popularium found was to inject that autobattler genre into the battle-royale space.

The post-alpha version of Chaos Agents showcased at GDC demonstrated the core philosophy behind the upcoming game — Garfield’s belief that optimized play patterns make for less-fun gameplay. The game is an “auto-battler royale” in which players control a single champion, or “agent,” giving them directions and leveling up their skills and abilities as they face off against other players’ agents in a virtual environment. To ensure a variety of play patterns, Chaos Agents features three vastly different win conditions and plenty of unexpected skill combinations to keep the metagame wide open.

Three decades later, can Garfield repeat this success? With Popularium, a new gaming studio founded by Garfield and three other industry veterans (Jon Bankard, Skaff Elias, and Arka Ray) he is about to find out as he launches the game Chaos Agents. Instead of being set in a fantasy world, this one exists in a space-opera-esque science fiction world, a kind of mish-mash of some of the more celestial Marvel comics but also at home with the texture of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” shared stories and novels.

Chaos Agents the latest title from Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, is entering its public alpha phase. Players can test their skills in the new title that blends tabletop games with auto-battlers and battle royales this weekend at GenCon.

In Chaos Agents, players will coach and power up their globally unique superhero to victory against other foes. The game should feel familiar to tabletop enthusiasts as well as gamers. It takes concepts Garfield developed through his career — particularly Magic: The Gathering and Keyforge — and blends them with a free-for-all auto-battler format.

Since bursting onto the scene in the mid-1990s, Magic the Gathering has become one of the most popular games of all time, with millions of players collecting cards to battle each other in an imaginary fantasy realm. But Magic’s early success came with a problem: the price of the game’s most powerful and rare cards surged along with its popularity. Eventually, Magic’s creators worried that the game would become too expensive and was at risk of becoming a short-lived fad. So, how do you pop a bubble in collectibles without completely alienating collectors? In this episode, we speak with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering, and Arka Ray, a long-time game developer at Microsoft who’s now CEO of Richard’s new gaming studio, Popularium. They talk about the surprising parallels between MTG and central banking, what they’ve learned from Magic, and how they’re applying those lessons to Chaos Agents, Popularium’s first new gaming launch.

As names go, Chaos Agents might seem a little vague. However, there’s nothing vague about Popularium Games’ ambitious plans for this distinctive upcoming free-to-play strategy game. This bold hybrid of auto battler and battle royale aims to offer a novel experience, where players master their own uniquely generated characters.

Battle royale titles are known for their mass combats, where only one player can walk away victorious, while auto battlers have players select strategies that their units will then carry out without their direct input. Both genres are titanic features of the video game landscape, but never before have the two met quite like this.

“The funding will help us develop, market and launch the Chaos Agents public alpha in the summer,” Ray told GamesIndustry.biz. “So far, we have been building with a core team of game developers, this funding will help us expand the team to bring in more support for managing our growing community.

“It will also help support development efforts for the key remaining features that the community is asking for before the Alpha launch, and help launch the first pre-release competitive tournaments for Chaos Agents.”

Richard Garfield remembers the magic of the early days of Magic: The Gathering. The creator of the iconic card game recalled how there was a period of time when people didn’t have access to perfect information about which Magic cards and decks were the best.

“We’re ready to expand to pre-alpha playtest through our new Chaos Broker Trainees – as they are better known,” said Garfield. “These playtesters have been selected from thousands of applicants eager to get their first taste of the Chaos Agents universe. We’re embarking on quite an adventure and Skaff and I are excited by where we’re headed.”

“We have been overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arka Ray, president and CTO at Popularium, in a statement. “The number of players who want to join the alpha and experience Richard’s vision has been over 20 times more than we anticipated.

“The nice thing about our industry is that it’s a very kind industry,” Bankard said. “All of our friends are out there helping us connect to people, friends of friends, and all of that is very collaborative and wonderful. It’s a big change from the big companies I’ve worked at in the past in just how much all of these indie studios are trying to help each other out.”

Richard Garfield remembers the magic of the early days of Magic: The Gathering. The creator of the iconic card game recalled how there was a period of time when people didn’t have access to perfect information about which Magic cards and decks were the best.