Dice Magazine, “New Edge: making dreams happen” (1 of 3)
With many thanks to our friends at Dice magazine (时代漫游) , here’s a translation of their story on New Edge (2012.08 edition, pages 54 – 57), where Terry and I talk about how and why we want to transform the company, and the (tabletop) game industry in China.
You can check Dice out at their homepage: http://www.dicedom.com/
Terry Li (李翔), Chris Toepker (许嵩虎)
“It’s time to make dreams come true – the transformative path of New Edge”
From the distributor of the world’s number two TCG, New Edge is now undertaking an important transformation. It’s not something as simple as just changing its logo, instead it is taking a leap towards its dreams.
The start of the dream
Terry and Chris have an interesting cooperative history: in the 90s, where one was the sales and marketing manager for Wizards of the Coast’s national distributor of “Magic: The Gathering” in China, the other was responsible for handling all the “Magic: The Gathering” (M:TG) events. From this meeting and working together, they asked themselves: when might China produce a company like Bandai or Konami?
Putting aside this question, the two nevertheless went on to become leaders in the trading card industry in China. When “New Frontier” (新边界) lost the distributorship of M:TG though, Terry went on to work in an electronics company. Funny enough, Chris also left Wizards of the Coast to work for Philips Electronics. During their time in different industries, they obviously did not stay in very close touch, and their ambitions in gaming were set aside. However, Terry learned from this change of distributors, unless a company had something to call its own, and was only handling brands or products for foreign companies within China, whenever you made a success there was always going to be another company who wanted to come take the lion’s share of it. Which is exactly what happened with M:TG and New Frontier.
In 2007, an opportunity to get back into the card game presented itself to Terry, and so he founded New Edge (新锐地带) which has seen the history of the “World of Warcraft trading card game” (WoW TCG) prove that earlier idea of “Bandai or Konami,” a combination of electronic and card gards, was entirely possible. Therefore, he used his experience and passion in trading card games to pursue the distributorship of WoW TCG. At the same time, the M:TG distributorship was also changing from a Hong Kong company to a mainland company, so under this great “aligning of the stars” opportunity, New Edge’s launch of the WoW TCG was very well received and enjoyed good sales. If that weren’t enough, it also brought Terry and Chris together again to work on TCGs as Chris took on Upper Deck’s (note: the global licensee for WoW TCG at the time) business in Asia.
Kicking off the dream
When Chris was 19 he started studying karate, which was mostly to take extra advantage of his tuition at school. However, over time he was more and more fascinated by Asian culture. Then, when he was 22 (correction: 20) he transferred to another university and was already very interested in the Chinese origins of martial arts and Asian culture. “Martial arts are a truly great art form, not only practical, but also beautiful. If you want to achieve these two, you must study deeply other things as well. At the same time, martial study includes morals and philosophy, all of which fascinated me.” At his new university, he met an excellent teacher, eventually leading him to study Hung Gar kun fu (洪家拳) with the grandson of the famous Lam Sai Wing (林世荣) (correction: grandnephew), and even today Chris keeps up his practice.
Martial arts got Chris started studying Chinese culture, and after he graduated from university in USA (correction: as part of his undergraduate degree), he went to Tainan, Taiwan to continue his studies because he felt that studying traditional characters let him more deeply understand Chinese culture. Ultimately, he stayed in Taiwan for 6 years (correction: 8 years), and for these reasons he was hired on at Wizards of the Coast and start his career in trading card games.
As you can see, Chris has been in the business for more than 10 years and accumulated a rich experience, from a tournament organizer and manager, to a game promoter, to game developer and consultant, step by step becoming a knowledgable industry insider – which explains why two years ago Terry went to Hong Kong and said to him, “Hey – the time has come.”
“From the outset, Terry’s strengths have been in sales and marketing, and mine have been in product strategy, planning and promotion, so while our skills may seem too parallel, in fact our cooperation makes for mighty pair.” During the interview, Chris expressed his strong satisfaction in being a part of New Edge because of the chance to pursue their (gaming) dreams.
As for the “time” that Terry mentioned when he went to Hong Kong, what does that mean?! There are at least two aspects: 1) the maturity of the marketplace in China, and during the interview the two both mentioned the importance of “Three Kingdoms Murder” (三国杀), which has brought tabletop gaming to the fore amongst the Chinese. They were both grateful that it had established such an important opening for the entire industry. 2) New Edge itself had reached a point where it was ready to transform.
[Next time: Dreams Realized]
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